Larissa Behrendt: On behalf of my partner in crime, the Director-General, Marie-Louise Ayres, I'd like to welcome you all here tonight. Now, just one housekeeping thing to ensure that the event goes as smoothly as possible. Can I please ask you to check that your mobile phones are switched off or are set to silent. 

As a Euahleyai woman, I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting tonight on the lands of the Ngunnawal and the Ngambri Peoples and I thank them for their ongoing care and commitment to this beautiful place that the library calls home and for the welcomes that I've been given by elders of this country on my many visits to Canberra for which I'm humbled and grateful.

This inclusive cultural protocol is a moment for us to reflect on the 60,000 plus years of stories that are on this country, but it's also a moment for us to reflect on what our own contribution might be to the ongoing storytelling of this place. 

So, it's my pleasure to see so many of you here tonight for the 33rd Kenneth Myer Lecture. The Kenneth Myer Lecture began in 1990 as an annual event for the Friends of the National Library of Australia. The Lecture is named in honor of Kenneth Baillieu Myer AC, a visionary Australian philanthropist and businessman. Kenneth Myer contributed to an extensive range of institutions and causes through significant personal donations, enthusiastic participation on boards, and of course, his involvement in the Sydney Myer Fund and the Myer Foundation. 

A generous supporter, and long-term friend of the National Library of Australia, Kenneth was a founding member of the National Library Council in 1961, prior to serving as its chair from 1974 to 1982. In 1989, he was the recipient of the Australian Library and Information Association's Redmond Barry Award for his service to libraries.

The prescription for the lecture has always been simple and is based on Kenneth Myer's views. Aligning with his wide range of cultural and social commitments, he saw it as an opportunity for an eminent Australian to make a significant statement, on a broad subject of particular interest to them. He hoped they would speak their minds openly and honestly and contribute to emerging national debates.

The lecture has been presented by a host of prominent Australians from the honorable Gough Whittam to Jillian Broadbent and most recently Professor Glyn Davies. The lecture series would simply not be possible without the support of Kenneth Myer himself, the Myer family, and since 2015, the Myer Foundation. As always, we want to thank them so very much for their generosity. And I'm pleased that tonight we're joined by Leonard Vary AM, CEO of the Myer Foundation and the Sidney Myer Fund. The Myer lecture is repeated for a Melbourne audience next week and we're pleased to say that members of the family will be in attendance then.

Tonight, it's my great pleasure to introduce Professor Brett Sutton AO, as our 2025 Myer lecturer. Professor Sutton is the Director of CSIRO - Australia's National Science Agency, leading the health and biosecurity research unit comprising of over 350 researchers. Actually, I think he might have said 370 earlier tonight. So, he's the head of an expanding workforce – in areas of digital health, human health and plant, animal, and environmental biosecurity.

A qualified public health physician, he brings extensive experience and clinical expertise in public health and communicable diseases developed through roles in government, emergency medicine, and international fieldwork. Before joining CSIRO, Brett served as Victoria's Chief Health Officer and Chief Human Biosecurity Officer, heading the health protection branch within the Victorian Department of Health.

With specialist knowledge in tropical medicine and infectious diseases, Brett has worked extensively in lower middle-income countries and complex humanitarian settings including in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Timor-Leste and Fiji. Brett's career reflects his passion and commitment to advancing health outcomes in Australia and globally. He is a fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health, a Fellow of the Australasian College of Tropical Medicine and a fellow of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine. He is also a member of the Faculty of Travel Medicine.

The world is increasingly faced with what might be termed existential threats. Climate change, biodiversity loss, fracturing of multilateralism and social cohesion, enabled by political and ideological polarization and mis and disinformation. 

These threats are complex interrelationships but can negatively synergize and represent a profound and urgent issue for Australia's well-being in the world. Professor Brett Sutton explores these wicked problems and provides thoughts on how in tackling them, we can support and revive Australia's well-being as a public and global good. Please join me in welcoming Professor Brett Sutton to present the 2025 Kenneth Myer lecture.
Professor 

Brett Sutton: Thank you so much, Larissa. And thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. It's an absolute privilege for me. I have reflected on feeling even deserving of this. It comes after a long line of very eminent Australians speaking. And it feels like such a pleasure to be here. So I thank you all. I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this Ngunnawal Country and all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who might be here tonight, or who are dialing in.

I do want to start by saying I'm speaking in a personal capacity, not as a CSIRO individual or as an employee of the Commonwealth. That’s A because it's true but B it also gives me the freedom to speak as Brett Sutton Australian citizen or world traveler or whatever and provide my reflections frankly and fearlessly which I hope to do. 

Some fantastic previous presenters and in the world of science and ecology, Tim Flannery, Gus Nosell, Fiona Stanley, and of course I'd like to also acknowledge Kenneth Myer, especially with regard to support for humanities and the arts. But you know, particularly support for science, my personal passion. I think it's such a foundational way in which we understand the world and which we're anchored which I'll come to in my speech. 

But I also think the way that libraries have been supported as a kind of central pillar for that coming together in truth, and the transmission of knowledge is an absolutely critical element as well. And I want to come to that at the end. So more on libraries soon enough. 

It's not easy to have a topic which is end of the world, as I spoke on ABC radio Canberra. It's heavy and it mixes in with feelings of futility and fatalism and potentially, lack of hope and despair. But I wouldn't be speaking if I didn't think A we could do something about it. B we're compelled to do something about it, but also that hope arises when we actually feel that we have the agency to be able to act constructively and meet the profundity of these challenges head on.

We have to go toe-to-toe with these. There is nothing more despairing than seeing the world play out in ways that we can barely tolerate because we can see the future playing out in ways that are pretty awful to contemplate. And so, while I'll paint a really challenging picture, I do want us to understand the full spectrum of that challenge and the way it is deeply interrelated across disparate domains but ways that are both you know, potentially a downward spiral but also an upward spiral. That's the thing about spirals. 

Yes – speaking to a weighty topic, I might have to throw a few jokes in. Kurt Vonnegut Junior’s biography of his father and namesake, was Armageddon In Retrospect. His father had gone through some stuff, so that was not inappropriate.  So, I'll speak a little bit Armageddoney, but hopefully not in retrospect. And hopefully with some of the same sardonic humor of Vonnegut. And Vonnegut, and Carl Sagan, and Joseph Heller, they were kind of a sardonic trio. All, I think deeply concerned with humanity, but also appropriately cynical, cynical of government, cynical of human motivation at times. Darkly humorous on perspectives of some of the great challenges and they had been through war. And understood the human condition. Hopefully I'm more Carl Sagan than Joseph Heller. I think I am. And he's an absolute hero of mine in the way that he speaks about science, speaks about that ground truth that we have, and also of the absolute preciousness of our natural world, which I'll want to touch on as well. 

But people have been talking about this stuff for a long time. I'm not suddenly revealing something to you that I think people haven't contemplated for decades really. David Suzuki has been talking about this for a long time. I think most recently, he's talked about us not being able to win it. Which is dispiriting in and of itself for someone like him who's had such an intimate understanding of the challenges that we face and who's been an optimist through time. 

But Fritjof Capra, who I read in the 1990s as a nerdy physics student when I read The Dao of Physics and later what was it? The Turning Point and he's a deep ecologist but also has a fantastic understanding of systems interactions and applied systems thinking to try and come to the solutions that we need to come to. 

I'm also slightly cautious here. Obviously, I am marked with the moniker of catastrophism through COVID-19. And maybe especially me, Brett Sutton, the cautious COVID responder of Victoria. Of course, Victoria's circumstances were different to the rest of Australia. It's a matter of deep regret to me that we had to go through the worst of Australia's experience of COVID as Victorians. But of course, the response there was trying to be commensurate to just how profoundly challenging that was both to Victorian's health and well-being, and the tens of thousands of people who might have died there had we not acted in the way that we acted. But also – and I think this is underrecognized in Australia but I'll say it here – the gift we gave to the rest of Australia in terms of how people could live more freely by virtue of being COVID free for long periods of time. But also without that death toll spilling out over the border from Victoria in the way that it's spread around the world. 

But also, I don't want this to just be my opinion of stuff. I hope I can synthesize some analysis that others have given and bring to this space words that belong to others. One of the great challenges of COVID-19 was all of the logical fallacies that I saw play out on social media and in mainstream media. The ad homonym attack, the red herring, the distraction, you know, the circular arguments and on it goes. 

But the worst of them, and it probably isn't a logical fallacy per se, but the cherry pick. That was the worst. And I can feel a slight anxiety that I'll be cherry picked for something that I say here tonight. Nonetheless, I didn't hold back in my hours and hours of standing in front of the media for hundreds of days. And I don't intend to here. So cherry pick away mainstream media or social media and we'll see where you get to. 

So it's not my analysis. The Doomsday Clock is not my clock. Eminent scientists around the world come together, think about the world in futuristic terms, think about the way in which threats come together, and come up with a figure of how close we are to midnight. We're at 89 seconds to midnight, ladies and gentlemen. That's the closest it's been in the 78 years of the Doomsday Clock. There's a commentary that comes on the doomsday clock as well and it speaks to the apocalyptic elements that I'll speak to as well tonight. 

So my first horse of the apocalypse is unsurprisingly, climate change. The World Meteorological Organization and the IPCC, again, hundreds and hundreds of eminent scientists – not just my words – think that the current rising temperature is 1.4 degrees, very close to 1.5, will probably exceed 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels in the next 5 years.

But we're not there yet as an average global temperature that will be sustained over time. And so, there is still enormous call to action to try and remain under that 1.5 degree mark, but I don't think we'll get there. We're very close already. The Paris Commitments as they stand will probably get us to two degrees, or under two degrees, if everyone holds to those commitments, and fulfills them in action and implementation in full. And that's not happening. And so, the current projections are probably closer to 3.1 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Now 3.1 degrees doesn't sound like a lot, on a cold chilly Canberra morning, when it feels 8 degrees, 11 might be more pleasant but for the scientific community the understanding of exactly what that means at a population level is profound. It has implications for food safety, food security, air quality, water security, water safety, and of course the direct effects of extreme weather events, flooding, drought, cyclonic winds, and the direct effects of heat, which are probably the most profound threat to Australia.

You know, the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria were horrific and almost 200 people died directly from those fires. But that same 4-day period of heatwave, killed an estimated 350 plus individuals. And so, these are really significant challenges that you can't hospital your way out of extreme heat events. We have an inherent vulnerability as we get older. People have chronic conditions, and those extreme days of heat 9 you can't be protected from them with medicine. You can't be protected from them with all of the most modern technologies if you still have those deep issues of inequity and inequality and poor housing, and chronic medical conditions. So it's a significant challenge. 

And of course, the other issue of concern for me with climate change is those tipping points, those spirals that can go upwards or downwards. But once they tip, they're really, really tricky to bring back and it takes some extraordinary – we haven't even tried it – some extraordinary geoengineering intervention to try and hold back. But we don't have the certainty, the scientific certainty, about taking those measures and I think they come with really profound risks if our hand is forced to try them. 

So the Albedo Effect in the Arctic, reflecting back heat, will be lost if the Arctic is lost. The permafrosts across the Russian and Siberian region and the methane release that is 25 times more powerful as a climate change driver than carbon dioxide. The West Antarctic ice shelf which could add a couple of meters of sea level rise should it be lost in full. And the Greenland ice shelf which I don't even want to go to because that's 70 meters of sea level rise. 

Now it's not going to happen overnight. But nobody wants that to be a process that kicks off that can't be held back. And the Amazon – a wonderful carbon sink – an absolutely magnificent home of biodiversity and richness and soil and that breathes out for the rest of us to live on. But if it dries and burns and is lost forever, there's no recreating the Amazon Rainforest. 

So those consequences of climate change, direct and indirect, really do present a profound existential threat to our health and well-being, but also our mental health. If we are having to deal with all of the emergency challenges that arise through climate change, then how do we focus our attention and our money and our resources and our energy on all of the desperate work of mitigation that we need to do? That's one of the challenges of a changing climate. That’s the spiky end which we have to deal with. If cities go underwater, if we've got communities in drought, if we are losing our food bowls, we have to turn our attention to that. But it does mean that we get squeezed more and more in terms of our capacity to respond to the urgent need to transition our energy system and all of the other adaptations that we need in food and water etc. That becomes challenging. 

The second horse of the apocalypse is the biodiversity horse. Maybe a Brumby for good measure. I love Brumbies by the way. I shouldn't say nasty things about Brumbies, but they don't belong in epidemic numbers in our alpine regions and they are a challenge to our biodiversity. But the real challenge to biodiversity is climate change actually. But the other convergent threats in that space are habitat loss and the way that that sustains our flora and fauna in really important ways. And it's changing at a pace that it hasn't, for probably 250 million years. We have debated, I think, whether we're in the sixth great extinction or not. But I don't think we should spend all our time with weasel words around whether we're significantly above the background rate of extinction expected at this point in time, or very significantly above that background rate. 

If you look at the IUCN, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List, they will list threatened species, but of course that's a tiny, tiny proportion, under one per cent of the proportion of species that are actually in existence. And so we're losing those without even knowing and accounting for them. But the IUCN will tell us that 25 per cent of our mammal species are on the threatened list. That a third of our conifers are on the threatened list. So we don't need to debate endlessly about whether we're in a sixth extinction or not. It is, we know enough that we are we are the only potential extinction event that is human induced, rather than a sudden upsurge of volcanic activity or being hit by an asteroid that hit the Gulf of Mexico 63 million years ago and wiped the dinosaurs out. So, it is, a different state of play that just in really the relatively recent history of settled agriculture, that we have driven that substantial change.

The third horse of the apocalypse is consumption or waste. Now a lot of people are very focused on the waste issue and I think that's an important issue to solve. Bioplastics being a really significant one obviously, but it is fundamentally a consumption problem. And that is a wicked problem by virtue of the fact that it's kind of built in. Capitalism has been talked about as the least-worst system that we have economically. And maybe that's a really useful description. I can't think of a better one necessarily. But it does lock in growth ad infinitum and that doesn't bode well for our waste challenge and our consumption challenge if we already have enough clothing for six generations of the world's population – it is problematic if the production of new stuff is the only driver that we have for GDP growth and full economic prosperity and full employment. So we do need to rethink that in profound ways I think. But you know, the plastic mass in the oceans may well have already exceeded the marine biological mass of fish and other marine creatures. Or it might be on the way and might get there in 2050. Either way, it's not a pretty sight and it's not a pretty thought to contemplate. 

The same applies for the world in which, the constructed world in which we live. It might now also exceed the biomass of the natural world on Earth. One – what is it one point one teratons – not insubstantial and what Fritjof Capra wrote about 35 years ago was embedding a circular economy in the way that we work, live and survive in profound ways. So, we need a circular economy that isn't just picking up two, three, four, 5 percent of what we produce, but that picks up 100 per cent or as close to 100 per cent as we can possibly get. Because if we're at four or 5 per cent as we are in Australia, that means that 95 per cent of what we consume is coming from the natural world. And that's a one-way street. It's not being returned in significant ways if we can't work through the reuse and recycling and reprocessing. That means that whatever our consumption demands are, are always coming from the natural world. 

And then the final horse of the Armageddon, and I'll call this one the trojan horse because it's kind of come secretly and without our full apprehension of it creeping in, is that funny combination of artificial intelligence, social media, and the post-truth world. And that's its own kind of hodge podge or farrago of challenges. Artificial intelligence – again not my words – the godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in AI said recently there's a 10 to 20 per cent chance that AI would lead to human extinction within three decades and apparently people in Silicon Valley have their own kind of probabilities that they would give to AI causing human extinction, and there are the P5s who think it's 5 per cent and the P30s who think it's 30 per cent and so I guess Geoffrey Hinton's a P 10 to 20 for what it's worth. 

And I think he was focused on things like autonomous robots in warfare. But there are many others who understand that it might be the exponential increase in demands for energy and exponential increase in demands for fresh water, that will be the challenge. And you know chat GPT kind of came to us from left field. It was completely out of the blue. I don't think we conceived of a world in which we could suddenly ask questions, and we got a fluent, cogent, intelligent, tailored, adaptable response. It works on billions of parameters of global data that's being used to train today's AI. And computers now share everything immediately around the world instantaneously. So they've learned with one another. 

One hundred million users took up Chat GPT in its first two months. And so, there is this issue of a profoundly disruptive platform then being held to what Mustafa Sulleman called the containment problem. That the disruptive profoundly shifting technologies like AI, can't be contained to just the good actors in the world. And a nefarious actor, may at some future point have all of the AI capability that the big tech companies have right now, or that might have in the next few years. Nuclear weapons were in that category. But the world paused and sat back and said we need multilateralism to work at its absolute best – imperfectly sure – but at its absolute best, to have a comprehensive test ban treaty and to make sure that we don't continue the development of nuclear weapons that will assure our mutual destruction. We don't have a comprehensive test ban treaty for AI and there's nothing that looks remotely like it's about to emerge. But I think it needs contemplation in the same way. Because it is a containment problem. That means that we want to be able to hold AI back from the kind of thing that the tech bros talk about, super intelligent AI being used for nefarious purposes.

I personally find it absurd that we're being sold this idea of super intelligent AI as if it'll solve all the world's problems. The irony will be that super intelligent AI will say, I highly recommend you hadn't invented super intelligent AI. Then we'd be much better off. It's a little bit like the colonization of Mars and Elon Musk has touted that as you know in his deeply egotistical self-serving narrative, as if it's the solution. How about we focus on the world that we're destroying here rather than sending 25 lucky people for a trillion dollars to a planet that actually doesn't have oxygen or an atmosphere? So there are some absurdities in the way that efforts are going towards particular things that are serving the ends of the very few, who might be very powerful, and who might have insatiable narcissistic tendencies, but that don't help you and me in the room. 

Which brings me to the rise of the corporate oligarchy. And you know this is AI but there are many other players in this space. I think they'd be happy to be called the broligarchy. It kind of sounds more easygoing and benign. But the truth of the matter is, it's driving the dis and misinformation that means that we are sometimes moving towards a space where you and I can't agree on what is real in the world. Now, we've always had our differences on how we see things and the filters through which we see things and how we interpret contestable concepts and ideas. But we're getting to a point where conspiracy theories are normalized amongst millions of people, where the world kind of turns upside down in terms of its social norms, where people can march on the capital wanting to overturn democracy, because they have deeply embedded ideas that are profoundly misdirected. That are deeply held, that they understand to be true, but has been fed by deep fakes and social media amplifying this disinformation in ways that make them feel like they are victims of an unjust conspiratorial network that is nefarious.

Now there are nefarious players in the world but trust me, the conceptions that people have come to, that have led them to those actions are not based on anything that I understand to be real. And so that's the challenge of the way the corporate oligarchy is kind of selling us an idea that we can have access to fantastic intelligence, when this intelligence is actually stealing data from across the world in many respects, or at least ignoring copyright, or ignoring the challenge of copyright, and is utterly and unequivocally focused on money and the exercise of power.

Social media is clearly in that space and you know I could spend another 10 hours talking about social media. I don't need to. I think you all understand the kind of poison that sits in the phone that we all use, that we're all completely and utterly dependent on, and that brings us a lot of good, and that can make us access information in ways that we couldn't have dreamed of previously. There's more computing power in this little number than was used to send man to the moon. And so, it is amazing as a technological innovation. By the same token, the idea that we're being sold that we're more connected now than ever before, when we've got an epidemic of mental health and well-being challenges, in large part because of the way that people are sucked into that vortex where the vortex is more important than the veracity of things. And the comparison problem, especially that young people are challenged by your stuff, my stuff, how you look, how I look. In my youth, you know, your local neighborhood was your village. And you didn't have to live up to the absurd and unrealistic expectations of someone halfway around the world who had an oversized influence on how you conceived of yourself and what you should be doing in the world. I certainly didn't have a completely fake and made-up computer-generated cover of Vogue Supermodel, which I've read about this week. So mis and disinformation is a is a big challenge in the sense that we require the concerted efforts of all of us pulling in a similar direction, if not exactly the same direction, in order to meet these great challenges. 

And so just when those three, those first three horses of the apocalypse are riding over the horizon, what happens? You've got this fourth horse of the apocalypse that prevents the really concerted action of global multilateralism being at its best. And so, you know the social norms being turned upside down are hugely problematic. You know, a world where, after the horrors of October 7, we've had the horrors in Gaza for almost two years, and yet the sanctions are on the United Nations staff who are investigating potential breaches of international humanitarian law, or potential genocide, rather than sanctions being on those alleged to be perpetrators. When even the Israeli organizations, Physicians for Human Rights Israel has talked about it being a genocide in Gaza. These are Israeli organizations speaking about genocide perpetrated by the state of Israel. 

Withdrawal from the Paris Treaty and global development investments, friends are enemies, enemies are friends. We used to be comforted by the idea that we had an executive and a judiciary and a legislature that would hold us and each other to account. But even those are fractured through this fracturing of the ground truthing that holds us together. And the challenge becomes greater as problems become more complex. When especially in a crisis, and I saw this in COVID – H. L. Mencken - who's not my favorite social commentator but he said some great things about politics and some great things about humanity. He said for every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, clear, and wrong. And I think that's really pertinent. When really urgent complex problems are playing out, there's something super comforting about the idea of a really simple solution like ivermectin, or hydroxychloroquine. But they're wrong. They don't work. But of course, they're appealing because the alternative is to face the complex, nuanced, multi-layered juggernaut of a challenge that's in front of you that can't be solved overnight with a really simple fix. And so, the convergence of system problems that we're facing now is exactly in that category. And so we have to avoid the notion that there is a ribbon cutting moment, a hard hat wearing announcement, that will make it all good.
And so let's take a moment. That’s the problem statement. To the to the solution. And of course, you know before starting on any solutions we really need to have this reflective moment, about what we're all here for. And I don't mean in this lecture theater. I mean on planet Earth – for what's the purpose of human existence?

Now, I'm not about to give you a pithy answer or pretend that it's the correct one, but we have to start with framing and conceiving of our place in the world. And asking the question repeatedly, for all of the things that we do, and all of the decisions that we make, and all of the things that we try and develop. 
To what end? To what end? To what end? Because that is the anchor point for making decisions that are purposeful and directive and working for the objective that is our clarion call. I would say, we're here to minimize suffering, to meet people's basic needs, but universally, with equity, to maximize happiness, and to bring meaning and value to lives supported by the love and connection to those around us and to the natural world that sustains us.

So I think as we think about solutions and as we think about these super complex problems, that should be the clarion call. That should be the North Star or the Southern Cross, for us Aussies, that guides us in thinking about all of those kinds of interim measures that we take. And so as we talk about national wealth, or GDP, or tariffs, or taxes, or industries, or employment, we have to have the framing of for whom, and in what way, and will it relieve suffering, and will it maximize happiness and well-being and sustain lives and will it take account of that foundational sustaining of lives the natural world. 

There are countries that have taken a really positive path having been challenged in really profound ways. Costa Rica, which was a tropical country, you know, 75 per cent covered in tropical rainforest in the 1940s, brought the loggers in, probably lost half of that tree cover. Absolutely devastated. And it was a biodiversity hotspot. I don't know if it's the sloth or the toucan, but beautiful central American indigenous species. But to its profound credit, the Costa Rican government said, "This is our identity. Our values are based on this beautiful country that we have, our connection to it, and the long legacy of these lands as sustaining us”. You know, as indigenous Costa Ricans initially, but then through their period of colonization, everyone who lived in Costa Rica. And they made a decision. And they said, "We will incentivize people to preserve the forest that we have, and we will incentivize people to plant trees." And they planted millions and millions and millions of hectares and are now at about 70 per cent forest cover again in Costa Rica. And people, you know, and that and that was, you know, a $500 million tax over years on fossil fuels as it happened. But what's it returned to Costa Rica? Most people, the majority of people who choose Costa Rica as an international travel destination do so because they understand the environmental beauty and value of that country. And so, that investment has been returned tenfold more so four, five, billion dollars in eco-tourism to Costa Rica through attacks on fossil fuels and through challenging circumstances where they had gone on a path to a deeply degraded ecosystem. 

Bhutan is another fantastic example. It today has 70 per cent forest cover which they've sustained all the way through because again it is intrinsic to Bhutanese values that the natural world is preserved. It's an absolute biodiversity hotspot for birds and wildlife. And as many of us might know, it doesn't measure GDP. It measures GNH or Gross National Happiness. Now, that sounds, kind of twee and I know that people probably hear it and think about it as cutesy. But the reality is, that has set at the highest levels of government a North Star for Bhutan. A setting in values that says this is intrinsically valuable to us in our identity and for our country. And so now they charge us, you know, $200 Australian dollars per day, as their sustainable development fund contribution as we go to Bhutan, again for its precious natural resources that have been preserved in all its beauty. 

So there are pathways to rebuild. But they have to be grounded in an idea that there is a destination that we want to get to, that is very clear to us and that is representative of those values about the world that we want to see, the country that we want to live in, and the way that we want our lives to be held up and sustained. It won't just be through positive actions, in the sense of let's work together to create small acts of kindness. I think we will also need non-violent protest. I think there will need to be small acts of resistance, growing to large acts of resistance, if we are challenged by global actions, with respect to what treaty obligations are, international law, policy settings, regulatory frameworks that we think are destructive. That we think are going to take us on a path that does not create the world that will sustain us and the generations to come. You know, I am of an age where I think I won't see the worst of it. But I do want my three kids to be in a world where they don't sit down and reflect on their dad and say, "Really? This is this is what you've left us? This is the legacy that we now have to fight through?" And I'm sure they will bring small and large acts of resistance. And I think they have a deeper understanding of the intrinsic value that needs to be preserved on this earth. 

But there are lessons again around the world. Like Poland in World War II, that was sometimes comical and sometimes absurd, but nonetheless brought people on a journey – not fighting fire with fire, because you know violent acts are met with violence and that does not serve anyone's interests at all – but with acts of resistance that bound people together and that made collective action possible and that made the framing of the threat clearer for people, so that they knew what they were up against and that they could only do it collectively.

So we have complex or wicked problems. I think they need systems thinking. Systems thinking is the idea that there are these deep, causal interconnections in these threats, but also in these solutions, need to be mapped out so that we can understand the points of influence that are most amenable for our actions. Because climate change is a threat to biodiversity. Biodiversity loss makes pandemics more likely.

Pandemics drive mis and disinformation. Mis and disinformation drives crisis thinking that leads to political and ideological polarization. That means that multilateralism can't work with the efforts needed to address the problems, and on it goes. And so, this downward spiral can also be an upward spiral. If we can act on any one of these influential areas in the system, then we can drive solutions that help in the broader ecosystem of those challenges. But the solutions must be commensurate to the challenge. Again, I wouldn't have accepted to stand up here if I thought that little bits of incremental change would do the job, or that we were more or less on the right path, and we'll get there in the end. We just need to give it time. I don't believe either of those things, but I do believe we can get to a world that we want to see, and that we want to live in and that we would be proud to leave our children. 

I do believe we need a radical sustainability gesture that goes beyond sustainability. I think we need a radical restoration agenda, a nature restoration agenda. I know Ken Henry spoke about the economic value of the natural world to the National Press Club. And he framed it in terms that I think policy makers understand, and politicians connect with – the economic value that hasn't been calculated in the way that nature has been commoditized or regarded as part of an extractive industry. And so, giving it a giving it a dollar value I think is entirely appropriate in the calculations that we make about the products that are produced and the value of those products. We also need to understand the value of what's being lost as we use nature to produce those products. 

At the same time, the Fritjof Capras of the world, the deep ecologists, would say there is a profound intrinsic value in nature. And a beauty of it that sustains us in ways that we can't even contemplate. Scientists have done the studies. It lowers our blood pressure to be in green spaces. It reduces our risk of significant mental ill health. We live longer with our connection to nature. So, it sustains us in health and well-being ways that we are understanding more and more deeply as time goes by. But I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about the intrinsic worth of living systems for their own sake. And I don't want to speak for First Nations people. But it is obvious to me, that First Nations wisdom has those same reflections about the deep worth, care for country, connection to country, stewardship, protection of country that is spoken of in Aotearoa and New Zealand. So Indigenous wisdom in this country, First Nations wisdom around the world, would say that we have lost our connection to the natural world, and its intrinsic value to us and the way that it sustains us. And I would say that we are in this complex spiral of challenge, in large part because we have seen nature as a tool for our benefit rather than something of intrinsic value. 

But even if we set that aside and say look - let's just take it in pure economic terms – the maths is compelling. The maths is profoundly compelling. The Stern Report on climate change now decades old said it: It's going to be expensive to address climate change mitigation and adaptation but whatever we spend now, and it's true today whatever we spend now, is cheaper than the cost of it not being acted upon in years hence. And so, it's just a plain and simple straightforward economic equation. Yes – tough choices about the immediate urgent demands in the emergency space and in cost of living demands. Absolutely. And they shouldn't be forgotten. They shouldn't be neglected. But don't, not spend on the things that we know we need to spend on now in order to save us even more substantial challenges years later. 

So, in a world of social and information fracturing and polarization, I do think we need to start with ourselves. What's the commitment that I can make personally and individually? You may or may not know I'm a bit of a student of Buddhism. I call myself a bad student, because I'm not a great practitioner. But I do have a deep intellectual interest in it. And when I was thinking about this, and the solutions that we need to come to, I did think about the great schools of Buddhist thinking, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. And Theravada is about your personal liberation journey and finding Nirvana and all of the things that you need to do to get there. The four noble truths, and the eight-fold noble pathway, and so on. Mahayana Buddhism is a little bit different. It's, I would say, it's a socially concerned school of Buddhism. And so, yes, there's the path to individual liberation, but it does say, look, if you're going to be held back a little bit in your path to liberation, because you are focused on the global good, and the good of society and relieving the suffering of those around you, that's what I would recommend. And so, I think we can take either path because I think they are deeply connected anyway. 

Happiness and its causes have kind of been lost from the way that we live in the world. It seems surprising to say, you know, we've done the science, we know it. If you had the answers, why wouldn't you live that way? But, you know, this is the challenge of human behaviors. If the world around us is engineered in certain ways, the path that we find through our own behavioral choices, can sometimes be really tricky. But the truth of the matter is, materialism doesn't serve us particularly well once our basic needs are met and we can live comfortably, and we can feel secure in our housing, and our food, and our security. Going much beyond that sabotages our happiness. That's when the comparison problem really kicks in. Your stuff. You've got stuff. Where's my stuff? I want your stuff. And so, we're going on that consumption treadmill, and it is a never – ending series of disappointments because there's no definitive end that you can get to where you can't look around the world and say, "Oh, but that person's got more than me." You'll always find that person who's got more than you. Hello Instagram.

Gratitude positive relationships, they are absolutely sustaining for us in our happiness and so the obvious action, put your bloody phone down. Talk to the person in front of you. And I know it's challenging because I am stuck to my phone far too much, but we need to make plans for ourselves that are definitive and that try and structure our world in a different way that helps us to navigate these significant behavioral challenges that will also help the world in larger scope.

Volunteering. My time in Afghanistan was probably the most fulfilling of my life. Six months in 1997 and six months in 2003.

Letting go. I still remember when I did Vipassana Meditation ten day silent retreat in the Blue Mountains and then later in Ladakh – the voice of the of the Buddhist monk: Remain equanimous. Remain equanimous. And so that process is also absolutely in support of our well-being and our happiness. So meditate or find times for reflection. Do the happiness hygiene – daily walks, daily exercise. We know they're absolutely good for you. They're also good for the world. Meditation, reflection, turn off your screens. Turn to real conversations and connection with nature. Again, because it'll make you have a deeper understanding of the value of nature, but I think it'll also sustain you in ways that you may barely be aware of now. And small acts of kindness. What's the Mahayana equivalent of this individual action? And again, in a world of social fracturing and fracturing of information and our ground truthing, I think it's having those real conversations and it's starting with your family and it's making a plan with your family about what you can do to make the world a better place.

That relates to any of these challenges, that relates to being grounded in truth, that relates to what you can do as a family to adapt to climate change, to mitigate climate change, to make the energy transition for your household, for your school, for the place that you work, for the organizations that you interact with. You can all be the drivers of that change. And yes, do it online. Sure – start a Facebook group if you must. I don't know what Facebook looks like. I haven't been on it. But start with real conversations, because that is the real motivation when people find that emotional connection and when people find the opportunity to have nuanced and complex conversations with you.

You know, this is part of the challenge of conspiracy theories that the simple narratives that get amplified online, are not a space for that nuanced and complex discussion. I think if we had more opportunity with the vaccine hesitant, for example, to have nuanced conversations about their concerns – legitimate concerns – is it safe in pregnancy? Is it safe for my children? And to talk it through with all of the complexities that are inherent in that as a public health intervention, we'd be in a better place. 

And then go to your neighborhood, go to your community, go to your street, and think about the plans that you can make to work on the local biodiversity and biosecurity threats that we have. I've done that in my house. I had, you know, the month where I pulled up every bit of holly in my garden. The month where I pulled up every bit of blackberry, and wandering trad, and broom and English ivy. Nothing against the English. I don't know why it's called English ivy, but maybe because it's a pest. English ivy. And take those small steps and feel the positive outcomes that can emerge from it. And then think about what you can do more of and what you can do synergistically, collectively, in the in the service of planetary good and of public good.

Libraries. I have to end on libraries. Maybe not the end, the penultimate thing to say. This whole talk could have been paean to libraries. It could have been a prosaic praise of libraries. Carl Sagan said that books are that magnificent treasure of knowledge that can be passed from one individual to another, but that can also be passed across the centuries, passed across a millennium. Precious holders of knowledge. Precious holders of those truths that have been found through discovery, and through philosophy, and through communities having those conversations and coming to new insights, and new analysis, and new understandings. And they've been captured. And they remain these precious, sentinel islands really, amongst in a way, the great septic tank of information that's in social media. You know there are still precious truths in social media. Still precious truths in the digital information ecosystem. But there is all the sewage washing in between, and so how do you sort through that stuff?

And that's why I think the personal conversations are really critically important.  Because they hold the gold of what we know to be true in ourselves that doesn't get distorted through online amplification of disinformation and misinformation because of the monetization and commercialization and guru making incentives that the social media world has. That's why it's distorted. Because you can make money, because the tech bros are making money, and because people can monetize and commercialize and get millions of followers by being dramatic rather than truthful. 

I think we need to fight like our lives depend on it. Because I think our lives depend on it. And so, we do need to take actions which are definitive, and which are absolutely embedded in action and focused forever on action. And I'll finish with this. I live in Wurundjeri lands in Melbourne. And Wominjeka is what I see when I'm driving up into the Dandenongs. In the Woi wurrung  language it means welcome, or it's translated as welcome, but a more nuanced translation would be come with purpose. And I think that's an absolutely beautiful statement in terms of our need for action and how we go about it and so I would urge myself, but I would urge all of you as we meet these challenges, and as we come to collective action for public good and planetary good, come with purpose. Thank you.

Marie-Louise Ayres: Thanks very much, Brett. And before I hand over to the Chair to close, we have time for three questions tonight. And you know the drill. You need to wait until the microphone comes to you. So, if you've got a question, put your hand up now. We've got a question right down here. So, I'm going to, if you just wait until the microphone comes to you. 

Audience member 1: Thank you so much, a wonderful lecture, and I just want to say a personal thank you. My entire family is in Victoria and I believe their safety during COVID was largely due to the response of your government. So, thank you. You came very dangerously to talking about the well-being economy, which is something that my PhD is focused on right now. I'm really interested in this idea that by changing kind of economic norms in the system, we can change the way that policy outcomes can be achieved. I wonder what you think about the well-being economy and also if you could just reflect a little bit on how the government is perpetuating growth norms and how that might be troublesome. 

Brett Sutton: In my next 45 minute speech! No – I absolutely believe we need the metrics that sustain and support the idea of a well-being economy and the reality of a well-being economy, but in making decisions, you know the bureaucratic structures respond to those KPIs and they respond to the metrics, performance metrics and otherwise, and so we need to have those conversations about what those metrics should be and make sure that those metrics reflect those ultimate outcomes that we want, which do relate to sustainability of our economy, and the sustainability of the planet.

And so if it's growth ad infinitum, let's make sure, that it is activity that is restorative. And so yes, we can have activity and that can build year on year on year and our efforts and our productivity and our efficiency can improve year on year on year, but it has to be, investing in the restoration of our planet in short. Thank you.

Audience member 2: Hi Professor Sutton, thank you for your talk. So you spoke a bit about what individuals can do to find purpose and happiness and you recommended a systems approach to some of these wicked problems and you also talked about extreme ideologies and politics. What is your thought or reflection on despondency, because I sometimes think that that is more of an acute threat to our solution forward than extremism. Brett Sutton: It's a really good question and I grapple with it and I and I don't know that I know the answer. I know that I don't want us all to feel overwhelmed, but I'm also really clear that I don't want us to feel underwhelmed. So, let's all feel whelmed. Can we do whelmed? And be whelmed? You know, I'm well aware of the graph that shows that if people are deeply fearful, they're paralyzed in action. If people are to have no anxiety about anything at all, they have no motivation to act. And so, there is a sweet spot in the middle where there is sufficient concern, sufficient contemplation of challenge, that drives people to action.

But I do – I do get the sense that again, especially in a social media era, you can find the echo chamber, whatever echo chamber that suits your mood and that can reinforce that sense of despondency and fatalism. I know that there's, there'll be a Facebook page or a Reddit feed or an Instagram hashtag that will meet everyone's particular set point as to their emotional state. That can simply drive it further down a path that leads to greater despondency. But I think you know our solution will be to find action amongst our communities by finding, not just people of like mind, but yes to start with people of like mind and like intent. I'm having a lovely dinner this weekend with, I think it's between 11 and 18 people. Haven't got all the RSVPs yet. We're going to talk about this stuff, and hopefully we're going to thrash through some of the things that we think are concrete actions that are positive and constructive and can make, by increments, at first, a difference. But with an idea of building it over time. I think despondency in some ways is inescapable at this juncture of challenges coming together in the world. But I hope it's not stagnancy. 

Marie-Louise Ayres: Last chance for one more question if anybody is going to be brave this, this evening. So, no. Well, I think we might, I'm going to call the Chair up, and as the Chair is coming up, I'm going to just say one thing. Thank you for talking about come with purpose. The flip side of that in a place like this and where you work is serve with purpose. So, thank you for that thought. Thank you.

Larissa Behrendt: Well, I'm going to confess that as Professor Brett Sutton was laying out the problems, I wasn't sure on how he was going to deliver on his promise of hope. But it was certainly, although I think many of us have been aware of many of those issues, he brought together those challenges. And it's no doubt the wakeup call we all need to stop being despondent. But he did deliver on the promise of hope, I think, profoundly by reminding us that while these problems do seem like they're overwhelming, we do have in response to his powerful call to arms, agency which we can sometimes forget that we have.

That was a very powerful thing that no doubt, gives great hope to all of us. And I'm sure like me you were sitting there making a list of the things he was saying that were very doable things that we can do in our own lives to meet those challenges. But the other hope, I think you gave us Professor Sutton, was that while we have public intellectuals who are so interested in the public good, who can be reflective and thoughtful but also compassionate. It can give us hope that there are ways to think through these complex wicked problems.

And of course, I think in closing with the thanks, you remind us in terms of the way you saw the problems as interconnected, that the solutions are interconnected, but you reminded us that we're all interconnected by encouraging us to talk to each other, to get off our phones and to have those conversations. That's also a very powerful thing that you gave us, of remembering that we're all in this together, and only together can we solve that. 

So, as we bring these formal proceedings to a close, please join me in thanking Professor Brett Sutton for his illuminating talk and for once again, and also can we once again, thank the Myer Foundation for their continued support of the Kenneth Myer lecture. So, I hope you can join me and Brett and the Director-General, and everyone else, to remember our interconnectedness in the foyer. Thank you.