About Festival of Dangerous Ideas

The 13th edition of Festival of Dangerous Ideas 2026 was held across Sydney, 20-30 August. For the first time the Festival’s footprint expanded to 10 days across 13 iconic venues with 115 sessions spanning talks, world-premiere art, a taboo film program, behind-the-scenes excursions, a banned book club, workshops, a Schools Day and a massive punk music Meltdown in a warehouse. The speaker and artistic line up included Tim Minchin, Maria Ressa, John Cameron Mitchell, Maria Alyokhina, Cory Doctorow, Richard Flanagan and more.

Our biggest Festival yet, the main Festival weekend held 22–23 August at Carriageworks, and events extending across major cultural institutions city wide including Dendy, Heaps Normal Health Club, ABC, Australian Museum, Chau Chak Wing Museum, Australian Botanic Garden, Justice and Police Museum, MCA Australia, State Library of NSW and The Mint.

In 2024, Festival of Dangerous Ideas, presented by The Ethics Centre, was held live and in person at Carriageworks in August 2024. The biggest Festival since 2016 brought together 87 of the world’s leading speakers (Masha Gessen, David Runciman, Roxane Gay, David Baddiel, Megan Phelps-Roper) with artists and audiences, to meet and exchange ideas. The lineup also offered a range of art and experiences including TAPE by Numen / For Use and performances from Re:group performance collective, and Vicki Van Hout with Marian Abboud. The Festival’s footprint was expanded with sessions at partner venues the State Library of NSW and the University of NSW from 21-27 August 2024.

Offering a haven for exploration and a harbour for the curious, the 2024 theme ‘Sanctuary’ invited audiences to engage with the ideas behind the headlines of the 24-hour news cycle. It provided a space to spend time with international experts and agenda-setting change makers, to better understand what is driving change in the world and society for better or worse.

After a two-year event hiatus, Festival of Dangerous Ideas returned live to Carriageworks Sydney on 17-18 September 2022.

The Festival’s characteristically forward-reaching line-up showcased 72 artists and thought-leaders, and 8 international guests including, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, Senator Jacqui Lambie, crisis historian Adam Tooze, tech writer Kevin Roose, historian Steven Pinker, performer and poet Alok Vaid-Menon, Lucy Peach, Jess Hill, Jane Caro, Saxon Mullions, Nick Bryant, A Rational Fear and The Minefield Live with live experiences including Scott Campbell’s Whole Glory, Counterpilot’s Truthmachine, a site-specific performance by Legs On The Wall, an original art commission by Brook Andrew, and pop-up collaborations with Gleebooks, Kitchen by Mike and more.

The 2022 theme ‘All Consuming’ asked us all to consider what we consume, what we are consumed by, and what should or could come to consume us. In an avalanching era of information, opportunity, isolation, and distraction, what are the truly dangerous ideas and where exactly should we focus our time and our investment?

In February, the Festival released a bold new podcast, The In-Between, an audio time capsule recording a moment in-between two eras. Eight hour-long conversations between the world’s biggest thinkers that capture the dangerous ideas of this moment. With guest speakers including Stephen Fry, Roxane Gay, Waleed Aly, Peter Singer, Sam Mostyn, Slavoj Žižek, Naomi Klein and more, The In-between tackles the big issues of our world and future, from climate change and global politics to artificial intelligence, truth and social media.

The 10th Festival and a milestone program with the theme ‘Dangerous Realities’. Sadly the Festival was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. See the cancelled 2020 Program here.

In light of this, the Festival launched digitally with a series of online video conversations taking inspiration from the original 2020 theme and streamed via the festival website. The series interrogated the reality of the current pandemic and its wider implications for our world and society.

The Festival took on a new format and new location. Held on Sydney’s Cockatoo Island, the program was a collision of ideas, art installations, live theatre and panel conversations. The Festival explored the blurring of truth and trust, internet sub-cultures, fascism, privacy, LSD and the end of the world as we know it. Headline thinkers captured minds and social feeds with Stephen Fry, conservative historian Niall Ferguson, author Pankaj Mishra, Ex-Westboro Baptist Church member Megan Phelps-Roper, author Ayelet Waldman, iconoclast Germaine Greer, activist Mick Dodson, rock star of AI Toby Walsh, techno-sociologist Zeynup Tufekci, criminologist Xanthe Mallett, author Chuck Klosterman, journalist Rukmini Callimachi and artists Betty Grumble and Riley Harmon.

The Festival celebrated its final year at the Sydney Opera House with psychologist Jesse Bering, conservative commentator Andrew Bolt, artist Molly Crabapple, Alicia Garza (Black Lives Matter), journalist Stan Grant, Black Flag’s Henry Rollins, author Lionel Shriver, postcolonial scholar Priyamvada Gopal, economist Philippe Legrain and more. The Festival’s closing event was ‘Mercy’, a large scale deconstructed performance of the Merchant of Venice presented with Bell Shakespeare, and speakers Michael Kirby and Germaine Greer.

The Festival featured solo sessions and panels with Tariq Ali, Naomi Klein, Peter Greste, Murong Xuecun, Suki Kim, Johann Hari, Malarndirri McCarthy, Paul Krugman, Laurie Penny, Jon Ronson, Eric Schlosser and Gideon Raff, exploring themes including the economy, artificial intelligence, climate change, cybersexism, addiction and sugar. A special edition of ‘The Moth live’ was the closing event for the Festival.

The Festival brought our view of ourselves and our place in the world into question, exploring the fringes of loneliness, masculinity, narcissism, climate extinction, modern slavery, surrogacy, persecution and classism. Speakers included Pussy Riot, Salman Rushdie, Masha Gessen, Steven Pinker, Elizabeth Kolbert, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, John Pilger, Lydia Cacho, Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Alissa Nutting, Ragip Zarakolu, Tim Flannery and Mark Latham.

Festival speakers included Arlie Hochschild, David Simon, Hanna Rosin, Evgeny Morozov, Vandana Shiva, Dan Savage, John Safran, Christos Tsiolkas, Julian Burnside and Peter Hitchens, and explored topics including outsourcing, conspiracy, masculinity, inequality and drugs.

Topics included “All Women Hate Each Other”, “Israel is an Apartheid State”, “The Devil is Real”, “Genital Cutting is Normal”, “We are all Sexual Perverts” and “A Foetus is not a Person”. The speakers included Sam Harris, Brian Morris, Tara Moss, Illan Pappe, Jason Silva, Shiv Malik, Ed Howker, Eliza Griswold, Cormac Cullinan, Ronnie Chan, Jesse Bering and Tim Harford.

The Festival delivered a host of cutting-edge thinkers including Julian Assange, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kate Adie, Alexander McCall Smith, Jon Ronson, Slavoj Žižek, Mona Eltahawy and Philip Nitschke. The Festival delved into the shadows with talks including “WikiLeaks has not gone far enough”, “Psychopaths Make the World Go Around”, “Ecstasy is No More Dangerous Than Horse-riding” and “All Women are Sluts”.

Geoffrey Robertson and Alan Dershowitz opened the Festival with the debate, “The Sins of the Fathers: Should the Pope be held to account?”. Other speakers included Christian Lander, author of the “Stuff White People Like”, with a tongue-in-cheek etiquette guide to Caucasian culture, and New York columnist and creator of the free range kids movement, Lenore Skenazy, on how she was labelled “America’s Worst Mom”.

The inaugural Festival was held at the Sydney Opera House and forged a dangerous beginning with an opening address by Christopher Hitchens on the topic “Religion Poisons Everything”.