Mark Cully was chief economist for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and the Department of Industry, as well as chair of the OECD's Working Party on Migration. As head of macroeconomic policy in the Treasury, he led the design of the JobKeeper program during the pandemic. He is an expert panel member of the Fair Work Commission and a visiting fellow at ANU's Crawford School of Public Policy.

Author photo by Elise Idiens

Toby Walsh is one of the world's leading researchers in artificial intelligence. He is a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales and chief scientist at its AI institute, UNSW.ai. He is the author of five books about AI, including Machines Behaving Badly, Faking It and, most recently, The Shortest History of AI. His forthcoming book is God AI.

Waleed Aly is a writer, academic, lawyer and broadcaster. A lecturer in politics at Monash University, he is the author of People Like Us and Quarterly Essay 37, What's Right? and Quarterly Essay 87, Uncivil Wars (with Scott Stephens). He co-hosts Radio National's The Minefield program.

James Boyce is a multi-award-winning historian. His first book, Van Diemen’s Land, was described by Richard Flanagan as ‘the most significant colonial history since The Fatal Shore’. He is also the editor of Inga Clendinnen and the author of Losing Streak, Born Bad, Imperial Mud and 1835, which was The Age’s 2012 Book of the Year.

Author photograph by Matt Newton