TONY JONES: Good evening. Thank you very much and welcome to Q&A live from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. I'm Tony Jones. Answering your questions tonight in the magnificent concert hall of the Sydney Opera House: iconoclast, feminist and historian Germaine Greer; radical Trotskyist turned Burkean Conservative, Peter Hitchens; author Hanna Rosin, who argues women are on the rise while men are on the wane; and sex advice author and gay activist Dan Savage. Please welcome our panel. Thank you, and as usual we're being simulcast on ABC News 24 and News Radio and you can join the Twitter conversation with the #qanda hashtag that just appeared on the screen. Our first question tonight is from Tim Wright.

COLLAPSE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

TIM WRIGHT: My question is for Peter Hitchens. You have described yourself as an observer and record keeper of the collapse of western civilisation. To what extent is your resignation to defeat a lament for the passing of a world where moral absolutes still existed, hierarchy and order was respected and nuclear families were the cultural norm? Is it not desirable that we have moved out of a world of black and white into one of technicolour?

TONY JONES: Peter Hitchens?

PETER HITCHENS: Well, the first summary of my opinions is absolutely right but what that has to do with a world of black and white and a world of technicolour I'm not quite sure. You seem to be suggesting that somehow a world in which people don't fulfil their obligations to their children, desert their marriages, don't keep to the laws, are increasingly selfish and follow their own desires and abandon all kinds of ideas of self-restraint and patience is a better world than one where those things actually ruled, and I don't agree with you. The fact that the world is technicolour - the fact the world is technicolour and full of drugs and people who get drunk and people who abandon their husbands and wives doesn't seem to me to be an improvement and it strikes me that it's time somebody said that actually this isn't necessarily a turn for the better. But in any case, when you're discussing all these changes in our lives, you can't return to the past. It's futile to even attempt to. What we're always doing all the time is discussing what we're going to do with the future. At the moment we're very busily choosing the wrong future, in which some of us and all of our children are going to live.

TONY JONES: Peter, you've...

HANNA ROSIN: It's a good thing we didn't bring our champagne out here. We actually considered it.

TONY JONES: Peter, you've obviously bemoaned the decline, the moral decline of Great Britain. I mean is it the decline of Christian values that you're talking about primarily?

PETER HITCHENS: Well, Christianity more or less collapsed in Europe after 1914 and the First World War and when it ceased to exist, all kinds of other things rushed in to take its place. But mostly what's rushed in to take its place is what I call 'selfism': the idea that we are all sovereign in our own bodies, that no-one can tell us what to do with our own bodies and that everything that we do is okay, provided we think we aren't harming anybody else. Quite often the truth is that we are harming other people but hiding it from ourselves.

HANNA ROSIN: But who gets to decide what's corrupt? So, you know, drinking, drugs, gay sex. I mean sort of where do you draw the line at what seems totally arbitrary?

PETER HITCHENS: Where do you draw the line? You draw the line fundamentally, as far as I'm concerned, around about the Sermon on the Mount and those instructions given to us and I have absolutely no shame in saying that I believe that the Christian religion was the greatest possession which the human race had, which it's now, in large parts of the world, rather busily throwing away.

DAN SAVAGE: I'm a firm believer in do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I just think there's more doing unto that's possible in my philosophy than yours.

PETER HITCHENS: Well, I know that.

TONY JONES: I think-

PETER HITCHENS: You do an awful lot of things unto other people and indeed yourself and that's your affair. But it's not the same question.

DAN SAVAGE: Consent matters and harm matters. Consent matters and harm matters. If there's consent and no one is being harmed it's no one's business what an individual chooses to do with his or her body.

PETER HITCHENS: Yes, but the question...

TONY JONES: No, I'm going to...

PETER HITCHENS: No. No. No. It's so essential to answer this. The people who say that they're not doing harm are invariably deceiving themselves. The people who divorce and say the children are happier as a result, they're not.

DAN SAVAGE: And the government should rush in to prevent people from being self-deceptive if that's indeed what they're doing?

PETER HITCHENS: The teenager who takes drugs and becomes mentally ill and ruins his own life and that of his parents is doing harm to other people, but at the time they do these things they say "No, my body is sovereign. I am a completely autonomous person. I don't harm anybody else. " We lie to ourselves about this all the time. I lie to myself about it. You all lie to yourselves about it. You lie to yourself about. We know that we harm other people.

HANNA ROSIN: So what about abortion, for example?

TONY JONES: Let me go to Germaine Greer. We haven't heard from Germaine yet. Do you see any evidence of moral decline in the west?

GERMAINE GREER: No. But I think what we have to be aware of is that there's another spiritual and intellectual system that is rejecting the west and rejecting it in no uncertain fashion. At the moment we're involved in this terrible business in Egypt where Morsi was elected by the Egyptian people. He's now going to be tried and we're pretending that somehow he wasn't elected. Now, we have got to confront that fact that ordinary Egyptian people were Salafists and fundamentalists and they rejected the western way of life as fundamentally corrupt. Now, I don't stand on the same side as Peter, because I think that the patriarchal system was corrupt, that it was a licence to exploit and humiliate and oppress women and children. But you know what people don't understand is that patriarchy also oppresses men. It isn't the rule of men, it's the rule of old men who send young men to war to fight their battles for them. This is the system that Peter would like to defend and this is the system that I have spent my life opposing.

PETER HITCHENS: No, it's your misrepresentation. It's your misrepresentation of the system I would like to defend. It isn't the system.

DAN SAVAGE: Could I characterise the system you would like to defend? It's the conservatism of 'Ick, I don't like that, therefore you should not be allowed to do it. I don't approve of drinking. I don't use drugs myself. I don't suck dick myself, therefore you should be legally prevented from doing those things.'

PETER HITCHENS: Well--

DAN SAVAGE: That's radical. That is not conservative.

PETER HITCHENS: And what's so brilliant about that because there are things I think...

DAN SAVAGE: I give a wicked blow job.

PETER HITCHENS: ...that we see around us that, that we do not...

DAN SAVAGE: I'm pretty brilliant.

PETER HITCHENS: There are things that we see around us that we do not like and if we don't act to stop then we're guilty of allowing them to take place.

DAN SAVAGE: But 'I don't like it' isn't enough reason to use the force of the State to stop it. I don't like cunnilingus. I'm not going to use the force of the state to prevent that from happening.

PETER HITCHENS: It's fantastic the ease with which someone can fill a room with laughter by just being rude and unpleasant.

TONY JONES: Okay.

DAN SAVAGE: I'm not being rude. I'm carrying your...

TONY JONES: Dan. Dan. I'm going to...

PETER HITCHENS: It's not particularly clever.

TONY JONES: Peter. Peter. Just hang on.

DAN SAVAGE: I'm carrying your argument to its logical extreme. I'm not being rude for no reason.

TONY JONES: We take your point. We take both your points, as it were. Now, we've got another question and we're going to continue the discussion based on the questions. The next question comes from Boran Izzet.

INTERNET HOOK-UPS

BORAN IZZET: With the growing trend of Internet hook-ups, sexting and the prevalence of apps which combine smart devices with GPS tracking and offer the closest potential suitor for a quick, cheap and purely hedonistic encounter. We have armed our generation with all the tools and platforms to normalise a culture of instant gratification. Is society so driven with personal pleasures that we're eroding the values of human relationships and reality-based interactions?

TONY JONES: Dan, let's start with you.

DAN SAVAGE: I don't think that two people who met via a hook-up app aren't having a hook-up in reality. They're still having a human interaction, however it is they were brought together. Any interaction, whatever its genesis, is as human as the humans involved in that interaction choose to be to each other and there are a lot of really terrific relationships that post-internet and post-hook up apps and pre-internet and pre-hook-up apps.

TONY JONES: Dan, can I just interrupt you there? For the broader audience who may not know, can you explain what hook-up apps are exactly?

DAN SAVAGE: Well, they're very popular with gay men because gay men are men and men are pigs and also safer, generally. But, what? What are hook-up apps? Hook up apps are little things on your phone, where you can use GPS and you can say, "I'm here in this location at this time and you can see who is nearby and if somebody is of a like mind and would like to hook up with you you can hook up. People have a sort of a moral panic about these apps, I think, that's out of all proportion to what they actually do and the impact they actually have on a lot of people's lives. Usually the people who are fulminating about them or most concerned about them are people who haven't used them and don't know what actually goes on during those interactions. There are a lot of terrific, long-term, stable, loving relationships that got their start with a sleazy meeting. If your parents met because they were stoned out of their minds and had a hook-up, they're not going to tell you. They're going to make up some bullshit story about the mutual friend that introduced them named Mary-Jane and that's really the only thing that - you know, I know a lot of people who are in long-term, stable, loving relationships, even marriages now, who met via hook-up apps and we need these apps because we have said now that it is not okay to hit on people at work, not okay to walk up to somebody on the bus or the street and ask them for their phone number. We've just (indistinct) these things, rightly so, to make the world safer for women as sexual harassment, so we need these places that when you enter them you are saying you may approach me. When I am in this space, whether it's virtual or a real space, like a kind of a pick-up bar, in these arenas it is okay to hit on me. In every other arena, for the most part, we have rightly decided that it is not okay just to walk up to somebody at work and hit on them.

TONY JONES: Peter Hitchens, I'll just bring you in here. You listened to that. I mean do you see anything sort of wrong with this concept of hook-up apps?

HANNA ROSIN: You're setting him up. You're setting him up. Say no. Just say no. Just for the surprise of it, just say no.

DAN SAVAGE: I'm going to get on grinder and see who's on right now in this room.

PETER HITCHENS: Do you want me to say anything, or not? It seems to me that when intimacy is something which is profoundly private and often, if people are mistreated when they're intimate with other people, they are severely damaged and the idea that sexual relations can be conducted in this casual and mechanical fashion is extremely cruel and crude and dismisses the concept of human love from a very important part of our relations and I think that's a pity. He doesn't think it's a pity. He wants a crude and, as far as I'm concerned, individualistic, unrestrained and a totally selfish world.

DAN SAVAGE: And the transcendent can emerge from the crude.

PETER HITCHENS: There is a definite difference between me and him. I'd just like to emphasise it. I think a society in which his ideas rule will be one you will very much regret having created.

TONY JONES: I think that is becoming clearer, that you're (indistinct).

PETER HITCHENS: Yeah, well, I just wanted to make it absolutely plain.

TONY JONES: Let me hear - I think it's pretty clear. Germaine?

GERMAINE GREER: The interesting part of the question was about instant gratification, because what is the mechanism that has told us all that we can have instant gratification? You want something, you can have it. You can have it now. It's called advertising. And the advertising of prostitution is pornography, which tells you the same thing. Sex is difficult. Sex is a blood sport. You can be hurt. But pornography tells you, you can have gratification without running any risk at all. You don't even have to converse. You don't even have to be laughed at. It's safe as houses and this is the kind of sexuality that has been promoted for the last 50 years. Now, it's interesting that what the app is doing is saying, " Go out, make a contact," and it's leading you into an area where you might be safe from misunderstanding. I think you're still running a risk but I think our kids and we have got to understand that sex is not bland and what worries me about your scenario is it seems rather bland. It is still dangerous out there and you have to go with courage. You have to go with love. The idea that love is something that you feel for somebody you have within your ambit who is in your power - there was a time when we understood that inequality negated love, that love could only exist between equals, that once one person was under the thumb of another there could be no love, only submission, and this is where Peter and I would absolutely differ.

TONY JONES: Okay. I'll let you get back in on that in a minute, Dan, but there's a specific question for Hannah on this subject. It comes from Brigid Meney.

HOOK-UP CULTURE EMPOWERING?

BRIGID MENEY: Hanna Rosin, how are a strong advocate of the hook-up culture and suggest it has been an engine for female progress. What authority do you feel you have to speak on the optimal sexual lifestyle of all women of different class, socio-economic levels, culture, values and religion and their respective progress? Do you feel your views discredit as unempowered women who exercise their choice to limit their sexual activity to that of a monogamous relationship?

DAN SAVAGE: You're a monster.

HANNA ROSIN: What authority do I have? Just extensive experience in the hook-up culture. I'm just kidding. Hook-up culture came before my time.

TONY JONES: You did go to study this phenomenon though, didn't you?

HANNA ROSIN: Deeply, yes. I deeply studied the phenomenon. I would say that that's a mischaracterisation of my position. I am not an advocate of the hook-up culture. I'm just an observer of the hook-up culture. It exists and, in fact, what you say about social classes is interesting because there is a difference between how social classes interact with the hook-up culture. In general it's upper class, elite women who are more comfortable with the hook-up culture. There's great studies done in college where the working class women are slightly shocked by the hook-up culture when they get there and have to be sort of slowly acculturated to it. So it's different and I would say, you know, it's been a great education for me because I write about the hook-up culture and then women have written back to me explaining to me what I got wrong, which is to say "No, we don't like one-night stands but, no, we don't like one night stands but, no, we're not looking to get married when we're in college". We've created this third kind of relationship which is unfamiliar to me, it didn't really exist when I was in college, which is intimate, which is sexual, which is respectful but which is not on the path to marriage and so that seems okay with me. It just seems like one kind of relationship. It's not the only kind but it's one legitimate kind.

TONY JONES: You did actually conclude that feminist progress actually depends upon this hook-up culture?

HANNA ROSIN: Yeah. I mean...

TONY JONES: I suppose that's why...

HANNA ROSIN: Yes.

TONY JONES: ...people take the view that you are an advocate?

HANNA ROSIN: Yeah. Well, no, I'm just an observer. It's not that I think it's great. I'm just saying I object to the fact that everyone looks at the hook-up culture and says that women are oppressed by it and it's created, you know, by men for men and women are suffering. It's not entirely true. If you talk to women, they don't want to get married. You know, women get married later and later in Australia. It's something like 30, right? So you're not going to go from 18 to 30 and have no intimate relationships, right? So you've got to create some other way of having relationships. So we just can't look at it and say it's horrifying. Women are suffering.

TONY JONES: I'm going to throw to Dan Savage because I think you did want to respond to what Peter Hitchens said earlier?

DAN SAVAGE: I don't remember what he said earlier at this point but I disagree with it, whatever it was.

PETER HITCHENS: That figures.

GERMAINE GREER: I'd just like to say something about that. Speaking as someone who teaches young women, I find that one of the greatest problems we have is that, you know, young women enter into relationships at university that are friendly, they're intimate, they're fun, but they're not a binding arrangement. It's not a prelude to a marriage and generally when exam time comes round the guys get a bit serious and it all stops and my young women fall to pieces, because they really believed that this was it. And I want to say to them "He's a boy. He wants sex. He wants friendship. He wants fun. He's is not ready to commit himself and why did you go more than halfway and why did you believe this was the one when it's actually now completely destroying you?" I'm happy for women to be less self-deceiving in encounters that are themselves fun and sexy and you never know, sometimes you're still seeing the same guy 60 years later. I am.

DAN SAVAGE: But you don't seriously believe there aren't young women out there who want fun, who want sex, who want companionship.

HANNA ROSIN: And who are not destroyed at the end of a relationship.

DAN SAVAGE: It's not that all It's not women are trading sex for male attention. There are women out there who want sex.

GERMAINE GREER: I understand that, but they overvalue, they misinterpret the signals that they're given, because shacking up, you know, having a regular boyfriend is now important even when you're in high school. When you're 15, 16 you get dumped, you lose prestige in your group and people will beat up on you for that. I mean, our young women are sexually active way before they're supposed to be and they enter into this really complex system of relationships that they systematically misinterpret, partly because they're very young and they take punishment and I hate seeing it. I hate seeing them utterly, completely distressed because of what has happened, because the young man has moved on, gone away.

PETER HITCHENS: Can I just say two things. One to what Germaine said a little while back, which is that I would maintain absolutely that marriage can be and most often is a partnership of equals and not a relationship of dominance. And to the people on the other side of the table, I say you are making a fundamental mistake. You are mistaking pleasure for happiness and they are two very different things.

TONY JONES: I'm going to move on because there'd be a long answer to that, I have no doubt, but we've got other things to talk about. We've got another question. It's from Erica Nock. Nock, I beg your pardon.

END OF MEN? MIND THE GAPS!

ERICA NOCK: My question is for Germaine. While women today are extremely competent and have achieved high levels of education and workforce participation, as a young woman in my 20s it's still apparent that there's a large gap between the two genders in many regards of their lives, but in particular in relation to pay, household duties and the decisions women have to make in relation to families and careers. So my question is: what do you see as the key factors over the next 10-20 years that will bring us closer to that point of equality?

TONY JONES: If you don't mind, Germaine, I'll throw that first to Hannah because she has actually written a book pretty much on this subject, which is called The End of Men. So you take us in that direction first and then I'll go back to Germaine.

HANNA ROSIN: So you are getting to the heart of the matter, right. So there are these differences in care taking. There are these differences in pay. But the long-term trend is that, you know, women's pay increases and increases and increases and men's pay decreases and decreases and decreases over the course of the century and so you see that, sort of, women are getting more dominant, stronger, are sort of, you know - it's changing for women. So while there are still gaps, it's really changing for women. Now, the one thing is the care taking. What I come to at the end of my book is we need to create sort of more space for men to do things in the domestic sphere without judging them for that, which I think we are doing. You know, we are doing. It's starting to happen.

TONY JONES: Now, your book actually looks, it seems to me, mostly, at post-GFC recession America and the shift that's going on where we've actually seen women become the largest group in the workforce. Is it just an American phenomenon you're talking about?

HANNA ROSIN: No, it's not just an American phenomenon. It looks different in different countries. For example, you know, the words "deliberately barren" I don't think would be spoken in America the way they are part of your political culture, apparently but so, you know...

TONY JONES: In certain quarters.

HANNA ROSIN: In certain quarters, exactly. Only in our country that's reserved for the Bible, the words "deliberately barren". So, you know, different countries have different...

TONY JONES: What I mean to say is it's not commonly used that phrase, it was used once.

HANNA ROSIN: Okay. All right. I won't pin it on the whole of the country. I got you. I got you.

TONY JONES: Probably a good idea.

HANNA ROSIN: Yes. Except that your current Prime Minister also said that women were, you know, physiologically not suited for leadership so, you know...

TONY JONES: Let's hear from Germaine Greer on the - the question was originally asked to you so I'll throw it to you and then we'll hear from the men on the panel.

GERMAINE GREER: Yes, now, the difficulty is that women are achieving parity in the workforce at a time when the workforce is spectacularly disabled, when it has no combination, it has no corporate power, it is people fighting all the time about workplace agreements, where the worker is always at a disadvantage because he's dealing with a corporation and the corporation lawyers and everything else. Now, I'm not happy about the fact that women are now being seen to be a biddable, reliable workforce for a capitalist system that is not under any pressure really from the workforce. And it's happening also in certain professions. Women become dominant in medicine, the prestige of medicine goes down. So it doesn't really make me happy. I have never argued for equality. Equality with men in the corporate world is misery. It's a really destructive system. We're saying now women have got into middle management. Wow! They're going to get into upper management. They're going to be catapulted into boardrooms where they won't really understand what is going on, because it's been decided in the men's room or on the golf course. So at the same time as we're saying women are becoming dominant numerically in the workforce they actually exercise less in the way of power in collective bargaining than any workforce ever has before.

TONY JONES: Can I just...

HANNA ROSIN: Yeah.

TONY JONES: I'd like to hear your response to that?

HANNA ROSIN: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I think you're not allowing for the possibility that women changed the workforce. You're right. Like, the American workforce, for example, particularly does not understand that people are human beings who raise children. You know, we don't even have maternity leave. So we're not a great shining example here, but I take the example of Norway where, you know, they forced women on corporate boards. We all wish we were Sweden and Norway. I know. If we could all be Sweden and Norway it would be awesome. But just let's...

TONY JONES: Well, you could be, you just have to change your policies?

HANNA ROSIN: I really don't look Swedish. I think it's just not possible for me. You know, other people out there in the audience maybe could pass as Swedish.

GERMAINE GREER: But there are plenty of Swedes who look like you, don't worry.

PETER HITCHENS: What is all this stuff? Women have stormed every profession. Women run the BBC in Britain. I expect they run the ABC in Australia. They dominate huge areas of professional life. The struggle for equality in educational professions was won decades ago.

HANNA ROSIN: And that's a problem? Like is that a problem?

PETER HITCHENS: What is really fascinating - what is really fascinating is this extraordinary alliance between radical leftist feminists and corporate multinational business which is probably the most sinister and cynical alliance since the Nazi Soviet pact, under which the '60s leftists applaud as millions of women are marched into wage slavery and exploitation by corporations. The people who claim that women were being exploited by marriage and by raising children don't raise a whisper against the immense exploitation of women by corporate business. Not a word and this endless continual ceaseless denigration of the most important and responsible task most of us will ever do, the raising of the next generation.

TONY JONES: Okay. I'm going to pause...

PETER HITCHENS: No, don't shut me up there.

TONY JONES: No. No. No. No. I'm stopping you because we have a question.

PETER HITCHENS: I'm making my point.

HANNA ROSIN: Wait a minute. If it's the most important task why...

PETER HITCHENS: (Indistinct) No, don't stop me. The ceaseless (indistinct)...

TONY JONES: Excuse me, we have a question. We have a question on this subject.

MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE

HANNA ROSIN: Wait a minute. Wait. Wait. Wait. Can I...

PETER HITCHENS: ...(Indistinct)...

TONY JONES: You'll get a chance.

HANNA ROSIN: No. No. No. Just one thing...

PETER HITCHENS: You haven't stopped anybody else.

HANNA ROSIN: One thing.

PETER HITCHENS: You haven't stopped anybody else.

TONY JONES: I'm stopping you to allow a questioner to make a point...

PETER HITCHENS: Yeah, I know you're stopping me. I noticed that, yes.

TONY JONES: ...you can respond to.

PETER HITCHENS: Right.

TONY JONES: Kimberley Adler has a question on this subject. Thank you.

WOMEN, WORK AND CHILDREN

KIMBERLEY ADLER: Do you think it's possible that the women's liberation movement has gone too far away from the primary role of women to nurture and raise their children? The current role of mothering is being performed by paid care-givers and my observations are showing me there's a direct correlation between narcissism rising in the population and early separation of mother and child. The women who can do it all tend to have children with narcissistic traits. We ship our kids off to strangers to raise them and wonder why everyone is tired and depressed. We are allowing narcissists to rule our world and - sorry. We are allowing the narcissists to currently rule our world, to tell us how to raise our children?

DAN SAVAGE: Well, clearly we need to re-enslave women. That's the solution.

PETER HITCHENS: Kimberley, you were fantastically brave. Be careful on your way home.

KIMBERLEY ADLER: No, you missed my point.

PETER HITCHENS: The feminists will get you for that. But of course it's true. There's extraordinary pressure to hand over young children to paid strangers while their actual mothers are tripped off to work.

HANNA ROSIN: Wait, why do the women have to do it if it's such an important job?

PETER HITCHENS: Yeah, here we go again. You don't like...

HANNA ROSIN: Dan has done a fine job raising his child.

PETER HITCHENS: Well, shall I tell you a very simple reason why? It may not apply to you. In a lot of cases they're better at it. There, you see, heresy.

TONY JONES: Germaine, let's hear from you.

PETER HITCHENS: Well, it's true.

GERMAINE GREER: What world is...

PETER HITCHENS: Anybody who's been involved in raising children knows that women are better at it.

HANNA ROSIN: Oh my God. That's just crazy.

PETER HITCHENS: You can't even say it, even though it's true.

DAN SAVAGE: I'm sorry. I'm sorry, what we've seen...

HANNA ROSIN: Wait a minute.

PETER HITCHENS: The power of fashion.

DAN SAVAGE: ...on studies of same-sex parents completely gives the lie to that statement, that children raised by same-sex couples are as happy, as healthy, as well-adjusted, as children raised by opposite sex couples and included in those studies are children raised by gay male couples, as my son has been raised, and they do just as well, because what matters is love and nurturing and safety and protection and caring adults who are invested in you, not parents with particular genital sets.

TONY JONES: Okay. Our questioner would like to get back in. Kimberley?

KIMBERLEY ADLER: Sorry.

PETER HITCHENS: (Indistinct)

KIMBERLEY ADLER: I think my point's been a bit misunderstood. My husband actually stayed home for six months to raise our child. It's not about the mother or the father. It's the fact that a parent is home to raise their child, to teach that child empathy and compassion for others and bring community together to work on the problems that coming forward. Narcissistic children lack empathy and are selfish and that's what I'm seeing being produced by children whose mothers aren't able to raise them.

DAN SAVAGE: I'd like to see the data, as opposed to an anecdotal assertion.

TONY JONES: Hanna, I saw you nodding earlier during that question. So which parts did you agree with?

HANNA ROSIN: Well, I don't remember which parts I agreed with. I must have had a head twitch.

DAN SAVAGE: You were trying to keep your tenor down.

HANNA ROSIN: Yes. No, I object because I think the problem today is not the lack of time that parents spend with their children. In fact time use studies show exactly the opposite, that in this culture where women work more, we spend more hours with our children than we used to. I totally understand parents should raise their children. That doesn't mean they have to be with them all day every day. I mean you can come home at 5 o'clock and, you know, have a nice dinner with your child and nurture them and love them. I mean, what it's the hours that you spend that are going to turn them into a narcissist? It just, you know, I think a stay at home mum has just as likely a chance to turn her child into one thing or the other as a working mum. What's the difference?

TONY JONES: Germaine?

GERMAINE GREER: I'm quite interested in the whole question of turning your children over to other people to raise, because my feeling is that we're way short of the amount of preschooling that we need and nursery care that we need, but I also seem to remember an English system where children were sent away to school, to boarding schools and it bred a generation of rulers of the entire British Empire. What was different then?

PETER HITCHENS: Are you saying I'm sitting here defending that? I haven't said a word about it. I'm against it and on the same principal.

GERMAINE GREER: Well, it's a bit late now, it's over.

PETER HITCHENS: Well, you brought it up. You suggested I was in favour of it. I say I'm against it. Future generations will look on our treatment of children as we look on the Victorians for sending children up chimneys. They will be amazed at the cruelty and neglect we showed to our children when we were so rich.

TONY JONES: Can I quickly ask you the question that was raised there was whether children are becoming narcissistic and so do you agree with that?

PETER HITCHENS: I have no idea whether they're becoming narcissistic but I think a lot of them are becoming seriously unhappy.

TONY JONES: Dan?

DAN SAVAGE: I want to see some data. Like we can sit around and we can just assert that a certain kind of family structure that's kind of been imposed on all of us by the economy - but, look, that stay at home parent thing was really an aberration, that there was a time in the 20th century when one person could earn enough money to support a whole family, to buy a house and maybe a second home and a car and go on vacations and that was an aberration. I don't think that...

HANNA ROSIN: Also a luxury. Also a luxury.

PETER HITCHENS: Oh, okay.

HANNA ROSIN: That, you know, there's been few moments in history where parents could afford to stay home. That's a sort of modern luxury.

TONY JONES: Okay. Let's move along. You're watching Q&A at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. The next question comes from Mitchell Grant.

CONSERVATIVES, TORIES & ABBOTT

MITCHELL GRANT: My question is for Peter Hitchens. You have said that the demise of the UK Conservative Party is inevitable and necessary in order to weed out what you call useless Tories. What do you think it will take to revive conservatism in Britain? Are far right populist parties necessary for such a revival? And, lastly, does Tony Abbott, our Prime Minister, represent lost conservative values that you would support or is he just an Australian version of the demise of conservatism that you see in Britain?

PETER HITCHENS: The last bit first. From what I can see, Mr Abbott is very much on the lines of modern fake conservatism. That is quite a lot of neoliberalism about the economy, a far too close association with Rupert Murdoch and a fair amount of rhetoric about moral conservatism close to elections accompanied by doing nothing whatever about it when he has the chance to do so and I think that is a general characteristic of conservative parties who have, for many, many years in the Anglo-sphere countries been betraying supporters in that way and not merely them but the supposedly left wing parties, the Labor Parties of the Anglo-sphere have also been betraying their conservative supporters. They have become factions of metropolitan bourgeois bohemians, who couldn't care less about the conditions of the poor and who are merely concerned with the luxury lives they live in their capital cities and so there is a complete divorce between what many people want out of life and what their politicians decide and so the British Conservative Party, if you really want to know, the best thing that could possibly happen to it would be that it split and collapsed and I'd do all that I can to hurry this on because nothing could be worse than it. I could carve a better political party out of a banana than the British Conservative Party, without any difficulty indeed. But the problem is that in our system, and I think in yours as well, people vote tribally and as long as people continue - as long as these parties continue to exist at elections, enough people will vote tribally to keep them alive and only if they collapse, that's the Conservative-minded people of your country and mine, will realise they have actually got no friends in government.

TONY JONES: Peter, you did do whatever you could to hasten the demise of the Cameron Government. In fact you...

PETER HITCHENS: Yeah, not very effective with that.

TONY JONES: Well, in fact, you actually advised people, or your readers, to vote for UKIP, which is a populist party - a populist party primarily anti-immigration in its basis?

PETER HITCHENS: Well, I advised them to do that because I kept saying that they shouldn't vote at all but they all seemed to think that voting was some tremendous important process, which actually it isn't. If you go to a shop and you're offered a load of goods which you don't want to buy, you don't buy any of them. So why, in an election, do you vote for people you don't like?

TONY JONES: Germaine Greer? All right. Okay. We'll bring Germaine in on that one-liner?

GERMAINE GREER: For me the greatest mystery is that Tony Abbott is a Rhodes Scholar. He is a product of one of our finest universities. British, I mean.

PETER HITCHENS: Well, so is Bill Clinton. I mean, so what?

GERMAINE GREER: Well, the interesting thing is that it looks as if a populist right-wing government has to pretend to be extremely stupid and Tony Abbott is very good at that.

TONY JONES: Well, Germaine, I mean it's obvious you don't like him but...

GERMAINE GREER: I don't have to like him.

TONY JONES: ...not, but, seriously it's not even worth a laugh, in fact, because there are plenty of people out there who do like him and one of the reasons, particularly among men in Australia they like him is because he's given up political correctness and he's changing the nature of the country, or trying to.

GERMAINE GREER: Well, are you happy about that?

TONY JONES: It's not a question of whether I'm happy. I'm simply making a point.

GERMAINE GREER: Well, why would any...

TONY JONES: Somehow you have to explain why he's won by a landslide.

GERMAINE GREER: Well, the complete shambolic nature of the Labor Party would seem to be a reason. And the manifest crookedness of the Labor Party would seem to be a reason, and it just goes on proliferating. More and more people come out of the woodwork, more and more shady deals, which is a curious thing about Labor Parties. They always get into trouble over things like property and shady deals involving shopping malls and stuff, whereas the conservatives sort of plod on and all they ever do is jump into bed with the wrong people, which basically makes us kind of like them.

TONY JONES: Dan, how does this look from your perspective in the United States? You've seen change of government here. It's very similar in many respects to the new government or the relatively new government in Canada?

DAN SAVAGE: I just think that you're having your George W. Bush moment and hopefully in a few years you will have your Barack Obama moment.

TONY JONES: Hanna Rosin?

HANNA ROSIN: What's been fascinating to me to watch the Gillard-Abbott switchover is, you know, in our country we do all our sort of racism and sexism in code and here you do it kind of overtly. You know, so she gets to call him a prime misogynist, you know, which are words that Hillary Clinton would never use and then he gets to say to her - what was the other fantastic thing he said? Oh, that she needed to make an honest woman of herself. That was the other fabulous thing he said. So, you know, they do these fights overtly.

TONY JONES: Okay. Let's move on. We've got another question. It's from Emilia Terzon.

EMILIA TERZON: As an Australian in her mid 20s, I've grown up with iconic images of protest, rebellion and flower power from the '60s, '70s and even the early '80s, yet I don't feel that I've experienced any of this ideology in my lifetime. Most people my age seem much more interested in buying the new iPhone 5 than they do about protesting against unjust wars or the corrupt global financial system. Am I correct to feel, as I do, that I've been born into a particularly conservative generation? Was I born without the will to question or do I just have things too good to bother fighting for anything?

TONY JONES: Germaine, let's start with you.

GERMAINE GREER: One of the interesting things about feminism is you have to encounter the real nature of a woman's life in our society at one of the painful points. You know, you come through school and you're probably doing better than the boys and everyone will tell you you're doing better than the boys. What they won't tell you is that the most successful boys didn't bother doing well at school at all. So somehow you've been suckered into conforming with a system which is meant to make you a useful member of society, in the sense that you will have a job and you will carry out that job and you will be promoted at the snail's pace that women are promoted at. It's when other things happen, like when you find yourself pregnant, having your first baby and discovering what the politics are of the birth place and how we still have preventable deaths of mothers or you may find it when you're actually looking after an ageing parent and you suddenly realise that the entire sector is under-resourced, that there's no prestige connected with doing it, and that actually caring - we talk about education, education, education - we do nothing but disable it and nickel and dime it and try to do it on the cheap. We spend vast amounts of money making war, uselessly for the most part, and we don't actually consider the question of doing the best by our own people. Now, if you're constantly being told that you've got it all then you might even begin to believe it. It comes to the point where you actually start thinking what is it that I do have? You know, everyone says this is the property-owning democracy. What does that mean? That means that you enter into debt. That means that you're a debt slave. That means that you have a lifetime of debt and DIY, as I used to explain this. That you've actually been tamed as a member of a body politic. You don't have a long-term vision. You're actually being told that you need to think short-term. Everybody says it's what's in your pocket, it's what you can buy. No-one talks about a vision of the future ever.

TONY JONES: Okay, Germaine, the question was about, in a way, a sort of nostalgia for a revolutionary period in the '60s, possibly the '70s?

GERMAINE GREER: But she didn't have nostalgia because she wasn't there. I mean what--

TONY JONES: But you were, you see, and I guess maybe she was trying to work out what you thought, whether that nostalgia is well placed or not, whether it was revolutionary or whether it was just a small group of people, highly educated, who were pushing those boundaries?

GERMAINE GREER: Well, don't imagine that you need a large group of people to make a revolution. You don't.

TONY JONES: I'm sorry, let's just go back and hear from Emilia Terzon. She's just jumped up again.

CONSERVATIVE GEN NOW

EMILIA TERZON: I'm just going to re-clarify. So I feel that compared to my parents, who challenge things so much, that most of all of the people around me don't really challenge things that much. They don't challenge politics. They don't challenge a lot of ideals. They don't even challenge the idea that we live in this completely consumer society. So I wanted to know from the panel do they think my generation is challenging society less than their generation was?

PETER HITCHENS: I was in the '60s too and--

TONY JONES: You were, in fact, a Trotskyist in those days.

PETER HITCHENS: I was a revolutionary socialist, yes. And there are two theories about this. One is quite plausible, which is they put something in the water because we all seemed to go completely around the bend. So the other is that, in fact, my generation are amazingly selfish, shouting loudly for what they wanted, got what they wanted and have been contented ever since and they got it on behalf of you. Whether you're happy with what they got is up to you but I think that's the reason why it's different.

TONY JONES: Hannah.

HANNA ROSIN: I just want to give a little credit to your generation because there is one great struggle, which is gay rights. That is a huge struggle that this generation has brought to bear, gay marriage. You guys are still working it out but I think that's, you know, you should take credit for that in your generation.

DAN SAVAGE: And remember all of those movements, the antiwar movement, the feminist movement, women's liberation movement - those were sort of generative. They came about when people became supremely uncomfortable. They were forced up against a wall and then they pushed back hard and so don't look at sort of the AIDS activists in the '80s and think, God, they were so motivated. Why aren't we like that? They got so motivated, my generation of gay men at that time, because we were fucking dying and we had a gun to our heads and we had to come out and fight. It's not that everybody thought, hey, let's like find something to fight about. Here's this AIDS thing. Let's fight about that." So just keep your eyes open and when the moment arrives for your generation, if it arrives for your generation...

PETER HITCHENS: All revolutionaries...

DAN SAVAGE: ...it will identify itself to you.

PETER HITCHENS: All revolutionaries claim to be fighting against the oppression of other people when, in fact, they're fighting for their own personal advantage.

TONY JONES: On that one-liner we'll move on.

DAN SAVAGE: I'm fighting for everybody.

TONY JONES: Sorry, go on.

DAN SAVAGE: Well, the gay rights movement is fighting for the advantage of being treated equally and being full members of society. We are not fighting to take anything from anyone else.

PETER HITCHENS: Says you.

DAN SAVAGE: That is not some selfish goal that we had in mind. Oh, it would be really fun to be equal under the law.

PETER HITCHENS: No selfishness involved in it at all. Not a bit. No.

DAN SAVAGE: No. I'm not trying to prevent you from living your life.

PETER HITCHENS: Well, of course I'm selfish but I don't pretend not to be.

GERMAINE GREER: But there's something you need to remember, which is the overriding of all of this as a kind of warfare. We weren't really fighting, we were arguing, we were pleading, we were demonstrating, we were doing street theatre. We were trying to suggest to people that there was a better way to live. I mean I wrote a book because I could see that women were being denied nobility, because they weren't able to be responsible for their own actions. Their whole lives were lived as if, you know, look what you made me do because women didn't have autonomy. The first thing you have to do to become a moral creature is to secure autonomy, to stand up and be responsible for what you do yourself and it wasn't so much that we were out there slugging, although I can remember terrible moments like when we marched on the Capitol in Washington and found ourselves confronted by an entirely black police force, a piece of completely cynical opposition between the black working class policemen and the middle class white women. We went through all these strange confrontations and we got scared. We got beaten up. We got - our houses were broken into by the police and all that good stuff. But the fight wasn't in terms of hitting someone, hurting someone, defeating someone. It was getting a moment to actually say something clearly and be heard.

TONY JONES: Okay, I'm going to go to - I'm going to bring you back because we've got a question that you might like to comment on. The question is from Claire King.

DO WE NEED MARRIAGE?

CLAIRE KING: A few weeks ago...

TONY JONES: Sorry, Claire, just wait for the microphone. There you go.

CLAIRE KING: A few weeks ago, in this very auditorium, Julia Gillard explained her reluctance to embrace gay marriage as not a result of prejudice but because it seemed abhorrent to her that women should be given from their fathers to their husbands. Regardless of gender, is marriage still relevant?

TONY JONES: Dan Savage, start with you?

DAN SAVAGE: Well, marriage, I think, is hugely relevant, particularly to sexual minorities. You know, one of the things that marriage allows you to do is to choose for yourself who your immediate next of kin is and that matters very much to people who may have homophobic relatives. If Terry and I should be lucky - my husband Terry and I have been together for 20 years - if we should be so luck as to live for 50 years, there is arguably a scenario under which one of us could be dying in the hospital and some fifth cousin, tenth removed could blow in and say "I am the immediate next of kin", absent our ability and freedom to marry. Marriage is hugely relevant and it's only as patriarchal an institution as you choose to make it. People who are queer who want to marry - gay people, lesbians who wish to marry - we're constantly told that we're seeking to redefine the institution of marriage. The truth is that straight people redefined the institution of marriage already. Marriage now is the legal union of two autonomous and equal individuals, period, the end. Everything else is optional. Your marriage can be monogamous or not. You can have children or not. It can be for life or not. It can be religious or not. The wife can submit joyfully to the husband, as the southern Baptists in the United States urge wives to do, or the husband can submit joyfully to the wife, as the female dominance fans urge husbands to do. Two people get to create their marriage for themselves. So for Julia Gillard to hide behind a defunct and obsolete definition of marriage as some sort of sexist and patriarchal institution, which it once was and is no longer because straight people redefined it, I think is hypocritical and absurd and transparently horse shit.

TONY JONES: Peter Hitchens?

PETER HITCHENS: Dan Atkinson(sic) is absolutely right about one thing, which is that heterosexual marriage has been redefined to the point where it is dying very rapidly in western societies. It's become easier to get out of a marriage than it is to get out of a car leasing agreement and, as a result, many people are not getting married in the first place. I don't know what the statistics are here but in my own country marriage is dying out as a thing which people do and increasingly it has been sidelined and it is the crucial issue of the modern western world as to whether marriage will survive as a relationship at all. I think it should. They probably think it shouldn't.

DAN SAVAGE: I absolutely think it should. I got goddamn married.

PETER HITCHENS: We're moving towards a position where the only people interested in getting married are lesbian clergy women and I look forward to the day when the female Archbishop of Canterbury is married in a lesbian marriage to the female Archbishop of York.

DAN SAVAGE: I think Hannah should speak to this because what we see now is a real class division.

HANNA ROSIN: Because I'm a lesbian clergywoman.

DAN SAVAGE: Because you're a lesbian clergywoman.

HANNA ROSIN: Yes.

DAN SAVAGE: Because we see a real class difference on marriage.

HANNA ROSIN: Yes.

DAN SAVAGE: And when people have economic security to a certain extent, and they have a good education, those people tend to marry and stay married when they marry. I'm sure you don't support strong unions, living wage jobs, economic security and economic justice but nothing would go further to strengthen the institution of marriage than those kinds of securities and equalities.

HANNA ROSIN: Also, I have to say the nostalgia drives me crazy because the fact is that the working class is not getting married and yet they are forced to cling to this ideal of marriage, because everyone keeps telling them marriage is a thing they have to get married, when we would be much better off if we did things like create social policies that treated three people who, say, lived in a house and had a child together and supported those people, whether or not they were married. That's what America needs to do. We can't force people to get married, you know, through nostalgia, the force of nostalgia.

TONY JONES: Why did you get married, because you did and you have got a number of children, as well?

HANNA ROSIN: Because, you know, I did what people do. I didn't think about it. I'm not a gay rights activist. You know, I got married because people get married.

DAN SAVAGE: You got straight married.

DAN SAVAGE: I just straight got married. I just, you know, got married.

TONY JONES: Germaine?

GERMAINE GREER: Well, I think marriage is a terrible system. I think it's a terrible system for lots of reasons. We live too long. We change too much. Our lives are constantly being rebuilt as to whether we're in an industry, out of it, in a creative activity. Da da da da. We meet new people. We turn into different people.

DAN SAVAGE: Which is why divorce isn't always a tragedy. This idea that if two people outlive a marriage that that marriage was a failure, I think is something we need to discard. You know, we tell people that, you know, if somebody dies, congratulations that was a successful marriage. But if you part and it was an amicable parting. You were together 25 years. You raised a couple of kids during that time you were married and then you move on to perhaps new partners, new interests, a sort of whole new stage of life, why can't we say that was a successful marriage and now those two people are in new successful marriage?

GERMAINE GREER: I'm in the that position because my marriage lasted three weeks and...

TONY JONES: I don't know that you are in that position.

GERMAINE GREER: People said, "Your marriage failed," and I said "No, it didn't fail, it was just short."

TONY JONES: Okay, we're fast running out of time. Let's go to our next question which is from Anna Christie.

EPIPHANIES

ANNA CHRISTIE: Oh, hi. It's a question for Peter. I'm fascinated by your conversion from revolutionary to authoritarian and so I wanted to ask how did this turn around in your personal values occur and was it an epiphany or was it a series of doubts that eventually weighed on you and convinced you that you were wrong?

PETER HITCHENS: Well, hang on a minute. First of all revolutionaries are tremendously authoritarian. It's revolutionaries who build gulags and set up the KGB. Revolutionaries are far more authoritarian than I am. But the fundamental reason why I no longer hold the infantile views which held in my late teens and early 20s is precisely that: that I grew up. The thing which astonishes me is that so many of my generation did not grow up and still, while they're drawing their pensions, they have revolutionary opinions and attend Rolling Stones concerts. What is wrong with these people?

DAN SAVAGE: How do you hope to bring about the world - to return the world to the state you would like to see it in without authoritarian (indistinct) ...

PETER HITCHENS: Oh, I gave that...

DAN SAVAGE: You're not going to get the pot out of my hands any other way.

PETER HITCHENS: I gave that up long ago. It would only make me miserable. I know that you people have won. All that I seek to do...

DAN SAVAGE: Which is why you have to be gay married now and do drugs now with the rest of us.

PETER HITCHENS: No, all I seek to do is to tell the truth about you and what you want while it's still allowed to do so because you are so fantastically intolerant.

TONY JONES: Now, Peter, I've got to interrupt. What do you mean when you say "you people"?

PETER HITCHENS: I mean the cultural revolution. I mean the cultural and moral revolution which has swept the western world since the collapse of Christianity.

DAN SAVAGE: I'm not intolerant.

PETER HITCHENS: It changed our societies, as anybody who has lived through it knows, out of all recognition in the course of 50 years and in my view for the worst. He's part of it. She's part of it. For all I know you are part of it but I'm not.

DAN SAVAGE: You're paranoid and you're projecting by saying we are intolerant. You have...

PETER HITCHENS: See, this is the intolerance. Because I hold an opinion different from his, he has become suddenly a qualified psychoanalyst who can tell me - who can tell me that my opinions which I am entitled to hold.

DAN SAVAGE: You're entitled to your opinions. You're not entitled to your smears.

PETER HITCHENS: But are a pathology. And this is the absolute seed bed of totalitarianism. When you start believing that the opinions of other people are a pathology, then you are in the beginning...

DAN SAVAGE: You're the one standing there pathologising other people's choices.

PETER HITCHENS: ...in the beginning of the stage that leads to the secret police and the Gulags.

DAN SAVAGE: You are the one sitting there saying that society is sick and damaged because other people are now free as white men used to be.

PETER HITCHENS: You'll have the whole world to yourself soon. You can't imagine anybody else is entitled to hold a view different from yours without having some kind of personal defect. That's what's wrong with you.

TONY JONES: Okay.

DAN SAVAGE: He's filibustering.

TONY JONES: Yeah. Yeah. So you get a chance now.

DAN SAVAGE: You are absolutely entitled to hold your opinions but you sit there...

PETER HITCHENS: That's not what you really think.

TONY JONES: Well, hang on. Hang on. Let him...

PETER HITCHENS: You're just saying that for public consumption.

TONY JONES: Peter, let him finish, if you wouldn't mind.

DAN SAVAGE: You sit there pathologising other people's choices. You sit there saying that other people being free to live their lives by their own light in some way oppresses you, when it oppresses you in no way whatsoever. You are free not to get gay married. You are free not to use drugs. You are free not to drink. You are free to stay married to one person for the rest of your life. You are free to stay home and raise your wife's children so they always have a parent by their side. You are not free to sit there and say that other people being just as free as you are to live their lives and make their own choices in some way is damaging you personally, in some way is destroying society. People are freer now, happier now. It's a less intolerant world than it used to be because people like me are now empowered to look at people like you and say you are full of shit.

PETER HITCHENS: This is so personal. Can I respond to it before the...

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDE AND CHEER)

PETER HITCHENS: It's a rally.

TONY JONES: Okay.

PETER HITCHENS: It's a rally.

TONY JONES: Hold on. We actually do need to hear (indistinct)...

PETER HITCHENS: While you do this - while you do this I can't talk. While you do that - while you do that I can't talk and you know it and that's to your - and that's to your shame because silencing opponents is a very wicked thing to want to do.

DAN SAVAGE: You've been a lot of things tonight, but you've not been silenced.

PETER HITCHENS: You said this is very personal. This is very personal. I'll reply to it. I am a very rich and fortunate person. I can - and I'm coming towards the end of my life anyway. I can personally escape many of the consequences of this but most people can't. They can't afford to and leave aside some of the things you've mentioned but a society in which the use of illegal drugs is widespread and unrestrained is one in which everybody is affected by the consequences, whatever they themselves do. It's like that ridiculous bumper sticker "Don't like abortion? Don't have one," to which my reply has always been: "Don't like murder? Don't commit one". The fact is if a society permits - if a society permits things to happen which damage the lives of many people, who, as I've said earlier as a result of the selfish unwillingness of those who do those things to recognise that they have consequences, it affects everybody.

DAN SAVAGE: Forcing women to give birth against their will damages women.

HANNA ROSIN: Yeah, I mean...

PETER HITCHENS: We have - those of us who oppose the cultural revolution and think that it's a mistake are entitled to say so for the moment.

DAN SAVAGE: You're entitled to say so.

PETER HITCHENS: For the moment.

DAN SAVAGE: You will always be entitled to say so.

TONY JONES: Okay. I'm going - we're nearly out of time, I'm sorry to say. I'm going to go to a final question, which you'll be able to respond to and in your own way. The question comes from Lisa Malouf.

WHICH DANGEROUS IDEA?

LISA MALOUF: Which so-called dangerous idea do you each think would have the greatest potential to change the world for the better if where implemented?

TONY JONES: Dan, let's start with you.

HANNA ROSIN: Oh, that's a hard one

DAN SAVAGE: Oh, my God.

HANNA ROSIN: You got to give us a minute to think about that.

DAN SAVAGE: Population control. There's too many goddamn people on the planet. And I don't know if that's a - you know, I'm pro-choice. I believe that women should have the right to control their bodies. Sometimes in my darker moments I am anti-choice. I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years. That's a dangerous idea. She wanted a dangerous idea. So throw a chair at me.

TONY JONES: That is a very dangerous idea.

HANNA ROSIN: I actually have to think about it for a minute. I have to think about it.

TONY JONES: Okay. Let's go to Germaine.

GERMAINE GREER: Well, I'm always in the same place. The most dangerous idea, the one that terrifies us the most, is freedom - to actually be free - is, to most human beings, disorientating, terrifying but it's the essential bottom line. If you want to be a moral individual you must be free to make choices and that includes making mistakes.

TONY JONES: Peter?

PETER HITCHENS: The most dangerous idea in human history and philosophy remains the belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God and rose from the dead and that is the most dangerous idea you will ever encounter.

DAN SAVAGE: I'd have to agree with that.

TONY JONES: Just quickly, because I think you can't really leave it there, why dangerous?

PETER HITCHENS: I can't really leave it there? Because it alters the whole of human behaviour and all our responsibilities. It turns the universe from a meaningless chaos into a designed place in which there is justice and there is hope and, therefore, we all have a duty to discover the nature of that justice and work towards that hope. It alters us all. If we reject It, it alters us all was well. It is incredibly dangerous. It's why so many people turn against it.

TONY JONES: Hanna Rosin?

HANNA ROSIN: I'm tempted to say something about the Jesus Christ but being the Jewish one on the panel I'll let that one go. Given our conversation today, I think I'm going to go with we should watch our children less. We live in a culture which follows our children around, is obsessed with safety, decides everything for our children, doesn't let them have any freedom. Doesn't let them wander. Doesn't let them go anywhere or do anything by themselves and we should, in fact, do less with our children, not more.

TONY JONES: Thank you very much. I'm very sorry to say that is all we have time for tonight. Please thank our panel: Germaine Greer, Peter Hitchens, Hanna Rosin, Dan Savage. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. And a special thanks to the Sydney Opera House, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, the St James's Ethics Centre and our largest ever audience. Please give yourselves a round of applause. Thank you. Now then, Prime Minister Abbott has famously declared Australia open for business. Next week Q&A will follow suite with a panel of business leaders facing your questions: the head of Santos Oil and Gas, David Knox; business woman and chair of the Women's Leadership Institute Carole Schwartz; the chair of the HSBC Bank and former president of the Business Council Graham Bradley; Nestle Australia chair Elizabeth Proust; and the founder of Aussie Home Loans John Symond. What would business leaders like to change about Australia? Join us on Q&A next week to find out. Good night.