Alex Newton

Alex Newton is a lawyer and public policy expert with extensive experience in executive roles, in both national and international contexts. From 2009 to 2015, she was employed as a senior advisor in Australia’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, specializing in legal and social policy. Alex led work on whole-of-government strategies to develop social investment in Australia. Most recently, she was appointed as Group Director of the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce: the national taskforce established by the Australian Government to manage over 2,500 complaints of sexual and other forms of abuse in the Australian Defence Force.

 

Outside her work for the public service, Alex lectures a postgraduate law course in transnational business and human rights at the Australian National University; she created the course in 2010 and continues to run it as an annual intensive. She also lectures in international human rights law at the University of Technology, Sydney.

 

Previously, Alex worked with the United Nations Secretary-General’s Policy Committee in New York and, before that, she was a lawyer with the Australian Human Rights Commission. She started her career as a corporate lawyer with the firm King and Wood Mallesons, Sydney.

 

Alex has authored numerous publications on business and human rights, and social responsibility and speaks regularly on these issues in Australia and internationally.

 

She holds a Master of Laws from Columbia University, New York and Bachelors of Arts and Laws (first class honours) from Sydney University.