SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Professor Hugh White AO FASSA is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. He spent much of his career in the Australian Government, including as Chief of Staff to Defence Minster Kim Beazley, International Relations Advisor to Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Department of Defence. He was the founding Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and then Head of ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. He has written four Quarterly Essays including Hard New World: Our Post-American Future [2025], and two books, The China Choice: Why America should share power [2012] and How to defend Australia [2019]. In the 1970s he studied philosophy at the universities of Melbourne and Oxford.