Justice and Peace Office

Dr Michael Walker has more than 20 years of experience in advocacy, mainly at the SDA trade union, where he previously collaborated with the JPO on campaigns about retail trading hours and penalty rates. Prior to that, Michael interned at the Chicago-based Shriver Center on Poverty Law, working on equitable access to public housing and welfare benefits, and volunteered at the Jesuit Refugee Service in Kings Cross.

Email: michael.walker@sydneycatholic.org

Mobile: 0439 584 221

Dr Robbie Lloyd is a professional educator, mental health worker and reform agent in community health. He has worked for over 30 years in frontline community-based mental health and alcohol & other drugs support across Australia, in New Zealand, Indonesia and India. He has also been part of the Global Mental Health movement across Asia Pacific since 2012, with colleagues from the Creating Futures Collaborative for Rural, Remote, Indigenous & Islander Mental Health. This network is coordinated from James Cook University in Cairns, working to honour First Nations healers and medicines alongside western ways, in training local people to become the frontline workers in MH & AOD and Trauma Informed Care. Robbie has worked with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for nearly 30 years, and he is also involved in the Adult Community Education movement across Australia, sitting on the national board of Adult Learning Australia for the past five years. He is passionate about building programs to support vulnerable community groups, including traumatized young people in Years 9&10 who are enrolling in Special Assistance High Schools after being rejected by mainstream schools because of their acting out behaviour due to trauma.

Email: robbie.lloyd@sydneycatholic.org

Mobile: 0417 570 980

During the early 1990’s Julie wrote a number of documentaries including, Mary the story of Saint Mary MacKillop, The Business of Saint Making and Muslim Converts, before joining  The Australian Financial Review as a senior writer for over a decade.  From 2007 onward she worked with Federal Labor, the NSW Greens, United Voice (then the LHMU) Greenpeace and more recently, ActionAid. She is currently doing a PhD at Western Sydney University into the question of Australia’s treatment of refugees. In 2016 she got together with Carmen Lawrence, Pamela Curr, Wendy Bacon and Claire O’Connor to form, Australian Women in Support of Women on Nauru.She is passionate about changing the way Australia treats those who ask for our protection and how we treat this ancient land.

Email: julie.macken@sydneycatholic.org

Fr Peter Smith has been a priest of the Archdiocese of Sydney, Australia since 1985. He is the Promoter of Justice and Peace for the Archdiocese. Peter is also the Parish Priest of the inner city parish of St Columbas North Leichhardt and an adjunct of the University of Notre Dame, Sydney.

Peter is the Co-editor in Chief of Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics. He has published articles on a variety of Social Justice Issues and presented at a number of international conferences including for the Vatican Dicastery for Integral Human Development. He is a co-founder and partner of the Refugee Welcome Centre Lilyfield and a Founding member of The Global Catholic Climate Network (now the Laudato Si’ movement).