Panellists:George Brandis, Attorney-General; Tanya Plibersek, Deputy Opposition Leader; Julian Burnside, Barrister and Human Rights Advocate; Piers Akerman, Political commentator; and Michele Levine, CEO, Roy Morgan Research. Panellists
George Brandis
George Brandis is the Attorney-General and Leader of the Government in the Senate.
George graduated from the University of Queensland with double first class honours in Law and Arts.
After winning a scholarship to undertake postgraduate legal studies at Oxford, he received a Bachelor of Civil Law and won the Rupert Cross prize.
Prior to entering Parliament, George worked as a lawyer at Minter Ellison. In 1985 he went to the Bar where he established a commercial practice specialising in trade practices law.
He was appointed a silk in 2006.
George’s parliamentary service began in May 2000, when he was selected to fill a casual Senate vacancy for Queensland.
He attracted attention as a tireless worker in committees.
He chaired the Senate Economics Committee for five years and also the Senate Privileges Committee.
In 2007, he was promoted to the Ministry as Minister for the Arts and Sport.
This promotion came in the last year of the Howard government and it was known that the then PM and the Senator from Queensland did not get on.
George is alleged to have referred to his PM as a ‘lying rodent’, an expression that instantly became the stuff of political legend.
He was shadow attorney-general in opposition and entered Cabinet as Attorney-General after the coalition returned to government in 2013.
Tanya Plibersek
Tanya Plibersek has been Deputy Leader of the Opposition since Labor’s defeat in the 2013 election. She is also the Shadow Minister for Education and the Shadow Minister for Women.
She entered Parliament in 1998, became a minister when Labor came to power in 2007 and was elevated to Cabinet in the health portfolio in 2011.
Tanya represents the seat of Sydney, which covers the CBD and several inner suburbs of Australia’s biggest city. She is the daughter of migrants from Slovenia and grew up in Sydney’s south.
Her late father, Joseph, came to Australia in the 1950s and worked on the Snowy River hydro-electric scheme.
Tanya has degrees in communications and politics and public policy. She is married to Michael Coutts-Trotter, a senior NSW bureaucrat. They have three children and live in the Sydney suburb of Rosebery.
Julian Burnside
Julian Burnside is a barrister based in Melbourne. He specialises in commercial litigation. He joined the Bar in 1976 and took silk in 1989.
He acted for the Ok Tedi natives against BHP, for Alan Bond in fraud trials, for Rose Porteous in numerous actions against Gina Rinehart, and for the Maritime Union of Australia in the 1998 waterfront dispute against Patrick Stevedores.
He was Senior Counsel assisting the Australian Broadcasting Authority in the ‘Cash for Comment’ inquiry and was senior counsel for Liberty Victoria in the Tampa litigation.
He is a former President of Liberty Victoria, and has acted pro bono in many human rights cases, in particular concerning the treatment of refugees.
He is passionately involved in the arts. He collects contemporary paintings and sculptures and regularly commissions music. He is Chair of Fortyfive Downstairs, a not for profit arts and performance venue in Flinders Lane, Melbourne.
He is the author of a book of essays on language and etymology, Wordwatching(Scribe, 2004) and Watching Brief (Scribe, 2007), a collection of his essays and speeches about the justice system and human rights.
He compiled a book of letters written by asylum seekers held in Australia’s detention camps. The book,From Nothing to Zero, was published in 2003 by Lonely Planet.
He also wrote Matilda and the Dragon, a children’s book published by Allen & Unwin in 1991.
In 2004 he was elected as a Living National Treasure. In 2009 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia. In 2014 he was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.
He is married to artist Kate Durham.
Piers Akerman
For 25 years the Labor-baiting columns and blogs of Piers Akerman in the Sydney Daily Telegraph have made him one of Australia’s best-known commentators.
He is regarded as a trend-setter, in that conservative columnists are now common but were a rarity when Piers first burst into print.
Born in Papua New Guinea in 1950, Piers was raised in Perth and pursued a career in journalism.
He worked at a variety of newspapers – mostly in the News Ltd group – in a number of cities and spent a long period in the US during the 1970s and 80s.
He met his wife, Suzanne, a solicitor, while covering the 1974 America’s Cup yacht races at Newport, Rhode Island.
After returning to Australia he was made editor of The Adelaide Advertiser in 1988 and Melbourne’s Herald-Sun from 1990-92.
His confrontational approach as editor challenged the established order in both cities and caused considerable controversy.
Piers began writing his columns after his stint at theHerald-Sun, and ever since has maintained his assault on Labor and all soft-Left causes.
He is a committed climate-change sceptic and a voracious critic of most Green causes.
Michele Levine
Michele Levine has been chief executive officer of Roy Morgan Research since 1992.
With over 30 years’ experience as a researcher, Michele has been responsible for thousands of surveys, including some of the largest research projects ever undertaken in Australia, many of which continue to play a crucial role in shaping our society today.
Driven by an insatiable curiosity about people and what makes them tick, as well as a fundamental belief in the empowering value of information, Michele was instrumental in developing Roy Morgan Single Source, the world’s leading consumer study based on over 50,000 interviews a year, and the Roy Morgan Business Survey.
With a passion for Australian culture, education and the arts, Michele is Chair of the Malthouse Theatre Board, where she provides leadership in strategic planning, philanthropy and corporate engagement.
She also serves on the Australian Made Campaign Board of Directors, where her expertise in buyer behaviour and the Australian marketplace is greatly valued.
A staunch believer in social justice, Michele is an Ambassador for the Menzies School of Health Research, advocating for their work in closing the gap in health and education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
In her roles as Honorary Fellow of the Australian Institute for Business and Economics at The University of Queensland, and member of the Advisory Board of the Melbourne Business School’s Centre for Business Analytics, Michele strives to connect industry with university research.
