Live recording of The Big Issue & The Protagonists on The World Today.

Hour 1: Environment Protection Reform Bills - Power Surge or Power Trip?

Australia's Environment Protection Reform Bills 2025, passed in late November 2025 representing major amendments to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) and 11 other Acts. It established new framework for stronger Federal environmental laws, new Environmental Standards, an independent National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) to streamlining project assessments and enhance enforcement for environmental protection and accountability.

This legislation was a deal between the Greens and Labour. The LNP opposed the legislation.

Of course the devil is in the detail and we ask our guests who are great conservationists and experts in regulation how this legislation improves what it replaced. Does it represent positive reform or if we will have worse environmental outcomes? Does it give the Federal government more discretionary power to ram through projects that should receive more scrutiny. Does it provide greater certainty to important projects and does it limit our choices on energy generation?

GUESTS

Dr Peter Ridd, Adjunct Fellow IPA, Geophysicist.

Dr Peter Ridd is a geophysicist with over 100 publications and 35 years' experience working on the Great Barrier Reef and developed a wide range of world-first optical and electronic instruments for measuring environmental conditions near corals and other ecosystems. He was head of Physics at James Cook University for over a decade before being fired, in 2018, for questioning the quality assurance systems used by reef science institutions. He is an Adjunct Fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs.

Dr Alan Moran, Principal of Regulation Economics.

Dr Alan Moran is Principal of Regulation Economics. He is a noted economist who has analysed and written extensively from a free market perspective. Alan was the Director of the Deregulation Unit at the Institute of Public Affairs from 1996 until 2014. He was previously a senior official in Australia's Productivity Commission and Director of the Commonwealth's Office of Regulation Review. Alan was educated in the UK and has a PhD in transport economics from the University of Liverpool and degrees from the University of Salford and the London School of Economics.

About The Big Issue: TWT takes on the Big Issues with an angle you might not expect from a perspective you won't find in the mainstream media.

Hour 2: Failures in UK Pharma & Biotech

We've had the pandemic, the expensive inquiries or coverups, evidence of the corruption of scientific publications and payments to the medical establishment that tragically encouraged citizens to take the jab - resulting in shocking death and injuries for little recompense.

The question is asked many times - do we now all exist in a moral vacuum. That Governments can do as they please - even maim and injure - and corruption is now so obvious it triggers little outrage or demand for accountability?

Our panel today will give us valuable insights into the highly lucrative pharmaceutical industry, into the individuals who have made it to the top, to the regulatory agencies funded by taxpayers to protect them from risky drugs and how they failed so spectacularly during the most critical time.

Has anything changed - we suspect not because the regulatory agencies and their masters have completely avoided scrutiny - despite the terrible toll.

We do need to ask how influential the UK pharmaceutical industrial complex was in the global Covid scam and is this where the buck should ultimately stop?

Mike Ryan HOST

GUEST:

Hedley Rees, Managing Director and Lead Consultant at Pharmaflow Limited.

Hedley Rees is the Managing Director and Lead Consultant at PharmaFlow Limited, a UK-based consultancy specialising in the strategic design and management of preclinical, clinical, and commercial supply chains in the pharmaceutical and life science industries. His previous appointments include senior positions at Bayer UK, British Biotech, Vernalis, Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, and OSI Pharmaceuticals. Hedley is also author of Wiley's Supply Chain Management in the Drug Industry: Delivering Patient Value for Pharmaceuticals and Biologics, which published in 2011 and a second publication Transforming the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain.

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