“We do not have to live in a society defined by such extreme inequalities of wealth and power. We do not have to spend the rest of our lives dealing with feelings of hopelessness and despair. We do not have to live in a world that is so unfree. We have only to peer through the cracks already emerging within capitalism to catch a glimpse of the real freedom that awaits on the other side.” Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism, 2025

Grace Blakeley is one of the fiercest anti-capitalist advocates of her generation. She’s an English economist, political commentator, journalist and former Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research who isn’t afraid to take on the world’s most powerful figures and corporations. She’s also an author and staff writer for Tribune magazine and has written extensively on economic justice, inequality and the myths that hold up neoliberalism.

Join Grace Blakeley and the Australia Institute’s co-CEO Richard Denniss for a conversation about the need for a transformative movement to address inequalities within capitalism. They’ll delve into how politicians, technocrats, and financiers are free to run the world without any democratic accountability and question why people appear to have accepted extreme inequality as an inevitable fact of life. It’s not. And Grace Blakeley will explain why.

SPEAKERS:

Grace Blakeley — Political Economic Commentator and Author

Grace Blakeley is a political economic commentator and the author of several books, including her most recent Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom.

Dr Richard Denniss — co-Chief Executive Officer at The Australia Institute

Dr Richard Denniss is a prominent Australian economist, Executive Director of The Australia Institute, author and public policy commentator, and has spent the last twenty years moving between policy-focused roles in academia, federal politics and think-tanks. He was also a Lecturer in Economics at the university of Newcastle and former Associate Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU. He is a regular contributor to The Monthly and the author of several books, including: Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us, Econobabble, Curing Affluenza and Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next?