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Feed your mind. Be provoked. One big idea at a time. Your brain will love you for it. Grab your front row seat to the best live forums and festivals with Natasha Mitchell.

Big Ideas

The United States has long been famous for its world leading universities. But in the face of research funding cuts, government attacks on free speech, DEI and the right to protest, and the persecution of foreign students, could all that be changing?

The speech, Poison Ideas: Universities and other Antidotes to Authoritarianism, was recorded at the 2025 conference of the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DASSH) representing 350 deans and associate deans from Australian and New Zealand universities.

Speakers

Simon Adams - President & CEO, Centre for Victims of Torture, Professor of Human Rights, Murdoch University

Universities and other antidotes to authoritarianism

The Western world is supposed to stand for values like freedom, justice and human rights, a commitment to meet wrongdoing with consequence, guided by rules and obligations. How then, do we reconcile that with Western governments' and media's support of and complicity in the horrors in Gaza? How do we witness the bloodshed and destruction, and yet look away?

This conversation was recorded at the Canberra Writers Festival on 26 October 2025.

Speakers

Omar El Akkad Author, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and novels The American War and What Strange Paradise

Peter Greste (host) Professor of journalism, Macquarie University, Author, The Correspondent

One day, everyone will have always been against this — Omar El Akkad and Peter Greste reckon with Western hypocrisy over Israel's war on Gaza

Build more houses. That'll fix Australia's housing crisis won't it? If you listen to governments, you'd sure think so. Under the National Housing Accord, all governments have agreed to support a target of building 1.2 million new, well-located dwellings in 5 years. But will that increase housing affordability, availability, quality, security of tenure, and the growing gap between the haves and have-nots? What's missing from this picture?

Join Big Ideas host Natasha Mitchell at the 2025 National Housing Conference with guests debating the rhetoric, reality and policies around housing supply.

This event was organised by the Australian Housing and Urban Institute (AHURI), hosts of the National Housing Conference.

Speakers

David ReynondsChief Executive, Department of Housing and Urban DevelopmentGovernment of South Australia

Professor Rachel Ong ViforjLeading housing policy researcher and advisorJohn Curtin Distinguished Professor of EconomicsCurtin UniversityDr Tim WilliamsGlobal Practice Leader, CitiesFormer advisor to five consecutive UK housing ministersFormer CEO, Committee of SydneyArchitecture firm GrimshawHost, The Grimshaw podcast 

Further information

Productivity Commission report on housing construction productivity (2025)

The Economics of Housing Supply: key concepts and issues (August 2024)

The State of the Housing System 2025: National Housing Supply and Affordability Council's second annual report.

Housing policy reporting by ABC News

Housing research reports and analysis by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)

Housing analysis by the Grattan Institute

Fixing Australia's housing crisis — is increasing supply really a silver bullet?

Whitlam's dismissal and following double dissolution 50 years ago, was arguably the most tumultuous period in Australia's political and constitutional history. This political crisis raises key questions about constitutional change and the robustness of Australia's current democracy. What are the lessons? And could it happen again?

Presented at the National Archives of Australia

Speakers

Anne TwomeyProfessor Emerita of Constitutional Law at the University of Sydney Law School

Frank BongiornoProfessor of history, Australian National UniversityFrom 2026, Donald Horne Professor of History and Public Ideas and Director of the new Centre of Public Ideas at the University of Canberra 

Dr Brendan LimBarrister and author of Australia's Constitution after Whitlam

Paul Barclay (host)Broadcaster and former presenter of Big Ideas

Gough Whitlam's dismissal — why is it still relevant today?

In the 1930s, New Zealand-born, Cambridge educated Arthur Dale Trendall carved a niche for himself as the world's foremost expert in the study of ancient South Italian vase painting. How then, did he end up leading a crack team of code-breakers working in Melbourne to decipher Japanese messages for the Allies during the Second World War?

This lecture was recorded at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance in partnership with La Trobe University's Trendall Research Centre.

Speakers

Dr Gillian Shepherd — Director of the A.D. Trendall Research Centre for Ancient Mediterranean Studies, Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at La Trobe University

An intriguing story of art and espionage — how a classical scholar turned codebreaker during World War 2

When it was founded in 2015, openai — the company behind Chat GPT — had a mission to develop artificial intelligence tools that would benefit humanity. But somewhere along the way, that mission changed. While the use of AI in our daily lives is increasingly pervasive, the technology's toll on the environment, human rights, copyright, privacy and workers and resources in the global south is starting to mount. In her new book, leading AI reporter Karen Hao details the AI industry's pursuit of progress at any cost.

This conversation was recorded at RMIT University in partnership with Readings Bookshop on 5 September 2025.

Speakers

Karen Hao Author, Empire of AI: inside the reckless race for total domination, former Wall St Journal reporter, former senior AI editor at the MIT Technology Review, lead at the Pulitzer Centre's AI spotlight series, one of Time Magazine's Top 100 people in AI in 2025

Kobi Leins (host) Lawyer, academic, AI governance and digital ethics advisor, author, New War Technologies and International Law: The Legal Limits to Weaponising Nanomaterials

Empire of AI — Karen Hao goes inside the reckless race for total world domination

ABC Radio National's CITIZEN JURY takes hard, hot-button issues affecting a community — and places citizens at the centre of finding solutions. It's citizen-driven democracy in action!

Tasmanian salmon is on dinner plates across Australia. It's a 1.4 billion-dollar industry producing jobs for Tasmanians, and more than 70, 000 tonnes of fish annually — with plans for expansion. 

But salmon farming has also become a lightning-rod for locals concerned about its environmental impact — on water quality, wild species, and then there was the mass mortality event last summer which saw over 1 million salmon die and smelly fatty fishy globules wash up on local beaches. 

Join BIG IDEAS host and science journalist Natasha Mitchell in the historic town of Franklin in the Huon Valley with three Citizen jurors, two expert witnesses, and a live audience of passionate locals — including salmon workers and activists — as they listen, debate, and share solutions on this fraught issue.

CITIZEN JURORSJohn StanfieldLifelong recreational fisher in Tasmania, former army employee, now works in healthFounder, RecFishTas (Recreational Fishing in Tasmania) Facebook GroupPeter GrahamSculptor, former mining industry geologistSecretary, Port Huon Progress Association Lives near a salmon company's hatchery facilityDr Rayne AllinsonHistorian, former university academic, authorFirst-time environmental campaigner and state election candidate after mass salmon die-off polluted her local beach in 2025. Employed by newly elected MP Peter George's electoral office in 2025.

EXPERT WITNESSESProfessor Jeff RossSenior researcherFisheries and Aquaculture CentreInstitute of Marine & Antarctic StudiesUniversity of Tasmania 

Christine Coughanowr Water quality management consultantCo-chair, Tasmania Independent Science CouncilFounder and former director, Derwent Estuary Program partnership

INDUSTRY REPRESENTATIVEDr John WittingtonCEO, Salmon TasmaniaFormer CEO, Blue Economy Cooperative Research Centre (CRC)Former Secretary of the Department of Primary Industries, Parks Water and Environment, Tasmania

AUDIENCE

Members of the Huon Valley community and surrounds. The call-out for audience was made on ABC Hobart, ABC Radio National, and The Cygnet. Huon & Channel Classifieds.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Huon Valley Council for granting the ABC access to The Palais Theatre in Franklin for this event.

Thanks to Jo Spargo and the ABC Hobart team for supporting this Citizen Jury event.

Thanks to Huon Aquaculture staff for a tour of their hatchery facility and salmon pens for the Citizen Jury members and ABC Citizen Jury team.

FURTHER INFORMATION

Tasmanian Salmon Farming Data (Salmon Portal)

Fin-Fish Farming in Tasmania Legislative Council Inquiry report (2022)

How many salmon farms are there in Tasmania — and who owns them? (ABC News, 2025)

Massive fish deaths in Tasmanian salmon farms to be investigated (ABC 730, 2025)

Tasmanian salmon industry reeling from largest-ever fish deaths event as EPA launches investigation (ABC News, 2025)

ABC's CITIZEN JURY — Fixing salmon farming's environmental harms in Tasmania

In 1975, aged just 29, she wrote a bestselling book that changed Australia. Since then, she's courted controversy and acclaim, but Anne Summers has never given up the fight for gender equality.

This conversation was recorded live at the 2025 Sydney Writers' Festival.

Speakers

Dr Anne SummersAuthor, Damned Whores and God's Police, Ducks on the Pond: An Autobiography 1945-1976, The Misogyny Factor, and many moreProfessor of domestic and family violence, University of Technology SydneyJournalist, editor, political advisor, advocate

Dr Alecia Simmonds (host)Associate Professor in Law, University of Technology SydneyAuthor, Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law, and Wild Man: The True Story of a Police Killing, Mental Illness and the Law

Further information:

Tenacity and two squat houses — how an Australian movement was born for women leaving violenceBig Ideas, ABC Radio National, Monday 6 May 2024

Baby boycott — the fertility crisis and the big decisionBig Ideas, ABC Radio National, Thursday 26 June 2025

Anne Summers — 50 Years of Damned Whores and God’s Police

When people say or do the wrong thing, we have laws and a legal system that should be able to deliver consequences and, hopefully justice. But in this digital age, the human instinct to inflict punishment in the court of public opinion has reached fever pitch. So do we want to live by mob rule, or the rule of law?

The 2025 James Merralls Fellowship in Law Lecture, hosted by the University of Melbourne Law School and the Victorian Bar, was recorded on 4 September 2025.

Speakers

Sue Chrysanthou Defamation barrister

James Waters (host) Commercial law barrister

Why we need to cancel cancel culture — with defamation barrister Sue Chrysanthou

For all of human history, space has been a place of mystery, awe and fascination. But unless you're an astronaut, a billionaire, or a pop star, most of us will never have the opportunity to travel there — except in our minds. This conversation features two writers who've used the perspective of space to explore our humanity, Earth's place in the universe, and the meaning of it all.

The conversation, Out of this World was recorded live at the 2025 Sydney Writers' Festival.

Speakers

Samantha Harvey Author, Orbital (2024 Booker Prize winner) and many more

Ceridwen Dovey Writer of fiction, creative non-fiction and science, filmmaker, author of Only the Astronauts and many more

Ashley Hay (host) Writer, editor, facilitator, mentor, author of A Hundred Small Lessons, and many more

Out of this world — with Booker Prize winning author Samantha Harvey

The British Empire was once the biggest in the world. But now, some countries are cutting ties, and some want reparations. So just what is the legacy of British imperialism?

This event was recorded at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in October 2024.

Speakers

Sathnam SangheraAuthor, Empireworld: how British Imperialism shaped the globe and Empireland: how Modern Britain is Shaped by its Imperial Past, and moreColumnist with the Sunday Times

Gill Westaway Owner-operator at Villa Karingal, Lombok, IndonesiaFormer British Council employee

Empireworld — Sathnam Sanghera on how British imperialism shaped the globe

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