SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Facilitated by:
Associate Professor Lyn Carson



Lyn Carson is the United States Studies Centre’s academic program director. She is an associate professor in applied politics with a particular interest in deliberative democracy and civic engagement in political decision making. She has been teaching, consulting, writing and researching in this field for 15 years and was co-designer of the Australian Citizens’ Parliament and an invited participant at the Australian Prime Minister’s 2020 Summit. She has facilitated dozens of World Cafes including a memorable event involving 300 people at Paddington Town Hall in 2008. See also maintains a website on active democracy activedemocracy.net

Moderated by:
Professor Geoff Gallop AC



Professor Geoff Gallop was born in 1951 in Geraldton, Western Australia. After attending school in Geraldton he studied at University of WA, Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar) and Murdoch Universities. He gained his doctorate from Oxford in 1983.

In 1986 he was elected a Member of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly, a position he held until retiring from politics in 2006. Professor Gallop was a Minister in the Lawrence Labor Government from 1990 to 1993, the Leader of the Opposition from 1996 to 2001 and the Premier of Western Australia from 2001 to 2006. In 2001 he was honoured with Life Membership of the Association for the Blind (Western Australia) and in 2003 was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Pubic Administration Australia. In 2006 he was admitted to the Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by Murdoch University. 

After retiring from politics he was appointed Professor and Director of the Graduate School of Government, The University of Sydney, a position he still holds. He teaches in the University’s MPA program and has developed short courses for public sector executives and political advisors in Australia, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. In 2007 he was appointed Deputy Chair of the Council of Australian Government’s Reform Council. In 2008 he was appointed to the National Health & Hospitals Reform Commission.

In 2008 he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.

Panelists:
Caroline West



Caroline West is a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. She has taught and published widely on a range of topics in moral philosophy, applied and professional ethics, metaphysics (with a particular focus on questions of personal identity) and political philosophy. Her current research projects include a book on happiness to be published in 2010.

Caroline teaches a popular course on the Philosophy of Happiness at the University of Sydney and has won numerous teaching awards. She is a member of the Council of the Australasian Association of Philosophy and on the editorial board of the Journal of Happiness Studies, a leading academic journal of interdisciplinary research on subjective well-being.

Shaun Parker



Shaun Parker has worked as a choreographer, dancer, physical theatre performer and counter-tenor over the last seventeen years.

A graduate of VCA, his performance credits include Meryl Tankard ADT, Kate Champion, Sydney Theatre Company, Chunky Move, The Song Company, State Theatre Company (of SA), Compagnie ALIAS (Switzerland), Meredith Monk (New York) and Sasha Waltz (Berlin). He has also performed in feature films including dancing in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and the actor/dancer role of Paul in Ana Kokkinos' Book of Revelation.

Shaun's self devised physical theatre and dance works have toured to Germany, Asia, New Zealand and across Australia. His credits include Divine Harmonies (Tasdance), My Little Garden (Barossa International Music Festival), Blue Love (Sydney Opera House), VAMP (Meow Meow & Malthouse Theatre), Love Installment (Sydney Opera House), Tenebrae III (The Song Company) and the award winning short films 'The Love Trilogy' and 'NO.'  Other work includes creative developments with Australian Theatre of the Deaf and the National Aboriginal & Islander Dance College (NAISDA).

His choreographic credits in the commercial industries include Assistant Choreographer to Kate Champion for the World Touring Production of Dirty Dancing, the modern dance work Judas Kiss telecast world-wide for World Youth Day, and choreography for SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE.
His awards include the Queen's Trust Award, the Emerging Artist of the Year Award  and the Robert Helpmann Scholarship 2006 to develop his work in singing, directing and choreography.

Shaun Parker's This Show Is About People world premiered at the Melbourne International Festival 2007 and the Sydney Festival 2008. It won the Australian Dance Award for Best Independent Production and was nominated for four Green Room Awards. Shaun was a featured artist at 2008's Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference (APAP) in New York and at the Australian Performing Arts Market 2008 in Adelaide. One of his most recent projects sees Shaun working with gifted and sometimes untrained and under-privileged performing arts students across Western Sydney; focusing on the thoughts and concerns of these raw and culturally diverse young Australians.

Bhante Sujato



Bhante Sujato is an Australian Buddhist monk who was born in Perth in 1966. He was brought up in a liberal Catholic family and attended a Christian Brothers' school. Impressed by the profound visions of the world opened up through science, and especially the Theories of Relativity, he rejected his Catholic beliefs while in his teens.

He read philosophy and literature at the University of Western Australia for two years, but left to play rock n' roll guitar. Together with the singer Peggy van Zalm, he formed Martha's Vineyard, a successful indie band in the late eighties.

In 1992 he went to Thailand and fell into an intensive retreat at a monastery in Chieng Mai.  He was ordained in Thailand at Wat Pa Nanachat in the forest tradition of Ajahn Chah. He spent several years in forest monasteries and remote hermitages in Thailand, Perth, and Malaysia.

In early 2003 Bhante Sujato founded Santi Forest Monastery, a Buddhist community for monks, nuns, and laypeople. The vision for the monastery has always included a role for nuns, and Bhante Sujato has become well known for his articulate and passionate support for the fully ordained bhikkhuni lineage, the most pressing controversy within contemporary Buddhism. He teaches and talks regularly about Buddhism to the wider community and his writings explore the earliest Buddhist scriptures, using a comparative and historical approach to illuminate the process of formation of Buddhist ideology and identity.