Our keynote speaker for Emancipation Day this year will be Professor Judith Sloan. Professor Sloan is a renowned public intellectual and economist in the liberal Enlightenment tradition that shapes our modern Western world and inevitably led to the abolition of slavery.

We hear about emancipationists like Newton and Wilberforce but others who are foundational to our economics and politics, like Adam Smith, John Locke and Edmund Burke, also opposed slavery. It is impossible to imagine that slavery of any kind could exist in a world based on their views.

Judith Sloan is one of Australia’s most respected economists and public intellectuals who has spent her career asking uncomfortable questions and speaking hard truths. A former Commissioner with both the Productivity Commission and the Australian Fair Pay Commission, she has held professorial roles in economics at Flinders University and the University of Melbourne, served on the ABC Board, and chaired the National Centre for Vocational Education Research.

Today, she is best known for her fearless columns in The Australian, where she dissects policy, politics, and public discourse with clarity and wit. On Emancipation Day, she brings her deep knowledge of labour markets, regulation, and human freedom to bear on the enduring challenge of liberation—economic, social, and personal.