LEX MARINOS

Participated in Ideas at the Powerhouse sessions:

Late Night Ideas - Ideas that work, ideas that don't.
- 9pm, Saturday, August 18
ABN AMRO Business Ideas Forum
- 10am, Friday, August 17
The Ideas Debate
- 7.30pm, Friday, August 17

Lex Marinos has worked in all areas of the entertainment industry including as an actor, director, writer and radio commentator. He has also directed several documentaries and television programs. Marinos is also an events organiser and most recently, he was Executive Producer, Yeperenye Federation Festival in Alice Springs as part of the Centenary of Federation celebrations.

The former Deputy Chair of the Australia Council and former Chair of the Community Cultural Development Fund of the Australia Council, he has previously served as Director of the New South Wale's multicultural arts festival, Carnivale. In 2000, he was segment director for the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games.

A member of many advisory committees including Board Member of the SOCOG's Multicultural Advisory Committee, Marinos is an advocate and spokesperson for an Australian republic, multiculturalism and the arts.

Born in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales into a family of Greek cafe owners, he later attended University of NSW, receiving a BA with Honours in Drama.

Lex Marinos is recipient of an OAM for services to the performing arts.

Philip Nitschke

Participated in Ideas at the Powerhouse session:

The pros and cons of death
- 1pm, Saturday, August 18
Hear audio highlights from the session
The Ideas Debate
- 7.30pm, Friday, August 17

Philip Nitschke is having a wild and varied life. He was born in Ardrossan, SA and educated at Adelaide and Flinders Universities, gaining a PhD in laser physics in 1974. As a physics honours student he created one of Australia's first holograms.

Philip was employed by the Gurindji people of the Northern Territory as a 'white adviser' to Vincent Lingiari for two years before Gough Whitlam handed back to them 1500 sq miles of Wave Hill station. He worked in Central Australia for the NT Parks and Wildlife Commission as a ranger for 5 years before returning to Sydney University to study medicine.

Philip graduated in 1989 and returned to the NT, working as an intern at Royal Darwin Hospital. Spent three years as resident medical officer and hospital medical photographer.

A whistleblowing incident involving the arrival of nuclear powered submarine USS Houston into Darwin harbour led to his dismissal from the NT Department of Health. A subsequent inquiry by the Federal Government Senate Privileges Committee led to exoneration and a subsequent offer of re-employment.

Philip instead went on to establish an after-hours medical practice specialising in the problems of intravenous drug using patients. A series of incidents designed to put pressure on the NT government led to the Territory's first methadone program for IV drug users.

Since 1995 Philip has been working full time on the voluntary euthanasia issue. He assisted with the passage of Marshall Perron's 'Rights of the Terminally Ill' (ROTI) Act. Four of his patients made use of the Territory's ROTI Act prior to it being overturned by the Andrew's Bill.

Following this, Philip's time is now divided between campaigning for the euthanasia issue, carrying out research into new methods of controlling death and dying and working with an increasing number of terminally ill patients who wish to have the right to end their life.

In the 1998 Federal election, Philip stood as an independent candidate against MHR Kevin Andrews reducing the margin of his safe Liberal seat from 11% to 4.8%

Philip has now established Euthanasia Advisory Clinics and Euthanasia Advisory Workshops in all Australian capitals. All clinics are free and the work is funded by donations to the Voluntary Euthanasia Research Foundation.

Recipient of:

• Rainier Humanitarian award, Washington, 1996.
• NT Darwin Territorian of the year, 1997
• Australian Humanitarian of the year, 1997.

.Jan Owen

Jan Owen has worked with children and young people in Australia for the past 20 years as a practitioner and advocate at the local, state and national levels. She is currently the National Director of the Create Foundation, the national consumer body of children and young people in Australia's care system.

Owen was the founding Convenor of the Coalition for Australia's Children, an alliance of over 52 national and peak children's interest organisations in Australia. In this capacity she convened the first National Children's Summit in Canberra in December 1998.

She is author of 'Every Childhood Lasts a Lifetime - personal stories from the frontline of family breakdown ' published by the Australian Association of Young People in Care (now Create Foundation) in 1996. She has been also been published in numerous journals writing about issues relating to children, young people and women.

In 1999 Owen was awarded a 12 month fellowship to the Peter F Drucker Foundation of the USA for leadership and innovation, the first non U.S. based fellow. Owen has recently chaired the International Forum for Child Welfare's Leadership and Management Institute hosted in Sydney for leaders of community service and not for profit organisations.

She is a member of the Commonwealth Ministerial Advisory Committee on Homelessness and the National Council for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect and received an Order of Australia (AM) in June 2000.

BRUCE PETTY

Participated in Ideas at the Powerhouse session:

'Satire and what's really going on'
- 2.30pm, Sunday, August 19

One of Australia's most celebrated cartoonists, Bruce Petty has been referred to as cartooning's elder statesman. He has worked for several Australian newspapers as well as produced many animated films. His film credits include Leisure and The Mad Century screened on SBS.

Speaking at Sydney Hotel, Petty described cartooning as a "mysterious profession ... we practice at looking behind what we've got in front of us, it's a good thing to learn. We present something that suggests 'have another look at this, there might be something else going on'. I think that's exactly what it does. And to query what you're told is a good thing to do, otherwise we would be forever manipulated and cheated by the crooks in the world, by charlatans and by bullies and so on."

As an astute witness and recorder of the politics, turmoil and change of the 20th century, Petty must resolve complex questions for his cartoons. "Subjects are getting complex, like gender. It's always been complex, but gender, how men and women should modify their behaviour, that sort of thing. Tricky subjects. Ethics is tricky, euthanasia: how do you draw euthanasia without offending huge sections of the community? The sheep Dolly was manufactured by some arrangement of a bit of tissue. Should we keep doing it to other Dollies, or humans? And then I remember reading about the worm, the little worm that was constructed from nothing. These sort of issues are the new ones, and cartoonists, the next lot, are going to have to work out what to say about these things."

An avowed radical, Petty has supported many community and political organisations by allowing them to use his cartoons free from royalties. He has produced several books and his most recent, The Absurd Machine: a Cartoon History of the World is his satirical look at class struggle and the world's progress since the 1960s, reported to feature a 'graphically momentous' climax. His production of machines extends to complex sculptural works which occupy sites in Sydney and Brisbane.

Bruce Petty has received many awards, accolades and honours for his work including an Academy Award for Leisure in 1977.

BARBARA PISCITELLI

Participated in Ideas at the Powerhouse session:

'Humanity thinking out loud'
- 2pm, Saturday, August 18
Hear audio highlights from the session

Children's rights activist and early childhood development specialist, Dr Barbara Piscitelli is Curator of the Children's Art Archive. She has been collecting, exhibiting and writing about children's drawings and paintings for the past decade. She has amassed a significant collection of children's art from Australia, Vietnam and China. Her other interest is children's learning in out-of-school settings, in particular, museums and art galleries.

QUT Children's Art Archive is the only university based collection of its kind in Australia. Over the past ten years, the collection has grown to a significant size with important work gathered from children in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. The collection includes more than 4,000 examples of young children's drawings and paintings from a range of social and cultural groups within Australia and throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

Piscitelli has organised two exchange programs have been undertaken between Australian and Asian children as part of cultural diplomacy projects with Vietnam and China. The exchanges have resulted in major exhibitions which have been seen in museums, art galleries, festivals and community halls in five countries. There has been a great deal of community support for the exhibitions with more than 100,000 people interacting with the children's art in real and virtual environments.

Recently, Piscitelli and David Hawke edited Children's Global Vision: A World of Art, a catalogue of children's art from 18 countries. Developed as a commemorative catalogue for the 1999 World Congress of the International Society for Education through Art, the catalogue presents 85 full colour images of children's views of the world at the end of the twentieth century. The catalogue contains an essay by the editors, information on art education practices in each country, and illustrations of five artworks from each country. The artwork represents children from four to eighteen years of age from Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Latvia, Lebanon, New Zealand, Romania, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda and the United States of America.

Michael Quall

Participated in Ideas at the Powerhouse session:

What to do with all that spare time
- 3.30pm, Thursday, August 16

Michael Quall is committed to the people of the Nation's Capital, devoting much of his time to ensuring the Canberra Community has a say in its own future and its present.

An experienced Community Development practitioner, Quall recently completed several years in the ACT Policing Community Liaison Team. This experience provided him with opportunities to interact with, learn from, and most importantly assist, many of Canberra's young people, ethnic communities, Indigenous peoples and the wider Community Sector. He has a reputation among his peers as a strong advocate for issues of community concern, and has gained the respect of workers in both the Government and non-Government sectors. Most recently Quall has undertaken a policy coordination and advisory role with the ACT Government in the Children's, Youth and Family Services Bureau.

Prior to working with ACT Policing, Quall spent a number of years working with the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation managing aspects of the Community Outreach program 'Australians for Reconciliation'.

In addition to his professional responsibilities, he commits much of his spare time as an adviser on a variety of community issues. He is a former Chairperson of the Youth Coalition of the ACT, and is the current Chairperson of the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Consultative Council. He is also a member of the ACT Indigenous Education Consultative Body, the ACT Steering Committee for the International Year of the Volunteer and was this year appointed to the newly formed ACT Children's Services Council.

Michael has represented the Canberra community both nationally and overseas, and last year was recognised as Young Canberran of the Year for 2000 and ACT NAIDOC Aboriginal Youth of the Year. He was also an ACT finalist in the Young Australian of the Year Awards for 2001 and is Chair of the School Board at the local Primary School.

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