Waleed Aly in conversation with Tory Shephard at Adelaide University

Why did equal rights fail to deliver equal lives? When did freedom start to feel so unfree? And how did we get so polarised? 

Join us as Walkley Award-winning journalist Waleed Aly discusses his Quarterly Essay 103, Time of Monsters: What Future for Liberalism? with journalist Tory Shepherd. 

For centuries, liberal ideas ruled Western economies and set the parameters for political debate. In his wonderfully clarifying essay, Aly delves into what happened to liberalism. As a set of ideas, it offered equality and guaranteed freedoms. But more and more, we live in a post-liberal world.

Aly maps the new politics arising – both conservative and progressive – as mainstream politics loses its appeal. He examines the new battles over identity, injustice, speech and sovereignty. Deftly identifying the cracks, he points to the instability at the centre of contemporary life: Social media, AI, environmental disasters and climate harm, endless convenience and information, insecure housing, income and energy – all feeding ‘a near-constant sense of crisis in almost every sphere of life’.

Is this what it looks like when an old order dies? Liberalism's confidence that humans are ultimately progressive beings seems to have overlooked how much we value stability, predictability and meaning. Our age of discontent stems directly from the sense that things are unmoored and beyond our grasp; that we are serving the system, rather than it serving us.
Waleed Aly, Time of Monsters

Copies of Dr Waleed Aly's Quarterly Essay, Time of Monsters: What Future for Liberalism? will be available to purchase in the Auditorium foyer on the night of the event. 

Presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre