Dr Nick Bryant, Former BBC Foreign Correspondent, will Address the National Press Club of Australia on "The Consequential Country"

'The Consequential Country'

Australia has become a serious player not just in geopolitics, economics and culture, but increasingly as a policy trendsetter, good and bad. In his lecture, The Consequential Country, Dr Bryant will show how, at a time of democratic recession, Australia has the potential, perhaps even a responsibility, to assert itself as a paragon democracy also. The country’s long history of electoral innovation often gets underplayed however, partly because of the self-belittling legacy of ‘Lucky Country’ thinking, and partly because success here is so uncontroversial. In creating a new sense of Australia’s global consequentiality, the hardest people to persuade may just be Australians themselves.

About the Speaker

During a career spanning almost thirty years, Nick Bryant came to be regarded as one of the BBC’s finest foreign correspondents. He has been posted in Washington, South Asia, Australia and New York, where he covered the Trump years. His writing has appeared in The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Monthly and The New Statesman. He broadcasts regularly on the BBC and ABC. Nick studied history at Cambridge and has a doctorate in American politics from Oxford. He now lives in Sydney with his wife and children. His book, When America Stopped Being Great: A History of the Present, currently resides on Joe Biden’s bookshelf in the Oval Office.