The election of influence: how new media will shape the future of Australian politics

Address to the National Press Club (in full!)

I am a shell of myself this week. I’m hoping to get into a rhythm of frequent Substack pieces over the coming months. Right now, I’m just a tired gal.

Delivering a post-election National Press Club Address last Wednesday was an honour, an incredible opportunity and completely overwhelming. I’ve had a big weekend of doing absolutely nothing, trying to return to a normal emotional baseline. It hasn’t worked so far but we persevere.

For those who may be interested, I thought it was worth marking the moment by sharing the video in full and the entire speech (which came to around 4500 words and was written in the 48 hours before it’s delivery - terrible decision but the election result was still evolving).

I’ve received so many kind messages and a few of the opposite, but the gravity of the experience is absolutely not lost on me.

Hope you’re having a great week! Here is the button to become a paid subscriber if you’d like to support - no pressure, I understand how tough things are at the moment.

Before I begin, I would like to start by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet here today, The Ngunnawal people, and pay my respects to elders past and present. After the disturbing national conversation we have seen in the past few weeks, it has never been more important to recognise and pay respect to the enduring connection First Nations people have to this Country. This always was and always will be Aboriginal Land.

I would also like to thank the National Press Club for providing me the opportunity to speak here today. It is incredibly meaningful as a member of generation-Z to see the press club so willing to welcome a new voice to give a post-election address. I want to particularly thank Emma MacDonald and Women in Media for helping me secure this opportunity.

At the age of 10, I decided I wanted to be the Prime Minister. I chose this career path for myself during my first school trip to Canberra. I was in grade four. Shockingly, sitting in the House of Representatives, watching our country’s leaders hurl insults at each other during Question Time is not what naively inspired me to pursue the top job. It was actually during our brief stop at the Australian Electoral Commission. I promise I’m fun at parties. During the tour, the system of preferential voting was explained to me. The concept that every person had to vote, and had an equal voice was impactful. I hadn’t even encountered the work of Antony Green yet, the sheer sight of the Senate ballot was as exciting as encountering Annabel Crabb’s leather tie on election night. Much to the embarrassment of my parents, from that moment forward: I wanted to understand the system, then improve it. While I have different aspirations now, this still rings true.

I grew up in a middle-class household and was the first in my family to attend university. I spent my childhood between south-west Sydney, and in the regional town of Orange in New South Wales. To say these areas were conservative, and my worldview as a result, is an understatement.

When I was accepted to study law at university, it was not because I got the required 99 ATAR, but because the University of Queensland saw a family context that included apprehended violence court orders. Backed by the sturdy support of multiple scholarships, I was able to pursue and prioritise my education. I wanted to enact change both at a personal level and for the broader community I lived in. The experience I had I hope will resonate with many as a common vision for Australian progress. We want better for the next generation.

After commencing my law degree, I was de-stabilised by those who made up my lecture theatres. My classrooms were filled with elite, privately educated young adults, who were more concerned with which school you went to and whether your father was a barrister or an investment banker, than who you were as a person. This corner of the world was made up of wealthy white kids who would go on to make the rules that governed our most vulnerable. Decision-makers with narrow worldviews and painfully long LinkedIn posts. From the first week of my degree, I knew I would never climb any corporate ladder in this world.

Just after my 20th birthday, I applied to do pro bono work at a community legal centre that assisted prisoners. For a short time, I visited maximum security jails and met with imprisoned men who could not read or write, many of whom could have been on parole but did not have the support or even awareness to seek this out. I spoke with pregnant women who were due to give birth any day, and were subjected to long stretches of time in solitary confinement. Most, if not all of these prisoners, had been in and out of incarceration since their teens.

Continuing along this path, I then moved to work in public prosecutions, transcribing police interviews with victims and accused perpetrators. By the age of 21, I had seen and heard things no human should ever have to experience. At a personal level, I saw how the justice system fails people on all sides.

Upon finishing my degree, I landed my dream role: as an Industrial Officer at the Electrical Trades Union in Queensland and the Northern Territory. There I learned that one of my greatest strengths was in communicating the law simply. There is no better way to train that muscle than with a membership base of predominantly 50-year-old electricians who wanted and needed to understand their rights at work.

While I’m young and my experiences are therefore limited, they are deeply political. It is important to lay this foundation and be forthcoming about my partisan views. Human rights and fair pay are not radical ideas.

These formative experiences helped to lay the groundwork for the company I run today. I knew how to communicate complex legal and political ideas in simple and engaging ways. I had the skillset to explain and challenge the establishment. I looked at the media I was consuming and realised how inaccessible and right-leaning it tended towards. Youth publications failed to take the views of young people seriously. Memes and satire are fun, sure, they serve a cultural role in engagement through entertainment. But if they're our only options, our political capacity becomes minimised and the scope of our future vision diminished.

As I stepped out of my small-town upbringing and into these realisations, I increasingly wanted to learn from the people around me about progressive movements.

I wanted to create and to facilitate a space that 16-year-old me would have benefited from, then and in my future. I wanted to publish commentary and create room for people to be curious. One of my greatest fears when entering left-wing spaces was feeling like I hadn’t got a handle on the terminology, the scholarship. I was terrified to make a mistake and be removed from the community I so desperately sought connection in. As I learnt, I wanted to help people and bring them along with me. Out of these desires, along with my co-founders, we created Cheek Media Co..

The goal of Cheek has always remained the same: to provide progressive independent commentary and offer the antidote to the Murdoch chokehold that Australia has been subjected to for decades.

In 2020, it was an Instagram account with 120 followers. Fast forward to May 2025. In the seven days leading up to the federal election, Cheek content was viewed almost 20 million times on Instagram alone by four million Australians.

I am not a journalist. I have never claimed to be. Research tells us that more than half of Australians get their news on social media, but I don’t want to be seen as a source of breaking headlines. My intention is to provide opinions, distribute ideas and ask people to navigate their own moral compass in relation to mine. I want to develop media literacy and encourage people to expand their news diet. The difference between the Murdoch media and many new commentators is that we speak across to people, not down to them. We also have our own challenges, like an entirely new feedback loop of comments sections and direct messages where personalised trolling is the norm - without the barriers or protections of a masthead for whom we’re producing our work. For many of us, we are here to help people navigate uncomfortable conversations and point out the realities that many of the dinosaurs of legacy media actively conceal.

The fourth estate has failed us, because it is currently wedded to the Coalition. Our democracy requires a range of diverse voices to help repair what we’ve lost.

It isn’t all negative though. It is crucial to recognise that the best journalism in this country is done by some heavy-lifting independent outlets. Many of whom rely on donations, subscriptions and often paywalls to survive. Crikey, The Guardian, Michael West, Zee Feed, Missing Perspectives, The Saturday Paper, The Daily Aus, are all incredible contributors to the industry. Social media commentators benefit from the hard work of these journalists. However, without reach, support and accessibility - we cannot consider our media landscape to be diverse.

In late 2024, a report produced by the Australian team of the Global Media and Internet Research Project found that our country had the second-highest media concentration in the world, when looking at tracking between 2019-2022. Our newspaper sector is owned by four companies who control 84% of the market share.

Three entities: News Corp, Nine Entertainment and Southern Cross Austereo, control almost 90 percent of the metropolitan radio licences. In Brisbane, Hobart, Darwin and Adelaide, there is one daily physical masthead: all owned by Murdoch. Instead of counteracting this with a well-funded and thriving national public broadcaster, multiple coalition governments over the course of a decade have cut $1 billion in funding for the ABC. When Peter Dutton is describing outlets that offer any criticism of him as “hate media”, you can understand their motivations for these actions.

The Murdoch media represents a departure from reality. While a national housing crisis sees homelessness rise, our mastheads interview landlords to see how they’re coping. Male shock jocks like Alan Jones, Steve Price, and Andrew Bolt are allocated endless space and airtime to falsely and ironically claim they are being cancelled, while Israel’s campaign of genocide against Palestinians is reduced to the language of an ‘offensive’, a ‘conflict’, or an ‘occupation’. An ethnic cleansing happening as I speak receives little to no space in our national publications, while the Daily Mail writes 29-word headlines about Margot Robbie’s post-partum body. They’ve probably published four articles dedicated to Abbie Chatfield in the time I’ve been standing here.

In a landmark study undertaken in 2016, Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety reported that in almost 60 percent of media coverage of violence against women and children, no information about the perpetrator was reported. This hasn’t significantly improved in the last decade, and the escalating rates of men’s violence against women and children speak to this. This is not to paint every outlet with the same brush, but large parts of our landscape are guilty of obscuring national epidemics of violence and international war crimes on a daily basis.

There is an undeniable correlation between the news we consume and our worldviews. If we can understand just how fluidly Andrew Tate’s presence in a teenager’s algorithm can impact his perception of healthy relationships, consider the impact the Murdoch media has had on our collective cultural conscience for decades. It is undeniable that Rupert Murdoch is the conservative mouthpiece for the English-speaking world.

Without him, there would be no President Donald Trump.

Kevin Rudd put it simply when he declared that Rupert Murdoch is a cancer on democracy.

Rudd’s petition demanding a Royal Commission into the Murdoch media is the most signed parliamentary petition in Australian history. In his first term, Prime Minister Albanese ruled out an inquiry into News Corp., or media diversity more broadly. Now, a Labor majority government is in a perfect position to take tangible action on the serious issue of media concentration in Australia. The more immediate solution to the spreading of disinformation is to implement enforceable reporting standards with genuine consequences and deterrence measures. Currently, there is no effective framework of accountability for outlets who are willing to publish anything in pursuit of a click. Our media regulators do not have the powers required to prosecute these issues meaningfully. This is before we even consider the regulation of giants like Google and Meta.

As Margaret Simons pointed out in The Guardian, in every state and federal election since 2010, Rupert Murdoch has endorsed the Coalition. Imagine holding that much power in television, print and digital media, and losing in a landslide.

The people with more impact, or even influence (some might say), than the Murdoch media this election cycle, had an iPhone and a clip-on microphone set up in their bedroom.

That’s the difference between noise and engagement. That’s the difference between a country with democratic protections like compulsory preferential voting, and one without. While Murdoch has the capacity to drive topics into the public square, his foot soldiers no longer have the ability to curb sentiment. The people cutting through with the public are not those in newsrooms concocting inflammatory headlines, they’re people reminding a friend of how preferential voting works and that you don’t have to choose between a red or blue tie.

Influencer has been the dirtiest word of this campaign, and I think it’s deeply sad that it’s been a focal point at all.

Peter Dutton ran a campaign on concepts of culture divides, ‘woke’ politics and indoctrination. Influencer is just another part of the manufactured vernacular of the culture wars. While that word simply means to have influence over a group, we know the Murdoch media has reserved this term for young women. The agenda is clear: to undermine our intelligence, to paint us as untrustworthy and to conflate us with green juice and a discount code. There is nothing wrong with being an influencer, but the label is intended to cause significant reputational damage. The impact is deeply misogynistic. I’ve never heard that word associated with a male podcaster, commentator or businessman. To my knowledge, the same criticism was not levelled at the Betoota Advocate or Mark Bouris for their demeanour, interview style or lines of questioning. Dim lighting and the branding of honest blokey conversation is enough for men to be left alone in the headlines and largely by the public, for women: it’s superficial, dangerous, unprofessional, a failure.

“You’re just an influencer.”

Make no mistake, this is personal and territorial from legacy mastheads. During an election campaign where minimal policy vision was on offer, the outlets which turned to the shaming of commentators drove a deliberate attack on political education, engagement and new kinds of conversations. It was as boring as it was predictable.

We were called ‘self-obsessed’ and ‘self-promoting’ by the AFR, who later endorsed the Coalition.

The Sydney Morning Herald introduced Milly Rose Bannister, the founder of a mental health charity, as a LuluLemon Ambassador.

The Australian ran a range of hit pieces on female content creators, right before they massaged the Coalition’s policies in the nightly bulletin.

Interviews with Prime Minister Albanese and former Greens Leader Adam Bandt were labelled ‘a warm hug’, ‘easy’ and ‘conversational’. And yet I haven’t seen Sky’s After Dark program ask any politician about the ongoing genocide against Palestinians, reform to negative gearing or the fact that more than half of the gas exported from our country attracts no royalty payments. These were the questions to which many emerging commentators were asking for answers. It might not be Sarah Ferguson on 730, but that isn’t the only measure of valid discourse.

Letting politicians speak isn’t fawning; I believe this is a gendered critique. Just like legacy media, new media exists on a spectrum. Not all reporting, opinion pieces and interviews are made equal. Quality ebbs and flows. Style and approach changes. A truly diverse media landscape allows audiences to reject tribalism in their consumption, and engage with a range of sources offering different perspectives and tones. Instead, these criticisms sought to put every woman podcaster in the same basket: friendly, unserious, surface-level. This generalisation is dangerous.

Instead of focusing on the failures of the major parties, instead of pushing for stronger policy platforms and greater outcomes for all Australians – these outlets wanted to sow the seeds of doubt. They wanted to invalidate and undermine a group of powerful young women who have developed the ability to communicate with new audiences in ways traditional media cannot fathom because they have eroded the trust of their audiences.

It is important to recognise that the new media ecosystem in Australia is made up of many exceptional people. Most of whom were highlighted during this election campaign were privileged white men and women’s voices and platforms, like my own. But there are brilliant, diverse voices in this emerging space who are not provided the same coverage or opportunities.

It is also important to acknowledge we are not one homogenous group. We are not one monolithic thing and different creators represent a variety of views, theories of change and approaches to political education, commentary and advocacy. I cannot and do not speak on behalf of new media as a group; my intentions and approach are unique to me. What I do expect is transparency and integrity from the media entities I subscribe to and consume.

Here is this from me. I am partisan. I overtly ran a campaign against the Coalition. I am happy to confront any line of questioning about this. I will constantly get things wrong, make mistakes and upset people on all sides of politics. But what I refuse to do is allow a microscope to be placed on me and my ring light, while the billionaire conservative mouthpiece of the Western world is allowed to run rampant with derogatory, defamatory and hateful content each and every day simply because that is our status quo.

This doesn’t just go one way, however. I believe there should be accountability structures for commentators online as well. I welcome guidelines and rules from the Australian Electoral Commission around sponsorships, collaborative posts and engagement with political parties and organisations. We must have frameworks in place to regulate this kind of work, but regulation should be uniform. Let’s force the Murdoch media to do the same. Let’s make politicians wear their sponsors on their shirts while they make policy announcements. While the Teals are constantly labelled as ‘backed by Climate 200’, the major parties evade having their identity and politics publicly connected to their backers. Content creators are required to clearly label paid partnerships, and we have been scapegoated while Goliath continues its rampage.

That notwithstanding, on May 3rd, Australians blatantly rejected the Coalition’s offer. There are many reasons for that. At the last federal election, I watched our nation explicitly refuse the agenda of Scott Morrison. Between the rise of community independents and the Brisbane Greenslide, our nation re-wrote the blueprint for our political arena. A clear message was sent to the two-party system: adapt or die.

When the Voice to Parliament referendum was voted down in 2023, two things occurred: the Coalition believed they had paved the path to eventual electoral victory AND Anthony Albanese’s leadership completely deteriorated. As Stan Grant wrote for The Saturday Paper, “Albanese’s act of political courage in honouring a commitment to the Indigenous Voice referendum was betrayed by his failure to prosecute it”.

Albanese’ first-term will be remembered as disappointing. The Voice, I believe, broke him. He opted for conservatism and self-protection over confident, progressive governing. Peter Dutton led a ‘No’ campaign under the slogan ‘if you don’t know, vote no’. His greatest political assets were apathy, fear and division. They have always been the only tools in his kit. While his confusion and withdrawal were enough to force our nation to reject the generous invitation from First Nations people, Dutton failed to realise that opposition alone is not enough to lead.

During this election campaign, the Coalition failed to offer policy or positivity. Instead, they led with a contentious and disjointed platform which failed to address the three major issues Australians care about: cost of living, climate and energy, and national security in an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment.

When challenged or criticized, Peter Dutton reached back into his limited kit bag and attempted to stoke the flames of the culture wars. People saw through the cards he kept playing: the words ‘woke indoctrination’, and the political desperation to drive racism and neo-nazi rhetoric into the mainstream were also features of the final week's demise.

Dutton believed Australians were hateful, but our nation’s conservatism is more of a skepticism than an extreme. While we remain a country facing many significant divides: class, gender, race, and beyond… Dutton’s delight in constantly punching down challenged our support of the underdog mentality. Even the campaign slogan, “Let’s get Australia back on track” directly points to the problem: the pitch is only enticing if you have a track Australians are interested in getting back on. The Coalition has not answered Australia’s call to reform the two-party system, Labor picked up the phone in the last three months, and we are waiting to see what they do next.

Critiquing the Coalition and the Murdoch media isn’t about silencing or censorship. This rebuttal of theirs has always been a false binary. Australians are not oppressing the views of Peter Dutton or his supporters, we are communicating that the Coalition he stands with does not understand the modern Australia they wish to lead.

Every reference to Donald Trump throughout the Coalition’s campaign only cemented the tombstone of the grave they were digging themselves.

As Charlotte Mortlock wrote on Instagram, the average Liberal Party member is a man in his 70s, but the average Australian is a woman aged around 35.

71.7% of my audience are aged between 25-44. 88% are women. The average Cheek follower is quite literally a 35 year old woman. This is another thing traditional outlets get wrong when reporting on emerging forms of media: we don’t just speak to young people who are becoming politically activated for the first time. We attract a a huge community of their disenchanted consumers. I have more followers over the age of 55, than under the age of 24. This isn’t an echo chamber for young women, it’s an inter-generational community on the rise.

Peter Dutton’s refusal to engage with new media platforms, particularly those run by women, was one small (yet huge!) decision in a series of reckless refusals to attempt to communicate with the voter base that would end his political career. Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese’s campaign ran a clear strategy that humanised him with a voter base that largely felt ignored. Whether you agree with his politics or not, he worked harder to earn each vote. He told women that he was interested in speaking to them.

It is widely known that Generation Z and millennials were the most powerful voting bloc in this election. I believe this is a strong reason for the record-breaking third party vote.

According to ABC analysis, for the first time since the establishment of the Liberal Party more than 80 years ago, the combined independent and minor party vote is on track to beat a major party. The analysis published on Saturday showed that the the Coalition had 32.2 percent of the primary vote. Minor parties and independents received 33.1 percent.

While Labor’s majority emerged stronger than anyone thought possible, it is necessary to remember that this is their second worst primary vote count in history. As the party stares down a super-majority, the question Australians must now ask themselves is, what is standing between the Labor party and drastic action in their second term?

The Murdoch media’s iron fist no longer holds the weight it once did. The conservative party rooms look like they are onto the final rounds of a game of musical chairs. While most progressive Australians sought a Labor minority government that forced action, this outcome leaves no room for excuses: the next 100 days for the Labor party will communicate whether Albanese is willing to re-build the progressive identity this working class party once had, or if he will consign Labor to centrist mentalities that have consistently failed our nation. The combative, safe, moderate approach of his first three years is not what Australia voted for. The last three months of commitments to respect, equality, action and opportunity for all are what led Labor to a historic victory. These values and messages tie them more closely to community independents and the Greens than the Coalition, and this is where the Senate minor party vote count really matters. The most progressive voting result of all time in the upper house means Labor only ever has to negotiate with the crossbench. If, when and why they turn to the Coalition in the coming term will be vital to watch.

There are three lasting messages that I believe this election has left for us:

First, that the relationship between the Murdoch media and the Coalition will obliterate them both. While it might be easy, quite leisurely in fact, for me to sit back and watch both go up in flames, I wish our nation had competitive major parties with beliefs and policies that elevated the offering to Australians. Yesterday, the first woman was elected leader of the Liberal party. Elevating Sussan Ley is evidence the party understand the life-sentence of irrelevance they are facing, but I will hold my breath to see if their values and platform shifts with this initial performance of reflection and awareness.

When it comes to the major players in media, I want to see more of our conglomerates following in the footsteps of independent outlets to work with emerging commentators and creators. This is how we evolve into a flourishing, collaborative environment which takes the best parts of old and new and creates a diversity of higher quality voices in Australia. This could be an exciting prospect for our future.

The second point, is that nothing stands between the Labor party and genuinely improving the lives of the Australians they seek to represent. 20% student debt cut is one thing, major changes to indexation and the cost of university is a bigger piece of the puzzle. 100,000 new builds for first home buyers does increase supply, but reforming the capital gains tax discount stops the wealthiest 10% of our society treating shelter like a thriving corporate opportunity. A government that is willing to pass a world-first ban on social media for under 16s, should also have the fortitude to establish a Royal Commission into Australia’s media concentration - examining not only Murdoch but the entire industry, including the unregulated space of social media of which I am part. Anthony Albanese has utilised new media as a vehicle to reach voters more directly, I hope his leadership reflects his campaign strategy.

Finally, my message to Australians. Billions of dollars have been spent attempting to divide us, to drive us to extremist ideologies. Entities like Advance Australia ensured your family member’s facebook account was never dry of disinformation. Yet, most of us saw through it. No amount of money spent on propaganda could drive us to elect hatred, bigotry and a nuclear policy that was undeniably bad. Voter engagement and literacy has never been higher. Our capacity to have uncomfortable conversations is a direct rebuttal to the tribalism of the United States. It’s young Australians who are leading this charge.

As we turn away from traditional media and the two-party system, politicians must work harder than ever before to attract our attention and earn our vote. The Labor party has a lot to prove, but just for a moment, there is hope that Australia is stepping forward -more unified. To have played a small role in mobilising progressive action across generations is the greatest honour of my life. While ten year old me wanted to be the Prime Minister, the 26 year old that stands here today recognises that forging an entirely different path and cultivating the passion of Australian women to become politically active, informed and confident will re-shape the future of the political arena in our country.

This is just the beginning.