Ideas Festival

The Ideas Festival was established in 2001 to present ideas, promote public debate, and to foster and celebrate innovation in Queensland, Australia. The biennial event is presented by the Queensland Government. It is an open public event and incorporates programming for children and schools, youth and the general public. Topics explored throughout the festival are broad, focusing on innovation and creativity across all industries. In 2011 event was delivered in partnership with the State Library of Queensland, and included ‘Flood of Ideas’, an exhibition of ideas on planning for and responding to floods.

Festival history

The Ideas Festival is a biennial festival, with events held in 2001, 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2011.

In 2001 and 2003, the Ideas Festival was presented in partnership with the Brisbane City Council at the Powerhouse. In 2006 the festival shifted to the South Bank Parklands, Brisbane supported by the Queensland Government.

In 2009 the program was delivered by Arts Queensland as part of the Q150 celebrations and the Year of Creativity, with Griffith University supporting as a Major Sponsor. The 2009 event presented over 100 speakers, 138 sessions and recorded attendances of over 22,000.

Sam Harris

Samuel Benjamin "Sam" Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, and neuroscientist. Harris is the co-founder and chief executive of Project Reason, a non-profit organization that promotes science and secularism, and host of the podcast: Waking Up with Sam Harris. As an author, he wrote the book The End of Faith, which was published in 2004 and appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list for 33 weeks. The book also won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005. In 2006, Harris published the book Letter to a Christian Nation as a response to criticism of The End of Faith. This work was followed by The Moral Landscape, published in 2010, in which Harris argues that science can help answer moral problems and can aid the facilitation of human well-being. He subsequently published a long-form essay Lying in 2011, the short book Free Will in 2012, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion in 2014 and Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue in 2015.

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, and journalist. Hitchens later spent much of his career in the United States and became a US citizen in 2007.

He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and Vanity Fair. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on a range of subjects, including politics, literature, and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure. Known for his contrarian stance on a number of issues, Hitchens criticized such public and generally popular figures as Mother Teresa; Bill Clinton; Henry Kissinger; Princess Diana; and Pope Benedict XVI. He was the elder brother of the conservative journalist and author Peter Hitchens.

Mitt Romney

Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American businessman and politician who served as the 70th Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. Following his service as Governor, Romney was the Republican Party's nominee for President of the United States in the 2012 election.

Raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, by his parents George and Lenore Romney, Mitt Romney spent two and a half years in France as a Mormon missionary starting in 1966. He married Ann Davies in 1969, and they have five sons. By 1971, Romney had participated in the political campaigns of both of his parents. In that year, he earned a Bachelor of Arts at Brigham Young and in 1975, a joint Juris Doctor and Master of Business Administration at Harvard. Romney then entered the management consulting industry and in 1977 secured a position at Bain & Company. Later serving as its chief executive officer, he helped lead the company out of financial crisis. In 1984, he cofounded and led the spin-off company Bain Capital, a highly profitable private equity investment firm that became one of the largest of its kind in the nation. Active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Romney served during his business career as the bishop of his ward (head of his local congregation) and then stake president in his home area near Boston. After stepping down from Bain Capital and his local leadership role in the church, he ran as the Republican candidate in the 1994 Massachusetts election for U.S. Senate. Upon losing to longtime incumbent Ted Kennedy, he resumed his position at Bain Capital. Years later, a successful stint as president and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics led to a relaunch of his political career.

John Kerry

John Forbes Kerry (born December 11, 1943) is an American politician who is the 68th and current United States Secretary of State. He has served in the United States Senate, and was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry was the candidate of the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election, losing to George W. Bush.

Kerry was born in Aurora, Colorado and attended boarding school in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. He graduated from Yale University class of 1966 with a political science major. Kerry enlisted in the Naval Reserve in 1966, and during 1968–1969 served an abbreviated four-month tour of duty in South Vietnam as officer-in-charge (OIC) of a Swift Boat. For that service, he was awarded combat medals that include the Silver Star Medal, Bronze Star Medal, and three Purple Heart Medals. Securing an early return to the United States, Kerry joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War organization in which he served as a nationally recognized spokesman and as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. He appeared in the Fulbright Hearings before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs where he deemed United States war policy in Vietnam to be the cause of war crimes.