Ghassan Hage

Australia has spent years building new ways to recognize suffering and combat discrimination, from dedicated envoys to public reckonings.

But are these approaches deepening division rather than healing it? Join professors Ghassan Hage and Marcia Langton and journalist David Leser in conversation with Simon Longstaff, asking the question nobody wants to ask: Is empathy killing our nation? This is the 2026 session, Paranoid Nationalism.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Uh, my name's Simon Longstaff.

Um, she's a descendant of the Yim and Indjara peoples, director of the Indigenous Studies Unit at ANEMDA at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, and her research has been in areas to do with family and domestic violence, indigenous alcohol management plans, racism, indigenous culture, and art.

But she's also been one of Australia's leading public intellectuals, not just in relation to indigenous affairs, but in so many different ways.

She's joined by Ghassan Hage, who is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and both the Australian and the British Academies of the Social Sciences.

He has a prestigious visiting professorship from a number of global institutions, including at Harvard, the Collège de France in Paris, and he's currently a distinguished research fellow at Zhejiang University...