Democratic Fragility

Lucinda Holdforth is a speechwriter and author. After time spent in the Foreign Affairs Department and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, she worked for the Hawke-Keating Labor government up to 1996, including as speechwriter to deputy prime minister Kim Beazley. She has since worked with chairs and CEOs of top-twenty Australian companies, entrepreneurs and innovators, and not-for-profit organisations. She is the author of True Pleasures: A Memoir of Women in Paris (2004), Why Manners Matter (2008) and Leading Lines (2019). Holdforth regards the free play of speech and ideas as essential for democracy and shared progress.

Michael Ondaatje is Head of the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, and Professor of History, at Griffith University. Michael is a prize-winning researcher and teacher and a regular commentator on American history and politics in the media. He is the author of Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press) and is currently writing a biography of Neville Bonner, the first Indigenous Australian elected to federal parliament (Melbourne University Press). Michael has been a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and was selected by the US Department of State for the International Visitor Leadership Program, the premier professional exchange program of the US government. He is also a recipient of the Max Crawford Medal — ‘Australia’s most prestigious award for achievement and promise in the humanities’ — and a Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Sally Young is Professor of Australian Politics and Media at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of the award-winning book Paper Emperors on the rise of Australia’s newspaper empires, and its sequel, Media Monsters, which reveals how those empires transformed into a handful of powerful companies. 

Sean Jacobs is a Papua New Guinean-born Australian writer, and government relations and public policy specialist. He is a former Brisbane City Council election candidate, ministerial adviser, United Nations worker, international youth volunteer, and national water polo champion. Sean holds a BA (International Relations) from Griffith University and a Postgraduate Certificate in Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism from Macquarie University. He also holds qualifications from the Australian National Security College, the Australian Institute of Management and the University of New England.