Australia Day full Honours list 2024: Recognising our national treasures and the way they shaped the country

From groundbreaking researchers to TV hosts, politicians, musicians, community heroes and volunteers, Australians from all walks of life have been recognised in the latest Australia Day Honours List.

For the second time, women outnumber men, accounting for 373 of the 739 recipients named in the list which was made public Thursday night.

The highest honour, the Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), was appointed to four people: scientist and chemical engineer David Boge, University of Technology Sydney chancellor and CSIRO chair Catherine Livingstone, University of Queensland vice-chancellor Deborah Terry, and criminologist Lorraine Mazerolle.

Ms Livingstone — honoured for her service to business, education, science and the arts — said while she was involved across multiple sectors, they were all linked.

“They’re all mutually reinforcing, the education is linked to science and technology which is linked to innovation and creative thinking and the arts,” she said.

“It’s a recognition of the interconnectedness of all those areas.”

Fellow AC appointee Professor Mazerolle’s long-standing research in Australia and the US has led to evidenced-based policing reforms.

She said being named on the Honours List was recognition of decades trying to reduce crime and bring fairness to the justice system, noting that since she was a teenager she wanted to be a criminologist.

“I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s in Adelaide and there were lots of significant and high-profile child abductions occurring and high-profile murders, and as a young teenager, I couldn’t understand why these events were happening,” she said.

Since then, Prof. Mazerolle has gone on to run large, randomised trials to test practices used by police to reduce crime levels.

“From an economic point of view, it’s important for police to focus on those interventions to bring about a better crime control outcome without harm, and look at police practice that reduce crime but don’t harm individuals,” she said.

WA’s anti-corruption boss John McKechnie and noted burns specialist Professor Fiona Wood were the only two Western Australians awarded the country’s second highest honour — Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) — out of 38 across the nation.