Dr Richard Denniss is the co-Chief Executive Officer at the Australia Institute. He is a prominent Australian economist, author and public policy commentator, and previously an Associate Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at ANU and a Lecturer in Economics at the University of Newcastle. The Australian Financial Review listed Richard Denniss and Ben Oquist of The Australia Institute on their 'Covert Power' 2018 list of the most powerful people in Australia.

Richard Denniss is a former columnist for Australian Financial Review and the Guardian and has been featured in The Monthly. He publishes regularly in academic journals and has written 6 books including Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough (with Clive Hamilton), An introduction to Australian Public Policy (with Sarah Maddison), Minority Policy: Rethinking Governance When Parliament Matters (with Brenton Prosser), Econobabble: How to Decode Political Spin and Economic Nonsense, Curing Affluenza: How to Buy Less Stuff and Save the World and the June 2018 Quarterly Essay, Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next which was also adapted into a book of the same title. Richard is also a contributing author in What’s the Big Idea?, released by Australia Institute Press.