2024 Wilks Oration - Richard Denniss

For this year's Wilks Oration we are delighted to have Dr Richard Denniss, Executive Director at the Australia Institute speaking on the topic: 
"Unequal Australia: What went wrong and how we fix it."

Australia is one of the richest countries in the world but while we can apparently afford tax cuts for high income earners and submarines, we “can't afford” to increase unemployment benefits, address child poverty or even protect our endangered species from the climate change we do so much to cause.

Join Richard Denniss to debunk the nonsensical economic arguments used to justify our ongoing failure to reduce inequality and discuss the simple solutions available for any parliament that is serious about reducing poverty, making housing cheaper, reducing Australia's emissions...or all of them at once.

Richard is the Executive Director at the Australia Institute. He is a prominent Australian economist, author and public policy commentator, and previously an Associate Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU. The Australian Financial Review listed Richard Denniss and Ben Oquist of The Australia Institute on their 'Covert Power' 2018 list of the most powerful people in Australia.

Prior to his appointment at The Australia Institute, Denniss was Senior Strategic Advisor to Australian Greens Leader Senator Bob Brown and was also Chief of Staff to Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja, former Leader of the Australian Democrats. He was also a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Newcastle.

Richard Denniss writes regular columns in the Australian Financial Review and the Guardian as well as regular essays for The Monthly. He publishes regularly in academic journals and has written 6 books including Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough (with Clive Hamilton), An introduction to Australian Public Policy (with Sarah Maddison), Minority Policy: Rethinking Governance When Parliament Matters (with Brenton Prosser), Econobabble: How to Decode Political Spin and Economic Nonsense, Curing Affluenza: How to Buy Less Stuff and Save the World and the June 2018 Quarterly Essay, Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next which was also adapted into a book of the same title.

We look forward to you joining us for this event.