As Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alekhina of Pussy Riot prepare to take to Sydney Opera House’s concert hall stage for the final session of the festival, we’re wrapping up our live blog for the day – and year.

Thanks for taking part and we hope we’ve given you an ear into at least some of the debates being had. Check our the #fodi hashtag for the full conversation and look out on Guardian Australia’s Comment is Free and culture pages for further tomorrow.

Australian Ethical, a super fund that partners with the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, has responded to Guardian Australia’s head-to-head debate about suggestions Pussy Riot should boycott the festival over links to immigration detention.

You can read their response in full over on the original Comment is Free piece:

Australian Ethical Superannuation is Australia’s leading pro-human rights, low carbon and coal-free investment choice.

Our investment decisions are governed by our ethical charter and we do not invest in companies that actively limit the rights of humans, such as those involved in the mandatory detention of asylum seekers. Any claims otherwise would be untrue, and unlike the vast majority of super funds, we are happy to disclose every single one of investments.

We believe that all Australians should be allowed to know where their retirement savings are being invested and if their fund is not transparent or they are not happy with the answers, they should divest and reinvest their money elsewhere.

Superannuation is a $1.85tn industry and each of us has the power to shape and create the kind of world we want to see by voting with our money.

John Hewson spoke at Fodi on Saturday about super funds and climate change. You can read Adam Brereton’s post on the topic here.

Monica Tan’s report on Scarlett Alliance’s Fodi protest is now live.

Three Sydney sex workers have staged a protest at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas over the representation of their profession in a panel discussion on the global sex industry called Women For Sale. They handed out pamphlets to festival goers and posed with an A3 sign that read “I am a sex worker. I am not for sale”.

This year’s festival has been beset with controversy, including the cancellation of a talk on “honour” killings and calls for a boycott over links to the government’s asylum seeker policy.

Read the full report here.

Stephen Pinker’s session, A History of Violence, is about to start.

Guardian Australia got the chance to chat with the Canadian scientist on Friday and some of his pronouncements may surprise.

Adam Brereton writes: Steven Pinker is best known for his bold claim that over the course of human history, violence has decreased. His claim is a historical one, based on much-queried empirical methods, but underwriting his narrative of progress is an assessment of human nature that worries we’ll fall into anarchy without a strong state to guide us.

Is this, rather than the idea that we’re becoming less violent, his really dangerous idea? In light of fresh anxieties about the rise of the security state and mass surveillance, it seems much more dangerous to worry over mass anarchy than the overreach of state power.

“As I’m having this conversation with you, I’m really not worried about a drone sending a missile through my hotel window and blowing me to bits,” Pinker told me by phone in the lead up to his appearance at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. “So I think those concerns are genuinely overblown.”

Pinker thinks that “evolution gave us a number of motives that, left to their own devices, will result in levels of violence that we all deplore, and that it’s up to our institutions – which are products of our own ingenuity – to drive those rates of violence down.”

I put to Pinker the idea that because the state has a monopoly on violence, and wields it in increasingly asymmetrical ways (drone strikes, militarised police, mass surveillance), it’s hard for citizens to respond.

“I don’t think that there’s much merit to those points,” Pinker said. “Because together with a more effective democratic government we have far more freedom of thought and speech than our ancestors did.

He added: “I can say that Barack Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya and is like Hitler, and I don’t have to worry about being trundled off to jail or sent off to re-education camps. Whereas a few hundred years ago, before there were technologies of surveillance and mass education, there were a lot of things that could have led me to be burned at the stake.”

Human societies are poised between the violence of anarchy, and the violence of tyranny, Pinker believes. But ”one part of human nature, namely the capacity to think up violence-reduction methods, such as governments and the rule of law, can counteract other parts of human nature such as the drive for dominance and revenge.”

Whether or not we suppress the desire to be violent, says Pinker, “we suppress the behaviour itself.” That said, he considers the militarisation of domestic police forces to be “a preposterous development over the last 10 to 15 years, which I expect to be reversed … it has led to salient atrocities like the one we saw in Ferguson.”

But, he insists, “by and large there’s no comparison between that and say the gulag or Maoist China, or Nazi Germany, or Medieval Europe.”

He think that liberal-democratic systems, informed by Enlightenment ideals, have hit a kind of “sweet spot”. Democratic checks and balances combine with “a government that wields the least possible amount of violence, in order to prevent greater violence”.

They are the most likely to self-correct too, Pinker says, because “it’s actually principles of liberal democracy that allow us to expose the crimes of our ancestors”. He refers to the politics of Martin Luther King Jr as an example of this process.

“[King] was deliberately applying a principle that on paper the entire country had committed itself to [in the constitution], but shamefully had not applied.

In Pinker’s view, liberal democracy is “a never-ending project, and it requires, as the cliche goes, eternal vigilance, which is the price of liberty. People in power are bound to try to abuse that power, so it’s a matter of coming up with safeguards to prevent that from happening.”

Fresh controversy for Fodi itself as representatives from the sex workers advocacy group, Scarlett Alliance, interrupted this afternoon’s Sex for Sale panel to protest the fact they had not been invited to join Lydia Cacho, Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Alissa Nutting and Elizabeth Pisani (all earlier Fodi speakers) in this debate about prostitution.

The protesters are handing out leaflets in the Fodi foyer. More from Monica soon.

Monica writes: New Yorker’s TV critic Emily Nussbaum opens this two-way by saying neither she nor fellow panellist novelist Salman Rushdie (who also appeared at Fodi on Saturday evening) actually agree with its title: Television Has Replaced the Novel.

She half-jokes they were both tricked into thinking it was the opinion of the other. I suppose this is what happens when a festival sets click-bait headlines for their panels – inevitably they fail to summarise the far more nuanced views of their speakers.

Rushdie, who once worked for 18 months on a pilot for a sci-fi television series that ultimately failed to be picked up, is clearly a fan of television and together with Nussbaum covers a lot of recent trends: the anti-hero as a show formula quickly wearing itself out; the undue weighting placed on a TV show’s finale; and also the diversification of audiences and how this has expanded the medium.

Nussbaum is arguably the world’s finest writer about television today, and though the HBO-driven golden age for television has altered public perception somewhat, she’s accustomed to defending her specialist subject. “Historically television was regarded as shameful garbage, and the only way to praise it is to compare The Wire to Dickens, or The Sopranos to Scorsese,” she says, calling for TV to be celebrated as a medium in its own right.

Rushdie, while well versed in the modern era of high-quality scripted dramas (he’s also a fan of the Big Bang Theory), makes a couple of jokes about Kim Kardashian that grate a little on Nussbaum. “Reality television is like the television of the past” she says – popular with the masses, loathed by the cultural gatekeepers; it’s become the new punching bag – and hence she feels “strangely protective” of it.

Particularly when the reason why Nussbaum became a TV critic in the first place was because of a little show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Back then Nussbaum (who has also written an excellent piece chronicling the subversiveness of Sex and the City) would defend the show’s many artistic merits, in the face of unfair prejudice towards its more “trashy” cover elements.

Though neither speaker really addressed the panel headline’s provocation, Rushdie did leave us with a rather cute joke: two goats are chewing on film reels in a projection room. One goat asks, “how was the film?” The other replies, “it’s OK, but not as good as the book.”

And for the record, here is an excellent discussion between Adam Kirsch and Mohsin Hamid that does actually address the premise.

Adam writes: The first time Ragip Zarakolu was arrested in Turkey, in 1971 after the generals’ coup, he was just a young masters student. His mother was upset, but then when she visited him in jail, she was proud of him. “It was an honour for me to be arrested with famous writers, and the greatest academics of law, humanist philosophers!” Zarakolu told this afternoon’s Fodi audience in his session, Publish and be damned.

He has been consistently arrested, harassed and imprisoned by the Turkish government for more than 40 years, in part because he insists on writing about the Armenian genocide in a Turkish political environment that is becoming increasingly nationalistic.

At least in Australia, he said, those who insist on a “clean history” can’t jail intellectuals. “You can talk about what happened to the Aborigines, you can discuss it,” Zarakolu said.

His most recent detention was in 2011. “It was like [Franz Kafka’s novel] The Trial, because I was kidnapped out the front of my house [by the anti-terrorism police]. They were unknown persons, civilians, their outfit was like normal young people … our neighbours tried to save me, they thought it was a gang!”

The odd thing was that under the “civilian government in Turkey they work with the same methods” as the old generals’ regime, Zarakolu said. In the 70s dictatorship, being arrested and harassed seemed normal – but it was “abnormal” under a civilian regime.

Zarakolu wryly noted that when he visited Belfast at the invitation of the British consul during the troubles, he was there as a human rights observer, but he has had the opportunity to observe the human rights conditions in jail as a prisoner. “It’s a kind of defence mechanism, so you can say you’re morally higher – [it’s the government that is] abnormal, and this situation is abnormal. So this is also an experience.”

“I am lucky to have this experience and I go on to express my ideas in prison also,” he said, noting that he’d published a petition calling for genocide recognition during his time in jail.

Freedom of expression is vital, Zarakolu said. “It’s a mission to struggle for freedom of expression. It’s not just a luxury, it’s an honour to be a human being – to feel pure, to use free words without anxiousness.”

Monica writes: Lydia Cacho is one cape short of being a modern day superhero. Read a great Guardian interview with her here.

She opens her Fodi talk, Slavery is Big Business, with some truly remarkable tales from her life as a journalist covering the global sex slavery business. There was the day she was kidnapped and then incarcerated on the orders of a corrupt police chief, and going undercover as a nun to collect stories from sex workers in some of the Mexico City’s roughest neighhoods.

She’s busted crime rings and linked some of her country’s most powerful businessmen and politicians to child prostitution, one of whom she once confronted in court with the words: “Every time you look into my eyes every child you’ve abused will be looking back at you.”

Cacho links these individuals to a global trade of coerced sex workers and underage sex slaves that she says makes $150bn every year. Australians are connected to that system – not only as sex tourists in countries like Cambodia and Thailand – but also as consumers of pornography, of which teenage imagery and videos make up 25%.

The journalist makes it clear that she is all for erotic, healthy love lives, nor does she believe in prostitution raids (excepting cases involving children) that pronounce someone is a victim when they are not. But the violence and misogny that proliferates in the sex industry can be changed, she says, and that change begins with men.

Cacho then proposes her own “dangerous idea”, that we kick off a global dialogue about masculinity. “What it is to be a man, and the owner of your own body.” She says feminism has taken great strides in helping women own their own bodies and sexuality, but now it is time that men have a similar discussion, and learn to enjoy sex “not through the penis alone, but with their whole being.”

She ends with a bold call out: “Men tell me we need more women like you. But what we need is more men like me in the world.”

Correction: This original post incorrectly referenced Carmen Aristegui as a subject of Cacho’s journalism. She is in fact a fellow journalist and collaborator.

Nancy writes: Sunday’s sessions kick off with a healthy dose of media introspection.

The motion: cat videos will save journalism

The (all-male) panel:
Tim Burrowes, editor of Mumbrella (chair)
Tim Duggan, publisher of Junkee
Peter Fray, deputy editor of The Australian
Mark Scott, managing director of ABC
Simon Crerar, editor of Buzzfeed Australia

Tim B opens debate by asking: does journalism actually need saving?

Peter Fray answers big: “We are living through the greatest era of human expression in the history of humanity. There are more journalisms (sic) than ever before. There are more people fulfilling the role of the journalists than ever before [paid / amateur / ‘corporations pretending to be journalists’]. And the audience is biggest than it’s even been before.”

Journalism(’s) alive and well then. Cats certainly don’t need saving, Peter adds, to opprobium from the audience. He also says that we need to stop talking about digital as if it happened two weeks ago. We’re two decades into this revolution – at least.

Mark Scott agrees but adds that the most comparable revolution, the invention of the printing press, took at least 100 years to roll out. We’ll look back at 2014 and realise we were only at the very beginning. The big question, he says, is: how do we fund it? There may be more journalists than ever before (more voices, more discussion, more debate). But at journalism’s core, there are far fewer people invested (and prepared to invest) in breaking news than there used to be.

Australia has seen a lot of recent and successful entrants into the market, says Simon Crerar. His own company Buzzfeed, the Guardian (thanks, mate), Daily Mail, and soon to arrive Huffington Post. These are forcing Australia’s sitting publishers into new ways or working thinking.

Peter agrees: Newscorp are responding with “nimbleness”. But the fact remains: you’ve got to bring in more money that you spend, especially if you are no longer proprietor owned, but share-holder owned. A la Fairfax etc.

Time to talk business models then. Tim Duggan of Junkee – which won Aus media brand of the year, he boasts ,“beating the Guardian” natch – does it all with only two full time editorial staff and funded by native advertising. Asked for a definition of that slippery beast, he gives one: “quality content, inspired by brands, delivered in-thread so that it looks like everything else we feed through.” He gives an example of a juicy 5000-word travel read for the youth brand Contiki that will launch next week.

All well and good, say Peter Fray, but who is going to pay for Kate McClymont to write 5000 words from ICAC? Journalism exists to seek truth and seeking truth is a very expensive thing, he says. Native advertising is not going to deliver that, at least not at the Australian where digital subscriptions are going up (here comes the push for the paywall), but 90 cents in the dollar still comes from print revenue.

Mark Scott chips in: “is that a print success story of a digital weakness story?” And another question: if print’s days are numbered, how big a newsroom could digital-only revenue fund?

There’s more chat about Buzzfeed and Junkee’s business models from Simon and Tim, talk of the global news brands (New York Times, Daily Mail, the Guardian) who are building on strong home bases with local offices around the world, and a surprising amount of optimism about Australian journalism’s future. And a big shout out from Simon for Vice’s embedded Islamic state video series.

This final thought from Peter interesting: “The one thing we don’t do enough of in this county is open the door and let the reader in. We journalists need to appreciate their opinion, not see it as the threat we first see it as. It’s a great opportunity, a once in a lifetime opportunity in my case. I’m buzzed up on that.”

See Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger on “open journalism” here.

Finally, some great questions – one could even say dangerous ideas – from the floor:

• Is the thing that needs saving actually advertising?
• Is there room for a model for a totally crowdfunded site that isn’t just a feed for ideas but a source of information? (Yes, says panel, it’s called Twitter)
• How can we ensure the quality and integrity of the written journalistic word?
• Do out of work journalists need to learn how to make cat videos then?

And that’s all folks. Not enough cat chat. Or women. But watch the whole thing for yourselves here.

What a difference a day makes. Sydney woke up to blue skies and dry pavements this morning in what feels like the first non-rainy Sunday in weeks.

But there’s no day of rest for the wicked, which is why the Guardian Australia team is back at Sydney Opera House for day two of the 2014 Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

Yesterday’s conversation over whether headline speakers Pussy Riot should boycott the festival has given way to debate over Nadya and Masha’s actual comments on stage (yes, they did turn up).

The pair drew comparisons between Australia’s asylum system and Russian justice, comments that have made front page news, not least on Guardian Australia where a heated debated is running in the comments section.

However, there are those who said yesterday’s Fodi debate wasn’t dangerous enough. That perhaps we were being upstaged by goings on at the “pro-family” conference, the World Congress of Families in Melbourne, where delegates were told that the breakdown of the family is to blame for 90% of poverty.

Saturday also saw an estimated 4,000 Australians attend 13 anti-government protests across the country, with more expected on Sunday.

So, come on Fodi. Let’s do this thing. We’ll be following debate all day and hoping to collect some dangerous ideas of our own. So keep on posting below the line or tweet us @adambrereton @m_onicatan and @nancyarts.

Adam Brereton: After the baby Gammy case, surrogacy is a hot-button issue in Australia. The Swedish author Kajsa Ekis Ekman says it will be the equivalent of the Baby M case, a watershed moment for surrogacy in the US.

Ekman says surrogacy is a “perverse sort of market”, the reverse side of the coin to prostitution. “These two industries both commodify the female body in different ways,” in that prostitution is sex without reproduction – the client of a pregnant sex worker will not expect to be responsible for any child resulting from intercourse – and surrogacy is reproduction without sex, because nobody has sex to procreate the surrogate child.

In what was one of the more provocative Fodi talks today, Ekman said this was so a male buyer can remain faithful to his wife, who may be infertile, and so a male homosexual couple may “keep their gayness intact while fathering a child”.

Prostitution and surrogacy embody the two archetypal forms of female subjugation, Ekman says, the whore and the self-sacrifical Madonna. Both of these “require women to renounce their own interests”, and instead engage with their bodies on the terms of a buyer. In the case of prostitution, “it’s not about her orgasm, it’s about his desire”, and for surrogacy, it’s about the buyer’s desire to possess the child – which leads Ekman to describe surrogacy as “baby trafficking”.

She disagrees with other ethical conceptions of surrogacy. Are those who procure surrogates merely paying for the “service” of the pregnancy? Or are they paying for the child, but not reducing the child itself to a kind of property? Ekman doesn’t find these arguments convincing – “what is being sold is very tangible: it’s a newborn baby”.

Ekman explained that surrogacy began in the US during the 1970s, after abortion was legalised. Because there was a marked decline in the number of newborns being put up for adoption, infertile, middle class couples turned to international adoption – but many white couples didn’t want a baby who looked racially different to them. This led to a search for paid surrogates in the US and the emergence of agencies who could link up surrogates with prospective buyers.

The development of embryo implants allowed this dynamic to change, and expanded the market for surrogates overseas to developing countries like Thailand and India. A white couple could employ an Indian or Thai surrogate in the knowledge that their child would still be white.

Ekman points to kidnappings and “surrogacy brothels” in the developing world, and exploitation through contracts, as examples of what happens when surrogacy becomes a market. She rejects the idea that paying surrogates changes the moral equation, saying “to me that’s the most cynical argument you could ever use”.

The problem, she says, is that surrogacy puts the woman through what the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács calls “reification” – which she explained was “when you commodify a part of human life itself”. Pregnancy itself becomes “functionalised” – turned into something that is “separate for the woman, as if she’s ‘a bun in the oven’ … a container – as if she doesn’t have feelings for the child.”

Consequently, surrogate mothers domestically and overseas are trained in ways to dissociate themselves from the baby they’re carrying. They “never to refer to the child as ‘my baby’, or refer to themselves as mothers,” Ekman said. Even “surrogate mother” is frowned upon as a term, with “surrogate” or even “surro” preferred, especially in the US.

This is what Ekman calls the “split self”, which she says also operates in sex work: “you shut off, you’re not there 100%. When you’re with a buyer, you don’t feel – you have a number of strategies.”

For this reason, she also disapproved of “altruistic” surrogacy, where a surrogate mother doesn’t sell her services, but assists a family member, or even a stranger. She also spoke about cases in the US of surrogate children, now in adulthood, who were disappointed when finding about their origins.

During questions, Ekman rejected the idea that prohibiting surrogacy would create a black market. “I would say it’s a big myth generally – there’s always a black market under legal industries too,” she said, noting the social censure that came about after Sweden criminalised the clients of sex workers. She sees surrogacy as different from organ donation, adoption and other types of technology-assisted fertility because of the centrality of the experience of pregnancy.

Ekman also responded during questions to Wendy Joy Francis of the Australian Christian Lobby about the baby Gammy case and the complications that can come about through risks to the mother, or the possibility of giving birth to a disabled child. “When you’re not carrying the baby yourself, it’s a lot easier to say ‘let’s just cancel this’,” she said. “You want the perfect product, if i’m being a bit cynical.”

Monica writes: Two of the festivals biggest drawcards Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova and Maria (Masha) Alekhina began their panel Russia is a Penal Colony by acknowledging the elephant in the room: the proposed festival boycott made by Australian activists.

Alekhina said they were both surprised to learn about the accusations these activists are making – that the festival organisers St James Ethics Centre have inappropriate links to the Australian government’s policy Operation Sovereign Borders, which involves the mandatory detention of certain asylum seekers.

We learned that last night the feminist punk artists met up with activists, and spoke at length to them, to attempt to understand the situation. But evidently they decided still to appear at the festival, and referred to their action during the Sochi Olympics where rather than call for a boycott they exploited the event to invite global media attention to their grievances with Russian president Putin.

Tolokonnikova then identified parallels between her and Alekhina’s hunger strikes, as prisoners in Russia’s labour camps, with the hunger strikes of asylum seekers in Australia’s internationally condemned offshore processing centres.

“The last few days we’ve been surprised by the problems here, such as the detention camps, which is similar to what’s happening in Russia,” said Tolokonnikova. “A hunger strike is a terrible thing, it’s like a slow suicide.”

It was an intelligent move to make: so swiftly to draw parallels to the injustice they see at home in Russia, rather than talk at length on a subject they know little about. They then returned to the panel’s original thesis: that Russia has become a penal colony. The pair uses their experience in prison to illustrate the much larger “prison” that they believe the common people of Russia have been interned in; where one’s rights, power and ability to challenge authority have been stolen.

“Russia is an important example of what can happen to any society, if it loses its memory or become unconscious, and simply obedient to its rules,” said Alekhina.

More on this from Monica soon...

Adam writes: Up now is a panel debate – The price of modern life is depression and loneliness. Heavy stuff!

Speaking are Anne Manne, who’s just written a book on narcissism, David Baker from the Australia institute, and Professor Gordon Parker, from the University of NSW.

Gordon Parker kicks it off.

“Depression is an encompassing word,” he says. We all feel despondent, which is normal, but there’s also clinical depression. Rates of reported depression are going higher and higher, he says, but he’s not convinced that rates of clinical impression are increasing. The rates of what we now call “melancholic depression” have been pretty similar over the centuries, Parker insists.

In relation to clinical depression, we “really don’t know how to define it … there’s no pristine definition.” But the DSM (the standard US manual that defines psychiatric illnesses), Parker says, has “progressively lowered and lowered the criteria for clinical depression.” Normal or “normative” depression has progressively been introduced into the “clinical domain”.

Secondly, there are some other factors that are relevant: “destigmatisation has meant that many people who have had serious depression and would never have talked about it, now do so openly.”

Third: there has been an increase in the diagnosis of some clinical disorders, like bipolar. The question is though, that the definition of “serious” or “clinical” depression is so vague: under the DSM, clinical depression can be broken up into 319 constituent disorders!

“If you’ve got a dumb model, then you risk a dumb application,” he says. That could mean overtreatment, or for people who have “major biological disorders” and would respond well to medicine, improper treatment.

Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alekhina’s talk has just begun.

And if you want a close-up, here they are backstage with ABC journalist Julia Holman.

And as Monica reports, they start by acknowledging the boycott controversy.

Adam writes: If you want to fight HIV in Indonesia, triple the budget for the Indonesian military. That was Elizabeth Pisani’s recommendation to the World Bank while she was working as an epidemiologist in Indonesia. In her talk, Corruption Makes the World Go Round, Pisani explains that after the destabilisation of the Indonesian state in the 1990s, the military had to go in search of “more predatory sources of funding”. Her investigation into the issue found a surprising correlation between the areas where soldiers were stationed and the biggest sites of heroin use, the major factor in the spread of HIV.

“Am I saying that soldiers should be able to deal smack so they can fund their military operations – obviously not,” Pisani says. “But we need to ask what function that corruption may have been playing beside enriching individuals.”

Pisani’s time in Indonesia convinced her that corruption is embedded in cultural values. She gives a couple of Indonesian examples – Acehnese rebels creaming off tsunami reconstruction funds and suddenly becoming politically appealing to the same generals who were fighting them in the first place; regional politicians pulling strings in Jakarta to get their children jobs; cultural sensitivities around the distribution of food aid – to show that tensions between central bureaucrats and decentralised regional demands can often produce outcomes that we might identify as corrupt, but which aren’t perceived that way in remote communities.

Does this mean that “some countries are more corrupt than others”? Only if we transfer the framework for dealing for corruption from one country to another, Pisani insists. When it comes to “more mature democracies”, we should ask about cultural sensitivities too – even Abraham Lincoln engaged in practices we would identify as corrupt to abolish slavery. In the US since then, she notes, “the use of federal earmarks [a kind of pork barrelling] has been an absolutely core part of the American political process”.

“A lot of people think that’s wasteful and corrupt – and I would have to agree with them. Between 2011 and 2013 there were attempts to try to address that by making certain types of pork barrelling difficult or frankly illegal,” she said, adding that she thought this was a factor contributing to the deadlock in US politics, because “there’s no way of essentially greasing the wheels of the legislative process to arrive at agreement”.

Pisani thinks democracy is “inherently transactional … you can transact in different ways”. That might mean paying cash directly for votes directly – a corrupt outcome – or transacting with the electorate by having a policy platform that is applied to everyone equally. What matters is that we deal with those different types of transactions in their specifics, rather than talking about “corruption” in a one-size-fits-all way:

“Extractive corruption – graft – taking money from the state and sticking it a swiss bank account, that sort of graft is actually rather easier to deal with and very important to deal with. Other types of corruption – what I would call distributive corruption, patronage – is often more culturally embedded.”

She also asks a few pointed questions about Australia. “Say a prominent politician’s daughter is given a scholarship ... is that corruption? If so, who’s guilty? The college, the daughter, the politician? It’s hard to know.” But she is certain about one thing: it is “unacceptable to give a bottle of Grange Hermitage to someone who doesn’t even remember drinking it!”

From superannuation to corruption – what a cheerful morning! Next up for me is a panel that explores the issue of whether depression is the price we pay for modern life… If you want to read more about Pisani, there’s an article about her over at news.com.au.

Monica writes: The premise behind journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s panel, We Are the Asteroid, is that we are now inflicting on the planet the kind of large-scale environmental change, and at a blinding speed, equivalent to an asteroid impact.

“It’s like we’ve taken over the geographical forces of the past,” says Kolbert of a concept explained in more detail in her book The Sixth Extinction. Read a 2014 Observer interview with her here.

Kolbert outlines three significant ways we are seeing this change manifest: in the atmosphere, in our oceans and in the “principles of geographic distribution”. She goes over ground that will be familiar to many: the dramatic rate at which humans are spewing CO2 into the air; the effects this is having on global climate and ocean acidity levels; and the impact of 10,000 species being moved around the world each day.

She frames these huge waves of change through the lens of several species of plants and animals, and their fate. Take the Hawaiian crow called Kinohi who is the last of his species and the researcher who has the task of “stroking Kinohi in a way that Kinohi is meant to find terribly exciting”.

Or the African clog frog that lays eggs when injected with the urine of a pregnant woman. This frog has now spread to many parts of the world, and is believed to have transported a deadly fungus that is killing native frog populations. Australian ones included.

Kolbert says it’s convention to end such a talk on a hopeful note “where perhaps if we do X or Y” disaster can be averted. And though she has no consolation to offer, nor is she advocating that we resign ourselves to the end being nigh.

“I don’t think we can let ourselves off the hook because we can’t see cause for optimism. We have a moral obligation to confront this issue, even though – or perhaps precisely because - we do not see immediate, clear solutions.”

Monica Tan writes: Monica here. Journalist, deputy culture editor, flawless, untouchable, creative genius. In the spirit of Anne Manne’s talk on our narcissism epidemic, I announced my presence at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on Twitter with a selfie. I bristle when I’m told by the panel usher that with my “guest pass” I have to wait until all the ticketed audience members are first seated. “I’m live-blogging this, it’s pretty important I’m in there,” I snap.

Manne is the author of the bestseller The Life of I: The New Culture of Narcissism and she kicks off her talk with a wide-ranging list of diverse if all high-profile examples of narcissism: the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, the queen of selfies Kim Kardashian, the cyclist-cum-cheat Lance Armstrong.

Narcissism encompasses a range of personality traits and social behaviours: vanity, greed, entitlement, ambition, and selfishness. The ego is highly inflated, but essentially unstable. And as Manne points out, it is most commonly found in neoliberal societies, that encourage aggressive individualism.

There is a smugness in an audience who laugh at Manne’s examples of narcissists – who among us will admit to actually being one ourselves? Yet she leaves us with a question that pokes at our complicity in a society that thrives on narcissism while also providing us with the antidote:

“Is it possible we’ve become so narcissistic that like Narcissus staring into that lily pond, we’ll be looking into all the lovely things in society, that reflect back at us better than we really are?

“Could it be that we will become so self-indulgent and enchanted and intoxicated by all we see in this lily pond that we are not prepared to face and do something about the really looming disaster of climate change?

“Can we turn this society of the selfie around when narcissism is rampant, and turn it back towards the values of altruism, generosity, caring for each other and care for the planet that we share?”

Well, can we?

Adam writes: John Hewson, the former Liberal leader, spoke this morning on climate change and the finance industry, including superannuation funds. The crux of his argument is this: as climate change and the responses to it become more pronounced, carbon emitting assets, like coal-fired power plants, will become increasingly stranded and will decrease in value. “The risk nature is very complex,” Hewson said, and financial markets aren’t much good at pricing that risk.

Big funds, like university endowments, super funds and sovereign wealth funds need to realise this, Hewson reckons. If they don’t, we face two serious consequences. First, it opens us up to the risk of a financial crash as those assets decrease in value – and the investments funds have made become worthless. Underpricing climate risk is a “phenomenal punt”, Hewson says, which “dwarfs for example, the risk of the subprime market”.

“Financial markets are not very good at pricing risk … just think back to the GFC [global financial crisis], and how clever they were in that context. The whole system of debt, the excessive debt that was built up at that time … was a risk that was clearly underpriced and under recognised by the financial community.”

That should draw a “fiduciary response” from fund managers, trustees and so on, who have a duty to maximise the return to investors. Hewson is interested in surveying and lobbying those who control the cash to get them to realise they may actually be risking a breach of their directors’ duties. He is even considering a legal challenge to one of the major funds on this basis, which he admits is a high-risk strategy. Consequently, he’s spending a lot of time with lawyers.

The second problem should be obvious: if we don’t address the problem, climate change will “destroy the planet”, hence the title of Hewson’s talk.

This is the interesting part – Hewson appreciates the urgency of the climate issue, but thinks it’s important to work within existing systems. Hence his focus on trying to bring the climate question under the purview of directors’ duties, current financial structures and so on. He is a former Liberal politician, after all.

So his organisation “surveys, rates, names and shames” the top 1000 funds, but doesn’t press them to take any particular action. He doesn’t insist on divestments or boycotts, which are the current responses preferred by organisations like 350.org and some Australian university groups, but instead says a range of solutions are available once funds analyse their risk. Divestment and boycotts are obviously two options, or divesting from exposed assets at the margins, but Hewson also mentioned hedging against the risk, and investing in renewables as possible responses.

There are a few major barriers: funds demand transparency from companies they’re investing in, regarding their exposure to climate risk, but refuse to make those disclosures themselves. There are also obvious political problems, and Hewson, true to form, took a couple of major swipes at Dick Warburton, Tony Abbott and other members of the current government.

Hewson appeared with Simon Longstaff from the St James Ethics Centre, and in a weird introduction mentioned that the last time they appeared together, Hewson had what he thought was a runny nose. It turned out to be a leak of brain fluid …

Make of that what you will and stand by for further blogs from me today!

David Cameron, the UK prime minister, has raised the terror threat level in the UK to “severe”. Here in Sydney, currently experiencing weather conditions more suited to old Albion, we’ve cranked up the threat level on our ideas-o-meter to “dangerous”.

Yes, it’s that time of year again: the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, at the Sydney Opera House. Year after year, Sydney’s luvvies can’t get enough of it – tickets to the big name speakers, like Salman Rushdie and Pussy Riot, have sold out. And every year, posers pick on Fodi for being too leftwing, too corporate, or just not dangerous enough. Either way, the festival, inaugurated in 2009, is going strong in its sixth year.

This year’s festival has attracted controversy before the first speaker has even collected their lanyard and pass. Back in June, one of the scheduled speakers, Uthman Badar of radical Muslim organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, pulled out of the festival after outrage over his slated topic: Honour Killings Are Morally Justified. Were honour killings too “dangerous” to be discussed? Was Badar the casualty of yet another round of Islamophobia? We canvassed some of these views at the time on Comment is Free.

And in the last week or so, calls have grown louder for Pussy Riot, the headline act, to boycott the festival. The St James Ethics Centre, one of the co-convenors of the festival, has links to Transfield, one of the central companies in the Coalition Government’s Operation Sovereign Borders regime. Refugee advocates say that compromises the festival as a forum.

Tune in throughout the weekend for regular updates. The Guardian Australia team – Adam Brereton (@adambrereton), Monica Tan (@m_onicatan) and Nancy Groves (@nancyarts) – will be liveblogging the best sessions. Tweet us with your own dangerous ideas, comments and queries or add them in the comments below.