International Governance Leadership Conference 2024 day one: Key takeaways, ideas and tips from our experts
The Governance Institute of Australia’s International Governance Leadership Conference 2024 featured a global conversation converging around the theme of the human condition.
Held at the Grand Hyatt, Melbourne, and accessible virtually around the world, the conference examined the governance and risk management implications of socio-economic factors, geopolitics, war, environmental issues, technological transformation and AI.
Here are the key takeaways and critical conversations from day one.
Opening address: The human condition
- The trajectory of human progress
- The obligations for leaders to help communities navigate the birth lottery
- How governance enables or disables the human condition.
- How global contexts and the human condition impact and are impacted by governance directions
Prof Daniel Halliday PhD, Author, Associate Professor, Philosophy. University of Melbourne
Chair: Anjali Rao, Award-winning Broadcast Journalist
Have you heard of the ‘birth lottery’?
A person inheriting $650,000 receives what a median wage earner without inheritance would take 10 years to earn. In the USA, black men who drop out of high school face a 70 per cent chance of later going to jail. Children born in the early months of the school year are more likely to become professional athletes.
Professor Daniel Halliday, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, argues that this ‘birth lottery’ poses a significant challenge for organisations and societies – and there are several approaches to address it.
In large part, the birth lottery is a problem that should shape law and policy, especially around domains like education, healthcare, and immigration.
But whatever policies are chosen by governments, the problem will persist at the organisational level.
The effects of the birth lottery impact who gets hired, who gets promoted, and which clients and customers are best served.
Halliday said there are various ways we can deal with the birth lottery.
Mitigating the birth lottery could make the world a fairer place. Harnessing the birth lottery and accepting that it creates winners and losers allows us to seek that the winners work in a way that raises the position of the losers. An optimising approach would see us accept that people are different and use their gifts accordingly.
“Each of the three principles … has some application. None of them are entirely exhaustive or entirely useless,” said Halliday.
Each approach is being used in the real world. New Zealand’s weight-based children’s sport classes aim to nullify the effect of a child’s date of birth. Progressive income tax aims to harness the fact that some people earn more than others. Organisations that seek diversity among their employees are aiming to optimise the differences between individuals.
What does this mean for leaders?
“If you’re a leader, you probably have done quite well out of the birth lottery and you can view yourself as having this duty of reciprocity towards others,” said Halliday.
“The more human cooperation evolves, the more the bulk of us who have got potential make the most of it, the less bad things get for people who are at the rough end of the lottery.”
And how can organisations ensure better equity?
“The short answer is they can do quite a lot, very easily. You can have quotas. I work at a university where we have a problem with … a skewed demographic in the undergraduate intake right now. We can complain about how this is because of how the government sets fees, how the secondary school system works… but we can also say, look, it kind of matters who’s who at the front of the lecture theatre when you show up, and who you see on the website in senior roles.”
However, he cautions that such affirmative action has potential drawbacks and may be perceived as tokenism.
“If you’re going to do it, don’t just do it in small doses.”
Another tip – consider dropping job interviews.
“I’ve seen … the panel say, ‘this person seems a little bit wooden, a little bit stressed’. Of course they’re stressed! It’s a job interview. We tell ourselves we’re learning something about this person… but what we’re learning is maybe not what we need to know.”
Panel discussion: Critical questions for modern boards
- What will corporations value in 2030
- The purpose of modern boards – within and beyond the organisation
- The grounds for decision-making and strategy – ethical and cultural precepts
- Assessing accountability and impact
- Rooting governance and decision-making in how it impacts those that the decisions are made for
John Stanhope AM, Chancellor, Deakin University, Chairman, Port of Melbourne
Helen Rowell FGIA, Non-executive Director, Qinsure, Australian Retirement Trust
Chair: Simon Berglund, Senior Vice President & General Manager, APAC, Diligent
The role of the board has changed rapidly in recent years, said John Stanhope, Chancellor of Deakin University and Chairman of Port of Melbourne.
New requirements include adapting to hybrid working, addressing positive duties towards preventing sexual harassment, improving occupational health and safety, tackling modern slavery, and facing the latest challenge of artificial intelligence.
“There are generational changes occurring – an undergraduate’s start is probably a bit different than I was when I started work.”
“How do you build a culture where people feel they belong when they are there only three days a week, or some are not there at all?”
“All these things impact on the culture of the organisation and how it should work, and how boards should think.”
Traditional vision and mission statements are becoming “a bit of a yawn” for the younger generation, Stanhope said.
Instead, a sense of purpose is more important.
“Why am I coming to this organisation? What is its purpose, and do I feel like that’s a good purpose?”
Stanhope, who chairs six organisations ranging from a university to private sector companies and not-for-profits, calls for boards to focus deeper on the social and governance aspects of ESG.
“From a board perspective, our social license and how we govern does need more attention. Listening at board level to stakeholders is very important.”
He said boards need to ask not only if they are doing things right, but also whether they are doing the right thing.
Helen Rowell, a non-executive director at Qinsure and the Australian Retirement Trust, notes a significant shift in community expectations of the role of organisations.
“They should – and are expected to – operate in a way that is going to deliver good outcomes for all of their stakeholders,” she said.
Rowell said key challenges facing organisations include the energy transition and economy-wide transformation, rapid technological evolution, particularly in digital and AI, changing organisational processes and heightened cybersecurity risks. All this is occurring amid an aging population and growing concerns about socioeconomic inequality.
“Boards and senior executives need to manage their organisations with a long-term view on strategy and… deliver outcomes that are going to appropriately balance the needs and expectations of customers, employees, shareholders and other stakeholders, including regulators.”
“And it’s not just enough to do that internally. You have to have a clear and compelling narrative about what the organisation is or is not doing and why. That means purpose and values need to be clear. They need to resonate with your customers, with your employees, and with other stakeholders.”
Rowell said organisations must recognise they cannot take action to address every societal concern and so need to prioritise those that are most relevant to the organisation.
“It is really important to think about whether you’ve got the right skills around the board table to help navigate through these challenges.”
Responding to a question from the floor, Stanhope said an important indicator of organisational culture is whether people feel they can speak up and, more importantly, whether they feel they are listened to.
“The no surprises culture is very important. Unfortunately, whistleblower policies are an admission, in my mind, that we haven’t created culture where people think they can speak out and they will be listened to.”
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Fireside chat: Sustainability
- Principles-based regulation
- Examining global and national frameworks and standards for reporting and disclosure
- The corporate compact
- The agency of leadership
- Can capitalism align with the power of purpose?
David Simmonds, Chief Strategy, Sustainability and Governance Officer, CLP Holdings
Danielle Welsh-Rose, Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer – Investments, Abrdn
Judy Slatyer, President, World Wild Life Fund Australia
Chair: Tim Nelson FGIA, Executive General Manager – Energy Markets, Iberdrola
The politicisation of ESG coming out of the US is creating pushback against some of the more progressive corporate agendas, said David Simmonds, Chief Strategy, Sustainability and Governance Officer at CLP Holdings, a Hong Kong-based listed business with energy investments across the world.
At the same time, a pronounced economic slowdown is also creating challenges for businesses seeking sustainability.
“In 2021, something like 50 per cent of climate resolutions put to shareholder meetings were voted in favour of by big investors like Vanguard, State Street and Blackrock,” he said.
“Fast forward to this year, Vanguard have supported not a single one.”
Similarly, just a few years ago, activist investors were seeing success getting elected to boards on a climate change and sustainability platforms, he said. “Today, concerns are growing about a different type of activist taking companies to task on diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. Many companies are starting to wind back their policies for fear of being criticised.”
He said the right response to this is to hold the line on sustainability and look past short-term shocks, fads and trends, and instead focus on long term trends and issues.
“That is a critical enabler of riding through these sorts of periods where there is a short-term pushback.”
Abrdn’s Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer Investments Danielle Welsh-Rose said the global fund manager is in a unique position to assess the change happening around the world.
“We have clients, stakeholders, and regulatory frameworks that are at times in opposition to each other, and we’re trying to navigate that from a compliance perspective, from governance, from reputation, from knowing what kind of products and services to supply to our clients.”
She told the story of a US pension plan being sued by lawmakers from a Republican state for doing too much on ESG and climate change, while at the same time being sued by lawmakers from a Democratic state for doing too little on the same issues.
“How does an organisation deal with those directly conflicting things? On the surface it looks like there’s a withdrawal from these commitments, [but] what’s happening … underneath that public hushing [is] still a lot of activity.”
Simmonds said as a result it is incumbent on governance professionals to keep boards and organisations honest and focused on the things that really matter and look through the semantics and the noise.
Judy Slatyer said the best corporates are deeply engaged in environmental issues and think broadly about how the environment affects their businesses.
She notes supermarket giant Coles investing in seaweed feed to reduce emissions from cattle and petfood maker Mars investing in synthetic proteins.
“The power of thinking broadly, thinking differently, casting curious, crazy questions … helps you think about what the future is, and if the future is a low-carbon, nature positive and AI-enabled world, what do we as a board [need to do] and how does our strategy make sure we succeed and thrive in that world?”
Slatyer said the process of horizon scanning and lateral thinking allows boards to be prepared for long term shifts. She said risk appetites need to shift as organisations enter new markets and new business models.
Simmonds points to the success of US car maker Tesla as an example of putting this in practice. Tesla has a greater market capitalisation than the combined market value of all other major international vehicle manufacturers and is selling more vehicles than any other company.
This is a result of it identifying the fundamental problem of climate change early and developing a product from the ground up to address it, applying talent and technology in a way that allows it to manufacture at a fraction of the cost of traditional automakers.
“So, very forward-looking, very focused on big issue trends, technology developments, and the people and skills required to succeed into the long run,” he said.
Panel discussion: Reimagining the purpose of technology and AI
- The competitive edge for design is human development
- How technology can enable the three factors of inclusive growth – education, work and wellbeing.
- What do we see emerging and how will this change the way we live as a society?
- Canvassing the transformational powers of technology and AI to enhance the value and societal impact of business
Michael Helmer FGIA, Company Secretary and Chief Risk Officer, NextDC
Tim Hogarth, Chief Technology Officer, ANZ Banking Group
Stela Solar, Director, National Artificial Intelligence Centre
Chair: Kieran Seed, Head of Content, Regulatory Compliance Global, LexisNexis
The future is AI-enabled – artificial intelligence is becoming a core part of what we do as a society and in business.
AI tools have the potential to both enhance and diminish our lives. By harnessing their capabilities, we can create new opportunities for growth, innovation, and fulfilment. However, we must also consider the risks. Effective regulation plays a crucial role in ensuring the responsible use of AI, safeguarding ethical principles, and protecting society’s wellbeing.
So, what approach to AI should governance professionals take?
NextDC Company Secretary and Chief Risk Officer Michael Helmer said AI is the second coming of software.
“It’s intuitively what we think software should always be able to do an ideal world. More data has been created in the last two years than in the whole human history. What is the potential of all that information that we’re gathering?”
“The breadth of what AI can do potentially as a tool to interpret that data is enormous, and the benefits for society potentially equally.”
ANZ’s Chief Technology Officer Tim Hogarth said AI is essentially a move from a rules-based to a probability-based approach in technology which is allowing us to solve human problems in novel ways.
“It’s probably bigger than the introduction of the internet, it’s probably bigger than the introduction of the PC, which fundamentally transformed society.”
National Artificial Intelligence Centre director Stela Solar said the world is moving to the point where we need AI in order to be human.
“What I mean by that is there’s such a complexity in the systems that are around us that is beyond what we can understand, and we’re needing AI tools to navigate that so we could make meaningful decisions.”
She said Australia is at the forefront of AI, led by industries like horticulture, farming, and medical technology. She said research shows Australia has 544 AI companies already, almost as many as economies twice its size.
“If we look at the very dynamism that generative AI has activated, which is individuals being empowered to use AI and bringing it into the workforce, we’re actually world leading. I like to call that world-leading AI curiosity.”
But she highlighted some statistics that may be alarming to governance professionals.
Two-thirds of those using generative AI in the workplace are not telling their employers that they are using it, she said, while more than 94 per cent of employees expect to be trained in AI by their current workplace.
The panel urged organisations to ask their AI suppliers about design and data governance choices to understand the way important data is being handled.
Copyright is front and centre of community concerns about AI amid concerns some global suppliers are not respecting copyright ownership, said Solar.
There are also important questions in the community about AI’s environmental impact and energy usage.
Hogarth cautions that data about AI’s energy consumption is obscured by the wider shift towards cloud computing, while AI systems are getting more and more efficient as they develop.
Helmer said some of the debate about energy use in data centres is misleading because it ignores the fact that as companies move data off-site into data centres, they are reducing their individual energy usage. He likens this to buses reducing cars on the road.
Solar said adding AI to existing processes is, on average, creating 30 per cent cost savings and efficiencies of resources required.
The ANZ board recently travelled to the US to understand how boards are changing their approach to governance because of AI, said Hogarth.
“I think it’s important for all boards to invest the time, because people in the grassroots are using this, competitors are using this, criminals who are trying to undermine the financial system are using. We don’t have time to wait and get things perfect. We need to move,” he said.
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CONCURRENT 1A – Measuring and improving board effectiveness
Chair: Nicholas Barnett, Executive Chair, Board Benchmarking
Why improve your board?
Better boards mean better organisations, said Nicholas Barnett, the executive chair of Board Benchmarking.
“And if you think about it, worse boards mean worse organisations. So, we’ve got a pretty high duty to do the right thing and to continually improve and continually get better.
“There’s a lot of boards out there that tick a lot of boxes, but are they moving the dial?
“If you’re on a board and you think, yes, we’re doing well, but your organisation is not really delivering … well sorry your board is not effective or performing as well as it should be.”
In fact, Barnett said his research shows one in four boards is dysfunctional.
“That’s a challenge – but that’s a fact.”
Board Benchmarking assesses boards across 20 areas, split up into a ‘what, who, how, do’ framework.
Barnett highlights board role clarity – the ‘what’ – as among the most important.
“At least 20 per cent of directors step way too much into management, and that’s an issue that’s all about role clarity. Too many directors will step outside their lane.”
Board composition and renewal – the ‘who’ – is another key area, while ‘how’ the board operates and what tasks it undertakes (‘do’) completes the picture.
In an interactive session, he calls on delegates to consider how they think through the important issues of board composition, board diversity, and board renewal, with three key questions. What does good look like? What does bad look like? And what is the fix?
One group of delegates shares a wide range of experiences including groupthink – which stops momentum and stifles healthy discussion – lack of experience and clarity and being too operational. Delegates nominate succession planning, clarity of strategic vision, performance management, and independent reviews as potential solutions.
Another group suggests boards need to focus on the fundamentals of having robust discussions, which is intrinsically linked to diversity.
This poses a challenge for organisations such as sports clubs and local governments, where board members are elected rather than appointed.
The second challenge to delegates is around purpose.
Barnet said the new global governance standard ISO 37000 puts purpose, not profit, at the centre of governance and places a bigger focus on ethics, stakeholders, and sustainability.
But one group of delegates suggests that boards are often distracted from this core focus because they are caught up in firefighting and operational issues that should be the CEO’s responsibility. This is partly due to growing personal liability concerns, which drive directors to delve deeper into operational details. They note that a key challenge – and potential solution – is knowing which questions to ask to effectively probe the details and truly understand what’s happening in the organisation.
Another group said purpose and strategy must be clearly defined so they can be measured, and people held accountable.
Barnett agrees, saying he often asks boards what they should be prioritising over the next 12 months and gets multiple different answers from different directors.
“That’s a problem when the board aren’t aligned and aren’t as one.”
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CONCURRENT 1B – The dimensions for an unforeseen crisis response
Chair: Robert Cockerell, National Lead Partner, PKF
Kaitlynn Brady, Partner, PKF
Geoff Peck, Partner, PKF
Tony Corry, Director, Technology Assurance and Advisory, PKF
Nick Duggal, Partner, Moray and Agnew
Unforeseen crises can hit organisations without warning.
Robert Cockerell, the National Lead Partner at PKF, introduces hypothetical scenarios that experts at PKF deal with very regularly, but most organisations face only occasionally.
The goal? To workshop how an organisation might face up to these challenges, using PKF’s experts acting as corporate council, chief information officer, head of audit and head of people and culture.
Scenario 1: A reporter is asking about allegations of sexual harassment and bullying at your organisation.
The discussion highlights the importance of acting quickly and decisively as the initial response to a crisis can significantly impact the organisation’s reputation.
Delegates also discuss the importance of gathering information and assessing the situation, consulting with key internal stakeholders like legal and HR.
The critical advice? Be transparent and take allegations seriously – the community wants to see organisations take these kinds of issues seriously and take appropriate action.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s worth considering whether any allegations are indicative of bigger cultural problems within the business.
Scenario 2: A phishing exercise results in a payment being made to the wrong bank account.
Again, the advice is moving quickly. Financial fraud requires rapid action advising banks, insurers, and regulators to maximise the chances of recovering money.
“What you do at the start is so important as to how this thing will be managed throughout the whole process,” said Cockerall.
But it’s also worth considering whether the threats you face are internal.
“The people who know your internal controls are the people you work with. The people who know how to work around your internal controls are the people you work with.”
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Capabilities and skills of the modern professional
- What are the capabilities that are critical to an agile and adaptive workplace?
- How do personal integrity, ethics, adaptive and critical thinking manifest
- How governance anchors culture, skills and purpose
Marcus Bowles, Chair, Institute for Working Futures Pty Ltd
Beth Hall FCPHR, Director, Culture Edge
Chair: Kenneth Weldin FGIA, Board Director, Governance Institute of Australia, Partner, PKF
One in five Australian workers are not proficient in their roles, said Culture Edge’s Beth Hall.
“We can’t ignore that statistic. It impacts 57 per cent of our productivity. Why is it that our workers are not proficient?”
The answer is that the world is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
“Change is happening to our employees… change is happening to their roles and change is happening to the organisational direction in the business,” she said.
As artificial intelligence starts to supplement day to day work, this change will only accelerate. Hall said experts expect AI agents to be part of work teams within 18 months.
“I call Copilot ‘Colin’ already. I have conversations with Colin on a daily basis to determine how to solve a problem,” she said.
As AI takes on more tasks, human employees are going to need to think differently about what we consider skills, knowledge and behaviours, she said.
“Colin will do the heavy lifting for us, but we need to apply some critical thinking, because he sometimes doesn’t really get it right.”
Chair of the Institute for Working Futures, Marcus Bowles, said much of these apparently new issues that workplaces are discussing today are issues that have been evident for a long time.
“Soft skills as a component of roles are increasing exponentially. It’s been going on, and we’ve been tracking it, for 20 years,” he said.
“We can predict what the jobs of the future will look like, even where they don’t have titles, [and] we can tell you that the 70 per cent of the job profile will be made up of the human capabilities we’re already tracking.”
These capabilities are the transferable, durable, and cross-disciplinary human skills like adaptability, collaboration, and empathy.
“More importantly, we know that you can’t build an organisational future based on skills that have shelf life of three years – the shelf life of particularly the digital and AI skills that we’re rolling out [at] universities.”
“Human capabilities are much more durable. They last longer.”
The implication for governance professionals?
“We need to build professions that are purposeful. We don’t just want people who can do things – they need to understand why and how we want them done,” said Bowles.
So, can these skills be taught? Yes, said Hall.
“IQ is pretty much set from teenage years, but EQ [is] 100% a skill.”
But it is also important that organisations are clear in their hiring practices that these skills are valued.
“Often hiring managers are technical experts… they tend to lean towards technical questions during an interview, as opposed to some of those human capabilities.
“So how do you switch that perspective.”
Bowles notes that not everyone needs all the skills equally – if people are aware of weakness in a particular skill, they can start to address it.
Workforce and productivity
- How we work – are we as productive as we need to be with the contemporary work settings
- Factors for employee disengagement
- How do we re-engage
Chair: Pauline Vamos FGIA, President and Chair, Governance Institute of Australia
Peter Varghese AO, Chancellor, University of Queensland
David Robertson, Chief Economist, Head of Economic and Markets Research, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank
Australia leads the world in many important areas, including high standards of living, wealth per capita, most liveable cities and regions, geopolitical stability, and strong labour markets.
But it lags in two important areas: carbon emissions per capita and, perhaps most importantly, productivity growth, said David Robertson, Chief Economist at the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.
“The 1.2 per cent productivity growth that Australia experienced in the last decade was the slowest pace of productivity growth since World War Two.
“Economist Paul Krugman made the comment that productivity isn’t everything, but in the medium term and the long term, it’s almost everything.”
So, what is productivity?
Many see it as an impost on workers imposed by business, but, far from it, it is actually about working smarter not harder, he said.
“It’s about investing in your workforce better, equipping your workforce with technology, investing in training and skills. Get that right, and you’re able to deliver more affordable products and services, and consumers are rewarded because things are cheaper and more affordable, and moreover, your workforce is rewarded because you’re able to lift wages without adding to inflation.”
So, why is Australia lagging in productivity growth?
Partly it is a lack of structural reforms in education, taxation, and industrial relations, partly it is an insufficient focus on innovation, he said. There is also a need for a more pro-business mindset across all levels of government.
Peter Varghese, a former diplomat and public servant and current Chancellor at the University of Queensland, said these are among the most important problems for the nation to solve.
“I don’t think there is any simple formula for fixing productivity, but fix it we must, because it will be the single largest determinant of our future prosperity as a nation and our standard of living.”
He said successive governments have struggled with a reform agenda that puts productivity at its heart.
“We are living in a populist age, and the defining feature of populism is that bad policy becomes good politics.”
“But unless political leaders can find a way to again align good policy and good politics, we won’t be able to dig our way out of this productivity rut.”
“It’s not that we don’t know what to do – there’s decades of fine reports from the Productivity Commission which sets out exactly what we should be doing.”
Varghese said productivity is not solely a problem for government – many enterprise agreements have lost productivity as a focus and the rising focus on work-life balance is also emerging as a profound cultural shift.
“We need much more reliable data on the impact on productivity on, for example, work from home. Assertions of costs and benefits need to be backed up.”
“Nor can we ignore how work from home will affect the cohesion and sense of belonging in the workplace, or what it means for induction programs or learning by observing, or the insights generated by accidental interactions, or importantly, the career prospects of those who may be less visible to managers, especially women who are more likely to work from home.”
“These all have productivity implications.”
Varghese is deeply critical of increasing state intervention in the economy and rising protectionism.
“These are potentially disastrous policies for countries like Australia, which have always done best when the economy is most open.”
Varghese said there is a direct connection between how open an economy is – which essentially ensures resources go to where they are most needed – and a good productivity outcome.
He said today’s politics shows striking parallels with the protectionism of the inter-war period when “we saw beggar-thy-neighbour policies and it all ended in tears”.
Responding to a question from the audience, Varghese said Australia’s ageing population may mean people staying in the workplace longer.
“Technology may make it a bit easier for [an older] workforce to actually be very productive.”
Fireside chat: The difficult conversations (Live cross from London)
- Broadcaster Louis Theroux discusses the most challenging ideas and ways of living that he has come across in his years of travel. What is the value in conversations with extremes?
Louis Theroux, Writer, filmmaker and broadcaster (UK)
Chair: Anjali Rao, Award-winning Broadcast Journalist
What is the value of conversations with the extremes?
Louis Theroux’s genre-defining documentaries explore the most controversial and complex aspects of the human condition.
With award-winning series like Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, When Louis Met…, and a series of specials including The Most Hated Family in America, Theroux has offered rounded portraits of people in complex social issues and human dilemmas.
“One of the guiding principles of my work is that we’re all strange underneath, and that the weirdest thing about weird people is how normal they are,” he said.
“I was an anxious child… and some of my earlier memories are thinking that everyone had the rule book to life and that I had somehow been left out.”
“Will I ever be able to read? Will I ever be able to drive, to pay my taxes? Worrying seems to have been more or less a family tradition.”
Theroux said that introspection triggered a deep curiosity about people.
“I remember seeing … people on the street being totally caught up in how different they were. I got a reputation for saying but why? But why does he do that? But why is that man not wearing any clothes walking down the street?”
“And it alleviated some part of my anxiety.”
“I’m most interested in forms of weirdness, deviance, sadism, predatory behaviour. “
Theroux recalls spending two weeks in a maximum-security mental hospital for paedophiles – “not as a client, as a documentary maker” – and meeting people who have committed hideous crimes.
“Jimmy Savile is the example of someone who did horrendous things, but who did them in a way that was tolerated or … in small ways, enabled.”
The lesson? Be on guard and identify the ways in which each of us might be failing to sound the alarm and call out behaviours.
“How do we identify and hold to account bad actors?”
One value Theroux holds dear is being non-judgmental, but aren’t humans hard-wired to have bias?
“I remember one of my tutors saying ‘Louis is an outstanding student but there’s an odd lack of moral content in his essay.”
“I definitely think my wife thinks that I am insufficiently outraged.”
“For me, I think I’ve always tried to question those things that you take for granted and to absolutely examine the cultural presumptions that underlay the judgments that you make.”
Still, many would argue that paedophiles, mass murderers, and white supremacists have forfeited their rights to a platform and that by giving them one, Theroux is ‘stabbing at the heart of society’s norms’.
“If I could accomplish one thing today, I would love that to be it. That’s a wonderful thing to aspire to, right?”
“The paedophiles I speak to don’t have huge social media profiles… they are absolutely considered – and for understandable reasons – to be the worst of the worst and they reside in a kind of permanent limbo.”
“And so, I can go in there and attempt, in a judicious way, to unpeel the layers and understand something about society.”
“Because they are so reviled, they say something not just about their own psychology, but about society’s treatment of them.”
“Dostoevsky [said] society should be judged by not how it treats its best, but by how it treats its worst.”
“By going to the margins, you don’t just get a measure of humans and the human condition, you get a barometer of the health of wider society.”
So are there hopeless cases amongst humans, or does every individual have redeeming features?
“Dreadful people can create wonderful things,” said Theroux.
“If you made perfect morality a precondition of being exhibited in a museum or put on stage, the museums would be empty.”
Theroux discusses white-collar criminals like Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried and Australia’s Melissa Caddick, saying there is an element of psychopathy or disconnection from others involved in these types of crimes.
“It’s hard for me to believe that you could be that disconnected from your fellow human, that you would over 10, 20, 30 years defraud people to enrich yourself whilst staring them in the eye.
“Nevertheless, we are all, in a sense, at risk of being looters, right?
“We are all at risk of participating in behaviour that’s anti-social.
“That goes back to the point about the need for oversight, the need for some sort of sense of civic norms.”
ENDS DAY ONE