Marcia Hines, singer

Being the hope junkie that I am, I would love world peace. A bit more understanding and world peace would be the gift that keeps on giving, right? I hope that doesn’t sound too airy fairy but really, what else could I want? Is everybody else saying that?

If you can’t think it, you can’t do it, you know. World leaders need to sit down, put their egos to the side and have a bit of a talk; that’s how most things get resolved. You mightn’t like what you’re going to hear, and vice versa, but it’s got to happen. Everybody would breathe a sigh of relief.

Hines is in Velvet Rewired at Sydney Opera House until February 12.

Robyn Nevin, actor

My wish is for us all to be given the gift of sight that enables each of us to “see” the gift of health — physical, mental and spiritual. As we value a healthy body, mind and spirit, so we value a healthy planet which in turn gives us the sustenance to endure.

It’s based on my clear understanding that my main priority as a working actress and director has been taking care of my health. I came to this after years of making bad judgments, like smoking, and then when I gave up, I realised the damage that it had done. It was the best decision I ever made.

I understood that taking care of my health had to be a priority. So that’s really influenced my thinking about everyone else. I just wish everyone else would do the same thing because it would lead to a revolution, it would just be extraordinary. It’s not going to happen, of course, but that’s my wish. It’s holistic health, mental, emotional and physical. If that happened, it would lead to an understanding that in taking care of yourself, the outcome of that is so positive, it then follows that you take care of the health of everything around you, animals and nature.

I suppose it’s fundamentally valuing the life that we’re given, and the lives that we see around us. If it radiates out from the individual, then it does become a global issue, it becomes care of what we have, and all we have are ourselves and our world.

Nevin is in The Mousetrap in Melbourne, which opens in February and has just finished filming two movies, Sting and The Appleton Ladies Potato Race.

Michala Banas, actor

It’s a tricky question because everyone across the world has different needs. Then I thought, what am I personally still trying to get better at that everyone else could be, too? And that’s probably being kind — firstly to yourself, and then to other people. I think kindness and being gentle with ourselves, and with each other, would go a long way.

It’s something you’ve got to practise. Something I’m still learning about and trying to get better at myself. What I do know is that the more I am kind to myself and take a moment to think about other people’s circumstances and situations — because we often don’t know what they are — the nicer an experience I have in the world. The second I do something even slightly kind or selfless, something big shifts.

It starts with doing that for yourself. I feel like a lot of people aren’t particularly nice to themselves and it’s just so important to be. That’s when joy and peace, and a lot of the other things that I would wish for the world will come. It sounds a bit corny, but I think the things that we would all wish to resolve - war and poverty and the things people are struggling with across the globe - it starts with kindness.

Banas is appearing in The Spooky Files and Turn Up The Volume for the ABC next year, and is a judge for the Peninsula Film Festival in February.

Ben Quilty, artist

My one wish is for teachers to be respected again in our community, by students, by parents and by governments. Education has been under siege by successive governments for decades. It’s easier to cut pay, retirement plans and infrastructure funding for schools when respect for teachers is so appallingly low.

When I finished art school in 1995, there were 11 art schools in New South Wales. Now there are three. They’re all struggling. The last federal Liberal government implemented sustained and brutal attacks on all humanities courses: art, history, music, philosophy, film studies, language studies and international relations. All university lecturers were refused JobKeeper through the pandemic lockdowns, unless they worked for the handful of private universities in Australia. Many I know left the teaching profession altogether.

There are still people who claim that the world is flat and that climate change is a conspiracy theory. Racism is rife in our communities. It is true that fear leads us to simplistic and knee-jerk reactions to the world, but so does a lack of education. By undermining education in Australia, we are undermining the very social fabric of our communities. When Christmas comes around again, buy your kid’s teacher a bottle of champagne, or even just write them a note saying thank you. They deserve it!

Rebecca Lim, author

I really think artificial intelligence is a huge frontier that we are going to have to grapple with over the next few decades. With that rise of AI, we need to look at what it means to be “human”, what the boundary between human and non-human might be, and all the ethical issues that raises.

In that context, my wish for next year is that we need to leverage the power of human connection to lift people up, to not leave people behind, to build community, to remember how to communicate with people, to check in with them, and to remember how to hope. To think about the things that make us unique and really lean into those things. Because I think the future is going to get a lot faster and more inhuman, and be a lot more challenging.

We’re almost creating our own endgame now, making ourselves obsolete. Obviously, AI can solve problems that human minds can’t solve, but it may become something that we can’t control – it learns from and about us, but is not of us – so how’s it going to help us to combat racism or misogyny or climate change if it can’t truly experience those things itself? Our future needs to get more human, rather than less. We need to hold onto what makes us truly alive.

Lim’s book, Tiger Daughter, won the main Children’s Book Council of Australian Award in 2022.

Abdul Abdullah, artist

It’s such a big question, but I think it would be that we leave the world a better place than we found it. Part of that is investing in the next generation and young people. Whether that’s through education or cultural and sports programs, we need to provide young people with the opportunity to thrive.

I work with young people a lot at high schools and I’m so optimistic. Usually I meet them in art classes and that involves a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking; art is so much about challenging the status quo or redefining things. Having met so many young people, I am sure that the future is in good hands.

Abdullah’s work appears in Portrait23: Identity at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, which opens on March 10.

Fanny Lumsden, singer/songwriter

I think mine is that everyone gets to experience hope. I think hope gives you a reason. It gives you cause to change your mind, start again and that things can be better — you can be better at whatever level you want, that there is hope for that. Whether that’s a huge issue like the future of the planet, or to eat better food or just to have a better day today.

I think that hope changes minds, and it can change people, and it changes outcomes. That is my wish.

Lumsden plays the Tamworth Music Festival on January 21.

Adam Zwar, writer

I think the world would benefit from more comedy movies. What happened to them? At the moment, Seth Rogan and Judd Apatow are doing all the heavy lifting and they can only pump something out every two years.

It seems that to limit financial exposure, studios are now only making big budget action movies, which they shove a few jokes into, and earnest mid-budget message movies that might win them an Oscar. And I get it. Comedy’s hard because it’s subjective. But if studios make a comedy that catches fire, the financial rewards are huge and for a moment, the world will stop being such an angry place.

Zwar writes via substack at Thekicker.substack.com.

Luke Sinclair, singer/songwriter

The ugly rise of Ayn Rand-esque capitalist neo-liberalism, individualism, free enterprise, deregulation and the relentless pursuit of profit has all but destroyed the chances of a peaceful, compassionate and empathetic reality in my lifetime. One where social connection (not social media) and community prevail, and housing is a basic human right instead of an unattainable commodity.

So, if I had one wish I would wish for … an all-knowing, all-seeing, extra-terrestrial life force to arrive on Earth, with superior tech beyond our capacity for understanding. A life force so powerfully peaceful, compassionate and empathetic that its mere presence causes the permanent disablement of all military weaponry. It would then lower its spaceship gangway to present an androgynous bot in human form to oversee our planet’s transition from impending doom and chaos, to global peace, love and understanding.

Declaring Earth to be under synthetic dictatorship until the transition is complete, it would publicly denounce and criminalise politics and religion outside the home, then systematically and ruthlessly abolish the privatisation and deregulation of services related to the general health and wellbeing of society — education, housing, childcare and so on.

It would unite the planet and walk us into the light over generations until the archaic violence and discriminations of our past are forgotten. Then it will phone home and wait out in the bush for the ET Uber service to arrive and take it back to the stars. And we all live happily ever after … The End.

That’s really just a long-winded way of saying world peace.

The Luke Sinclair Set plays the Workers Club, Fitzroy, on January 12, and George Lane, St Kilda, on February 17. New single Things Back Home is out now via ABC Music.

Tom Keneally, author

We congratulate ourselves on being a very advanced and safe country but we’re living with a huge number of refugees in misery. There are nearly 90 million refugees around the world. It’s caused by tyranny but also in reaction to American, and sadly thus Australian, policy. We f—ed up their countries - or at least we helped - by our intrusions, but we won’t help those seeking refuge.

Our whole immigration system has become Byzantine, which is a great irony for our nation. At the end of WWII, the question of displaced persons was dealt with under the Marshall plan and it was under that plan that this country was transformed, to all our benefit. There was a great world program to deal with displaced persons.

That’s the wish, that some great international leader would provide some moral leadership on this issue. We need someone like Roosevelt or Marshall. America once had the power to bring everyone together on this cause, it has lost the capacity to do that now. So, where will the power arise from to lead us out of this?

There’s no urgency for it except at the level of us punters, it’s the first thing we shake our heads about when we rise and the last when we retire. We have a moral obligation to these people. Let’s hope public opinion allows some more humanity to enter the conversation.

Ella Hooper, singer

I recently learned about hyper vigilance and I think most people I know are experiencing a touch of that, due to the effects of these last few years. Strange and concerning times where it felt like one global disaster piled onto another. My wish is that we don’t press ourselves into acting normal, just yet, and stress ourselves out further by upholding old expectations, even rituals. Many of us have changed and unraveled some.

Let’s not re-ravel too hastily. Let’s explore what’s happened inside and outside us, and let ourselves off the hook for - and maybe even welcome- being a bit different.

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