I am an emeritus professor at the Australian National University in Canberra located at the School of Regulation and Global Governance in the College of Asia and the Pacific. My academic background is in economics and anthropology and I was the Foundation Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the ANU from 1990 to 2010 and a research professor there 2010 to 2014. From 2016 to 2019 I was a research professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Melbourne. My research currently focuses on four broad areas: Alternative development for difference: the Indigenous hybrid and domestic moral economies; the links between poverty alleviation and natural and cultural resource management on Indigenous lands; the Northern Territory Emergency Response Intervention and its aftermath; and Indigenous policy formulation and reform especially in the areas of social and economic development. My theoretical interests are in political economy and political ecology and alternatives to the embedded neoliberalism of late capitalism that is unsustainable and generating a climate emergency. I am a foundation director of the Karrkad-Kanjdji Trust and Original Power, a director of the Arena Foundation and Uncle Jimmy Thumbs Up and chair of the Board of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies located in North Melbourne. I also chair the Research Committee of the Australia institute.
Member of the Order of Australia (AM); Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia since 2003, Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand since 2012