Government & International Relations Seminar Series:

Albanese Government 1st Year Anniversary Assessment

Presenter: Nick Bisley (La Trobe) and Mark Kenny (ANU)

Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 650 and Zoom

Professor Mark Kenny (ANU) will overview the domestic policy challenges, achievements, and failings of the Albanese Government. He will be followed by Professor Nick Bisley (La Trobe) who will talk about the foreign policies of the Albanese Government. The format will be two 20-minute talks followed by 30 minutes of questions.

Nick Bisley (La Trobe)

Nick Bisley is the Dean and Head of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of International Relations. His research and teaching expertise is in Asia’s international relations, great power politics and Australian foreign and defence policy. Nick is currently the President of the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities and was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in 2020. He is a member of the advisory board of China Matters, a member of the Council for Security and Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific and served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Journal of International Affairs between 2013 and 2018, the country’s oldest scholarly journal in the field of International Relations. He has been a Senior Research Associate of the International Institute of Strategic Studies and a Visiting Fellow at the East-West Center in Washington DC. Nick is the author of many works on international relations, including The Belt and Road Initiative and the Future of Regional Order in the Indo-Pacific (Rowmand and Littlefield, 2020), Issues in 21st Century World Politics, 3rd Edition (Palgrave, 2017), Great Powers in the Changing International Order (Lynne Rienner, 2012), and Building Asia’s Security (IISS/Routledge, 2009, Adelphi No. 408). He regularly contributes to and is quoted in national and international media including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, CNN and Time Magazine.

Mark Kenny (ANU)

Professor Mark Kenny came to the Australian National University after a high-profile journalistic career culminating in 6 years as chief political correspondent and national affairs editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Canberra Times. He is a fixture on the ABC’s Insiders program, Sky News Agenda, and is a sought after commentator on radio programs across the country. Before Fairfax, Kenny was political editor at The Advertiser having moved across from the ABC. Based in Canberra for nearly two decades, he has reported from locations as diverse as Kandahar and Copenhagen, Bucharest, and Brunei. He has covered bilateral talks inside the White House, 10 Downing Street, Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, the German Chancellery (Bundeskanzleramt), the Japanese Prime Minister’s Residence (The Kantei), The Vatican, and many others. He has also covered crucial summits including annual APEC and G20 meetings, G8, ASEAN and East Asia Summit, NATO, and the infamous Copenhagen climate talks in 2009. A long-time member of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery committee, he is a director of the National Press Club. Kenny was made a Visiting Fellow at ANU in 2018 and took up a full-time academic post at the Australian Studies Institute in January, 2019. His research interests include national politics, comparative studies, democracy, and the rise of populism.

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