Experience ANU

After enacting an array of new anti-terror laws in the years following the September 11 attacks, Australia is now seeking to introduce additional laws in response to the threat posed by fighters returning from conflicts in Syria and Iraq. This talk will examine whether these measures are needed, exploring whether Australia already has the laws in place to protect the community from home-grown terr...

Graeme Simsion talks about his latest book, creative processes and adapting the Rosie Project for the big screen. The Rosie Project was an international publishing phenomenon, with more than a million copies sold in over forty countries around the world. Now Graeme Simsion returns with the highly anticipated sequel, The Rosie Effect. Don Tillman and Rosie Jarman are now married and living in New Y...

Authoritarian regimes are under siege in many parts of the world. Some have already given way and others are likely to follow. Building democracies in their place will not be easy or quick, and in some cases it will not happen in the medium term. Much has been learned about how to organize free and fair elections, but building the other institutions and the habits of democratic governance inevitab...

With unprecedented access to their hitherto sealed records, David Horner tells the real story of Australia's domestic intelligence organisation, from shaky beginnings to the expulsion of Ivan Skripov in 1963. This is the first volume of a remarkable official history of ASIO - a revealing and authoritative account of the early years of Australia's national security intelligence service. With unfett...

This podcast was recorded at ANU on Thursday 3 October. Annabel Crabb is in conversation with Samantha Maiden, National Political Editor Sunday Telegraph. Working women are in an advanced, sustained, and chronically under-reported state of wife drought, and there is no sign of rain. But why is the work-and-family debate always about women? Why don't men get the same flexibility that women do? In o...

Australia asserts sovereignty to 42 per cent of the Antarctic continent and has a long involvement in Antarctic exploration and science. Australia also has important economic and environmental interests in the Great Southern Ocean. We are an original signatory to the Antarctic Treaty which, among other things, establishes all that part of the globe below 60 degrees South as a region free of milita...

In the past decade more than 150 books with ‘Anzacs’ in the title have been published. But for Australians there was much more WWI than battles and fighting. The war bitterly divided Australian society and politics, along fault lines that would last for at least a generation. In all of today’s national commemoration we should remember these others ‘wars’—between pro and anti-conscriptionists, betw...

The Government’s decision to commission a new Defence White Paper – the third in just in just five years – suggests that Australian defence policy is in trouble. That comes as no surprise, because Defence policy is never easy. But the new White Paper will only fix the problems if we understand why the last two failed, and avoid the same mistakes. Professor Hugh White AO, ANU Public Policy Fellow d...

Born in the United States to immigrant Chinese parents, Amy Tan is an internationally celebrated writer. Her novels The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetters Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning, are all New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of a memoir, The Opposite of Fate, and two children's books. Her work has been translated into 35...

Alastair Walton, Chairman of BKK Partners and a former Co-Chairman of Goldman Sachs Australia, discusses Australia’s financial sector in the context of global developments impacting the industry.

Visiting international academic and influential science blogger Professor Jim Coyne gives a provocative talk at ANU Research School of Psychology.

Greg Combet has been central to some of the biggest public struggles of our time—on the waterfront, the collapse of an airline, compensation for asbestos victims, the campaign against unfair workplace laws and then climate change. From an idyllic childhood on the Minchinbury estate in the western suburbs of Sydney, Combet's world changed dramatically with the early death of his wine-maker father....

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women, in conversation with Virginia Haussegger

The Curtin Medalist for Excellence in Medical Research for 2013, Canberra’s Centenary Year, is Nobel Laureate Emeritus Professor Rolf Zinkernagel. The Medal was presented to Professor Zinkernagel for a Lifetime of Achievement at a ceremony at JCSMR. Professor Zinkernagel then presented a Public Lecture on his work entitled 'Why do we not have a vaccine against HIV or TB?' Professor Zinkernagel was...

The United Nations Human Rights Council established the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) in 2013, tasked with investigating the alleged systematic, widespread and grave violations of human rights in North Korea, with a view to ensuring full accountability, particularly for violations which may amount to crimes against humanity. The Ho...

What if the traditional lecture became a thing of the past? Are there some forms of learning that are better suited to computers than the classroom? Do students want to be talked at or talked to? Technology is opening up new ways to teach and learn and we want your opinion on what the classrooms of the future might look like. Featuring panellists: Professor Sanjay Sarma Director of Digital Learnin...

Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, Ambassador Roberto Azevêdo delivered a public lecture on the 17th of July 2014 at ANU entitled, New momentum: can the success in Bali transform the WTO? Ambassador Azevêdo discussed where the WTO should go next and reflected on how trade issues might play into the G20 process — a timely discussion in the lead up to Australia's hosting of the G20 Su...

What causes some eruptions to be more explosive than others? Is it the total driving gas fuel, or how fast the gas escapes? This lecture examines both the volatile content and the speed of magma ascent immediately prior to eruption. Chemical zonation preserved inside glass pockets and crystals provides one of the fastest clocks in geology. These timescales of chemical diffusion operate over minute...

Claiming the body as property has been represented as the best way to ensure control over our own choices and lives; a crucial way of asserting our rights to bodily integrity; and an important means of protection against the abuse of our bodily materials by today's biotechnology companies. Refusing to see our bodies as property, it is argued, reflects either a religious view of the body as belongi...

The Gender Institute marked its 3rd anniversary on Friday 21 March 2014 with an inspirational lecture and discussion with Sex Discrimination Commissioner Ms Elizabeth Broderick from the Australian Human Rights Commission, who spoke on; "Progressing gender equity and the role of male champions of change" Commissioner Broderick was introduced by ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Ian Young, AO who lauded...

The European project was an attempt to pursue a strategic objective by economic means: continental peace by way of coal and steel. More than 60 years on, if measured against that original set of goalposts, it has been a successful project. Indeed, the lure of European peace and prosperity has been so attractive that the EU has grown dramatically in the last two decades. Yet Europe has many detract...

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, AC CH, has used a talk at ANU to argue for Australia to step back from the Australia-US ANZUS military alliance. Mr Fraser said Australia made a major strategic error and betrayed its national interest by not showing strategic independence from the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union. He warned that Australia needs to be careful not to follow the...

Governments and society are increasingly reliant on cyber systems. That reliance makes us vulnerable to cyber attacks, which can have powerful impacts on people's lives. Because of this, in liberal democratic societies governments have a duty to ensure cybersecurity in order to protect their citizens and, arguably, the people of other nations. But as recent events following the revelations of Edwa...

Energy lies at the heart of the world's sustainability challenge. On the one hand, abundant, accessible, low-cost energy is vital for economic prosperity. On the other hand, the world's pattern of energy use, based on fossil fuels, threatens massive future climate change with devastating potential consequences. The greatest sustainability challenge, therefore, is to meet the energy needs of a grow...

As Indonesia's economy grows, it is increasingly being referred to as a rising middle power and there is mounting speculation that Indonesia might eventually join the ranks of Asia's great powers. Regardless of just how far Indonesia will rise, its government and the will of its people will become increasingly influential in terms of its regional leadership and the values and norms Jakarta espouse...