In Conversation with Clive Hamilton
6M Wednesday 5 October 2022
About
Clive Hamilton will be in conversation with Ben Oquist on Clive's memoir Provocateur. A Life of Ideas in Action, in which Clive shows us why questioning the status quo matters, how powerful arguments can change the country, and how the life of ideas in action actually works.
Clive Hamilton has spent a life asking why. From why climate change matters to how we understand ourselves as Australians and the dangers to us of the new authoritarianism – all this and more has been shaped, for better or worse, by public researchers and writers like Hamilton. His work, and that of the Australia Institute he founded, made him many friends as well as powerful enemies. He’s been denounced in federal parliament, black-handed by the Chinese Communist Party and sued by an angry corporation. He’s had to call in the police after death threats and take a crash course in counter-surveillance techniques. But he has also influenced the quality of the air Australians breathe, the cost of our education and how we see Australia’s place in the world.
In Provocateur, we see the passions, the doubts, the strategising, the fears, the victories, the mistakes and the questioning. Here is a blueprint for changing public debate in our increasingly uncertain times – proof that ideas are powerful and that a different way into the future is possible.
Dr Clive Hamilton AM, ANU alumnus, is Professor of Public Ethics and Vice-Chancellor's Chair in Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. His influential books include Silent Invasion, Growth Fetish, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change and Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene. For fourteen years he was the executive director of The Australia Institute, a think tank he founded. Clive has held visiting academic positions at Yale University, the University of Oxford, University College London and Sciences Po in Paris.
Ben Oquist is Climate and ESG Director with DPG Advisory Solutions and served as Executive Director of the Australia Institute from 2015 to 2022. Ben has a 25 year career engagement with Canberra policy and politics and is a regular commentator and contributor across broadcast and print media.
This event is presented in association with Harry Hartog Bookshop. Books will be available for purchase on the evening in the Cultural Centre foyer. Pre-event book signings will be available from 5.30pm, and available again after the event.
