WTF is agency, and why does the community sector make it so hard to join in?

The Hon. Kate Washington Minister for Families and Communities with students from St Brigid’s Primary School.

Spend an hour in a community sector meeting and you’ll hear about agency, lived experience, co-design, holding space and building capacity. Everyone around the table nods. I’ve nodded along too. Many of the people the sector works for would reach for a dictionary.

The sector’s promise is nothing about us without us. Yet we often talk about people in words they wouldn’t use themselves.

What even is agency?

Agency means having a say in what happens to you, and being able to do something about it.

Some other words we use, in everyday language.

  • Lived experience: knowing it first-hand
  • Co-design: designing it with the people who’ll use it
  • Holding space: giving people room to speak safely
  • Building capacity: helping people do more themselves
  • Place-based: suited to this town
  • Theory of change: our plan for making a difference
  • Systems change: fixing the rules
  • Mutual aid: neighbours helping neighbours

What words would you add?

The skills behind the words

Leading a community organisation comes down to four skills: curiosity, creative thinking, collaboration and communication. In my eight decades I’ve met only a few people who have all four. I believe they can be taught.

Where could we start?

School seems the obvious place. Children are curious, and what they learn in the classroom grows the adults they become

Teachers would do the teaching, so training them comes first.

The resources and the training are already here. Action4Agriculture has resources that teach curiosity, creative thinking, collaboration and communication, the same skills I teach the kids I work with. They’re available on request. Josh Farr runs the training. Through Campus Consultancy he has delivered more than 1,600 leadership programs with over 40 universities, reaching more than 100,000 students and staff. He  trains teachers too.

I’ve seen Josh in action. In 2023 he led the student workshops for Action4Agriculture’s Young Environmental Champions program, working with students from ten schools across the Hunter and Hawkesbury. The share of students confident they could do something to improve their community rose from 57% to 80%.

And the kids delivered. St Brigid’s Primary School cut its landfill by three quarters.

You can read the full report here and the case study here

Our case study calls it an “Ecosystem of Expertise”. We wrote it for government in the langage government use. In everyday language, a lot of good people helped some kids do something great. Both versions are true. The skill is knowing your audience and speaking their language.

So when we’re talking with our communities, why aren’t we using language everyone understands

What do you think?

What would change if the people we work with chose the words we use?

A ten-year-old with these four skills could explain agency better than any strategy document.

 

 

The Envelope That Left Port Moresby the Week the War Began

Ivy Irvine and her four daughters, Valma, Olwyn, Molly and Nola were wonderful collectors and sharers of Jamberoo’s history, and I’m very grateful that some of that history was passed on to me.

I was tidying it up the other day, making sure it stays in pristine condition, and came across a couple of envelopes of stamps. Having written about the work the Lions Club does for children with cerebral palsy, I was excited to see whether these stamps could help the cause.

One is a registered airmail envelope posted in Port Moresby on 6 September 1939, the first day these Papua airmail stamps were issued, addressed to Mrs R. A. Irvine, “Clover Hill”, Jamberoo. On the back is the Sydney postmark of 11 September 1939. It made its way here in the very week Australia entered the Second World War.

Jon Phipps and the late Hilton Bloomfield became known as Kiama’s stamp men, collecting used stamps and selling them to raise money for the Australian Lions Children’s Mobility Foundation. Jon carries on that work today. The Foundation provides walkers for children who can’t walk unaided. Each walker costs about $7,500, and every stamp helps. Thanks to Ivy, this little envelope may raise up to $100 toward one.

If you have stamps tucked away in a drawer, an old album or a box of family letters, please drop them at RMB Lawyers, Kiama Pharmacy or Blooms Pharmacy. Keep them on the original envelope where you can, because collectors value the postmarks as much as the stamps.

And if you’re a stamp collector, Jon would love to hear from you.

Ivy and her daughters kept Jamberoo’s history safe for all those years. Now a piece of it can help a child walk. And I wonder who Ivy knew in Port Moresby who knew she would love to add them to her stamp collection

What happens after the applause?

This post has been sitting in my drafts for four years. I knew there was something I wanted to say, but every time I returned to it, it sounded like a grievance. So back into drafts it went.

Now I know what I was trying to say.

When Bob Hawke died in 2019, the four of us who had received the Bob Hawke Landcare Award wanted to do something small and heartfelt. We wanted to make a joint statement about what the award had meant to us. Each of us had a story to tell about meeting Bob, the contribution that led to the award and what came afterwards.

Landcare Australia, which managed the award, chose another approach to its public tribute. I was disappointed. At the time, I saw it largely through the lens of that disappointment.

Four years of sitting in drafts, and some completely unrelated conversations, have helped me see the much bigger question.

What happens after we give people awards?

I was the inaugural recipient of the Bob Hawke Landcare Award in 2012. At that time it was an individual award carrying a $50,000 prize. The award has changed considerably since then. It is now worth $30,000 and can be awarded to an individual, community-led group or eligible not-for-profit organisation.

But something in the criteria remains fascinating to me.

Recipients are recognised for qualities that include inspiring others, mentoring people, encouraging action, sharing knowledge and supporting communities.

In other words, the award seeks people who build capacity in other people. But who creates the opportunities for them to build that capacity together?

Australia has hundreds of awards recognising people for their contribution, knowledge, leadership and experience. We find them. We assess them. We celebrate them. We put them on stages, take photographs and tell their stories. Then, quite often, we send them home. The following year, we may come back and ask them to promote the next round of awards.

This is a lost opportunity.

The Bob Hawke Landcare Award records its alumni, with recipients going back to the inaugural award in 2012. That recognition has value, but an alumni list is not an alumni network. If an active network exists that brings Bob Hawke Landcare Award recipients together to learn from each other, I have never been invited to be part of it.

Belltrees Public School showed me what is possible. The small rural school, with around 20 students, organised a regenerative agriculture day that brought former Bob Hawke Landcare Award recipients together. We heard from each other, asked questions and exchanged ideas. I attended, and it was brilliant. A little school had recognised the value of connecting people with different knowledge and experience and created the opportunity for us to learn from each other.

The Banksia Foundation also experimented with this idea. Award recipients were brought together to visit the businesses and organisations of category winners, see what they were doing and learn directly from them. I attended one of those visits and it was brilliant too.

Both experiences showed me the difference between recognising knowledge and connecting knowledge. You can put someone’s name on an alumni page, or you can create opportunities for people with different knowledge and experience to learn from each other.

For years I worked alongside people in agriculture who gave organisations their time, credibility, relationships, lived experience and knowledge. They spoke at events, sat on panels, joined committees, opened their farms, told their stories and helped organisations demonstrate what was possible.

Many of them gave enormously.

Too often, I watched the infrastructure around them benefit from all that human capacity without creating the same opportunities for those people to benefit from one another.

We are very good at identifying individual achievement. We are less good at asking what becomes possible when we connect the knowledge and experience of the people we have recognised.

Interestingly, this was part of what I was talking about when I received the Bob Hawke Landcare Award in 2012. I wanted to “find innovators, early adopters and people doing extraordinary things and help connect and amplify what they knew.”

Two years later, a Landcare publication described me as “a connector” and quoted me saying I was “obsessed with finding and nurturing talent, and supporting it”.

So apparently I have been banging on about this for quite some time.

What I did not have then was the question I have now.

Is the community serving the infrastructure around it, or is the infrastructure serving the community?

Over the past few months I have been conducting a completely different piece of research, interviewing people who have made significant commitments to their communities. Those conversations finally gave me the language for this four-year-old draft.

People bring enormous assets into organisations, programs, campaigns and movements. They bring knowledge, relationships, credibility, experience, energy and trust. Organisations are often very good at mobilising those assets.

The more interesting question is what they build around the people who provided them.

Do those people leave with stronger relationships? Do they have access to the knowledge of others who have travelled similar paths? Can they learn from each other? Are they introduced to people who could extend what they are already doing? Does the organisation ask them what would make the relationship valuable to them? Does the collective capacity become greater because those people were brought together?

That brings me back to awards.

Imagine if part of running an award program was asking recipients a year later: What would be valuable to you now?

Perhaps they want nothing further from it. That’s fine. But perhaps they would value meeting other recipients. Perhaps somebody who won ten years ago has knowledge that could transform what a new recipient is trying to achieve. Perhaps an experienced recipient could mentor somebody emerging in the same field. Perhaps two people working on opposite sides of the country are tackling versions of the same problem.

Perhaps the most valuable thing the organisation could provide is simply the introduction.

This does not require another glossy program. It requires seeing the award differently.

The award ceremony recognises what somebody has already contributed. The alumni community asks what might become possible next.

There is another question here too. We invest considerable resources in finding, judging and celebrating award recipients. Awards can involve substantial events, sponsors, communications, judging processes and hundreds of guests.

What proportion of that investment goes into connecting recipients after the event?

I do not know the economics of the Landcare Awards, and I am not suggesting what that answer should be. But it is a question worth asking across the awards sector, particularly when some of the most valuable connections may require little more than bringing people together.

Belltrees Public School managed it with around 20 students.

And I now understand why my original experience with the Bob Hawke Landcare Award bothered me enough for this post to sit unfinished for four years. It was never simply about a statement after Bob Hawke died. It was about the difference between recognising human capacity and building it.

Landcare itself grew from people connecting knowledge, experience and effort. Farmers, conservationists, neighbours and volunteers discovered they could achieve more together than they could separately.

It moved people from “I to We”.

An award bearing Bob Hawke’s name has an opportunity to continue that tradition. So do thousands of other awards.

We spend considerable time and resources identifying people whose experience and contribution we believe are worth recognising.

Perhaps the next question should be: What are we going to do with all that human capacity now that we have found it?

 

Social media gives us a choice between curiosity and cruelty

 

We do not have to solve world peace to start practising it

Yesterday, I put a post on our community Facebook page for a friend who had to find a new home for her little dog, Teddy.

She asked me to post it because she was petrified people would abuse her. That fear tells us something about social media before the comments even begin.

The truth was more complicated and it was also private. My friend had waited nine months to find accommodation. When they finally found somewhere to live, their circumstances meant she could not take Teddy with them. The landlord had not refused him. They were not looking for an excuse to give him away. They were making a painful decision after running out of other options.

We cannot ask children to practise peace if we do not model it

None of that was in the Facebook post because nobody should have to publish the details of their private life to avoid being abused by strangers. People could have asked a question before deciding they knew the story.

Some did. They wanted information that could help Teddy find the right family:

  • Is Teddy comfortable with children?
  • Does he get along with other animals?
  • Is he house trained?
  • Is he leash trained?
  • Is the yard fenced?
  • Can a prospective family meet Teddy and his owner?
  • Would a rescue organisation be able to help with the process?

One family said they were looking to adopt a dog and would like to meet him. Another person offered information about rescue organisations. Others tagged people who might be interested.

These comments moved the conversation forward. They gathered information, offered practical help and kept the focus on finding the right home for Teddy.

Then came the assumptions:

  • The landlord cannot refuse a pet.
  • The owner does not understand the rental laws.
  • This must be an excuse to get rid of the dog.
  • The owner should have found somewhere that accepted Teddy.
  • I could not legally rehome somebody else’s dog.

The landlord had not refused Teddy. My friend was not asking me to rehome him. I had posted on their behalf because I belonged to the Facebook group and I cared enough about them and Teddy to cop any abuse. It was also a chance to prove my community was compassionate.

People had created an entire story from information they did not have.

The cruellest comment suggested my friend was using her rental accommodation as an excuse to get rid of a beautiful dog. That person knew nothing about her circumstances, how long she had waited for accommodation or the decisions she had faced. She filled every gap with the worst possible explanation.

A few days earlier, I had spent 95 minutes with almost 100 young people at the Cowra World Peace Day Youth Forum. We practised curiosity, creativity, collaboration and communication.

I showed them a picture of a cat, a mouse and a flea. Each saw the same situation differently. The cat, the mouse and the flea had different information, different concerns and a different view of what was happening.

Then they met Pickles. The students could not discover Pickles’ story by guessing. They had to ask questions, listen to the answers and use each answer to decide what to ask next.

I also showed them someone pushing into a tuckshop line. At first, the person looked rude and entitled. Then the students learned she was collecting a first-aid kit for someone who had been injured.

The picture had not changed. The information had.

The Facebook discussion about Teddy became the same lesson played out among adults.

Some people saw a gap in the information and asked a question. Others saw the same gap and inserted an accusation.

The people who asked questions helped. They learned more about Teddy, offered advice, found possible families and identified safer ways to manage the adoption. The people who made assumptions added distress to someone already going through a painful time.

Every conversation is a chance to practise peace

Curiosity would not have required a long conversation. One question could have changed everything:

“Can you tell us more about the circumstances?”

That question leaves room for an answer. An accusation closes the door before the person has spoken.

I keep wondering what those young people in Cowra will do the next time they see something that looks wrong. Will they decide they already know the whole story? Or will they remember the cat, the mouse and the flea, Pickles and the person pushing into the tuckshop line?

Will they ask another question before they judge?

After reading the comments about Teddy, I hope they do.

The lessons Pauline Hanson wants cut are the ones children ask for

Pauline Hanson called Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples “the most primitive race on Earth”. She said they had achieved nothing in 60,000 years and described teaching Indigenous history as a “complete waste of time”.

She made the comments on a podcast in September 2025. They surfaced this month. Her target was the school curriculum. She complained that children were learning about Aboriginal culture and language and asked what Aboriginal people had contributed.

I have spent 20 years in those classrooms. I founded Kreative Koalas, a program that ran across New South Wales. Primary school students studied the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, chose a challenge facing their community, designed an action project and painted their solution on giant koalas.

Those koalas remain in school foyers and gardens across the state. Many carry Aboriginal designs and stories chosen by the students.

Before that, I founded Young Farming Champions and sent young people working in agriculture into schools to talk about the country that feeds us.

I have watched what happens when young people take a big idea and act on it.

Hanson is right about one thing. The curriculum is crowded. Teachers have spent years dealing with trying to cover more content than a school year can hold. Every new demand consumes time that must come from somewhere else.

Cutting Aboriginal history, sustainability and Australia’s engagement with Asia will not solve that problem. It will remove the content that helps children understand where they live and the world they will enter.

The Australian Curriculum contains three cross-curriculum priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, Sustainability, and Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia. They are taught through existing learning areas rather than as three extra subjects.

Under the earlier curriculum, teachers often found these priorities through curriculum tags and optional elaborations. The teachers I worked with wanted to teach all three and ran out of hours.

Version 9 strengthened their connection to specific content descriptions and made the links clearer. Teachers had greater authority to teach what many had been trying to fit in for years.

That is the change Hanson objects to.

A Year 4 class learning how Aboriginal people used fire to manage this continent leaves knowing more about the ground beneath its school.

A Year 8 class tracing trade routes through Asia leaves understanding Australia’s neighbourhood. We share a maritime border with Indonesia. Our students will trade with Asia, work with Asia and travel through Asia.

Sustainability is the century they will inherit. They will spend their adult lives dealing with its consequences.

These priorities exist because Australian children require more than a collection of dates and facts. They require the knowledge to understand their country, their region and their future.

I watched classes across New South Wales debate which Global Goal their community should tackle, then develop projects and act. They asked direct questions about Country, culture, food, water, waste and climate because those subjects connected the classroom to the world outside it.

Within a day of the comments resurfacing, Hanson said she would apologise “if people were offended”. She claimed she had been describing Aboriginal people at the time of European settlement.

Hanson blamed the offence on those who heard her rather than the words she chose.

I have watched nine-year-olds paint 60,000 years of care for Country onto a giant koala, then stand before their school and explain it.

The children showed the curiosity, knowledge and respect missing from her argument.

Something terrible happened here on the 5th August 1944

Going home to Cowra reminded me how completely I had lived inside a bubble.

I grew up at Pack’s Grant, a 572-acre farm beside the Cowra prisoner-of-war camp. I knew the camp was there. I knew about the breakout. I also knew about the holes in the weatherboards at the back of our house and in the shearing shed, which we understood to be bullet holes.

The woolshed at Pack’s Grant – had bullet holes from the Cowra PoW breakout

What I had never fully appreciated was that the history of the Cowra breakout had run directly past our back verandah. That changed when I sat down for lunch with Tom Rowston at the Happy Days cafe.

Tom Rowston had some pieces of gold information for me over lunch at the Happy Days cafe 

Tom was 93 and approaching his 94th birthday. His family had been in business in Cowra since 1924, owning car yards and other enterprises around the town. He remained fiercely proud of Cowra, its council, hospital, water supply, businesses and people.

When we met, Tom looked at me and knew exactly where I belonged. “You come from Pack’s Grant. You’re tall and skinny like your father.”

It was an extraordinary welcome home. Tom went to school with Harold Read, whose family owned Pack’s Grant before mine. They were mates, and Tom had stayed at the Read family home when he was a schoolboy.

Then he began talking about the night of the Cowra breakout.
“When the Japanese broke out, they came down and they ran past that house all night.”

The breakout began in the early hours of 5 August 1944, when more than 1,000 Japanese prisoners attempted to escape from the camp. Many headed east, apparently believing the ocean lay beyond the hills. My home Pack’s Grant stood in their path.

“Must have been pretty frightening living there,” I said. “Didn’t worry him at all,” Tom replied. Harold had told him that the men “made a lot of noise and kept us awake”.

That was how Harold Read apparently remembered a night which became one of the most recognised events in Cowra’s history. Men were running past the family home in darkness, yet the detail passed down to Tom was the noise they made and the sleep they interrupted.

Fourteen years after the breakout, Pack’s Grant changed hands. My grandparents purchased the farm for their two sons, my father, John Lindsay, and my uncle, David Lindsay. The plan was for the brothers to farm it together, although the partnership did not last long.

The letter confirming the purchase was addressed to my father. Dated 15 July 1958, it came from Cowra stock and station agents Norman C. Bellamy Pty Limited. It recorded the agreement to buy the 572-acre property from Mr Read for £45 an acre, with a 10 per cent deposit. My father moved our family to Pack’s Grant. David Lindsay built an academic career in agriculture and became Dean of Agriculture at the University of Western Australia. He is now Emeritus Professor David Lindsay.

The sale included the floor coverings, an electric stove, two hot-water systems, electric light fittings, three electric motors, an air compressor, two windmills and the shearing plant. The livestock were negotiated separately. The family bought 717 sheep, including 20 Dorset Horn stud ewes, along with 17 cattle.

Our family photographs from 1958 record what came next. They show the woolshed and yards, sheep, pigs, horses, haymaking and the broad hills surrounding Cowra.

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Note the black-and-white Holstein dairy cows. They had travelled with us from the dairy farm in Dapto to become the house cow at Pack’s Grant. Against a landscape of sheep and beef cattle, she looks like a small declaration of where our family had come from.

For me, Pack’s Grant was home. The woolshed was a woolshed. The holes were holes. The former prisoner-of-war camp was nearby, but its history belonged to another time. Returning to Cowra closed the distance between those things.

A conversation over lunch connected me to Harold Read, the boy who grew up in our house and heard the Japanese prisoners passing it during the night. An old letter captured the moment one family handed the farm to another. The photographs recorded the landscape as my family found it in 1958. I went home to Cowra and discovered that the story I had travelled there to find had been waiting at home all along.

Every insult aimed at One Nation is an own goal

Bogan. Cooker. Racist. Woke. Lefty. Latte sipper.

We throw these words around as though they explain people. Mostly, they put people in a box and give us permission to stop listening.

The words change depending on who is speaking.

We may believe these words make our case. They usually do the opposite.

I saw that when I spent five days handing out how-to-vote cards for the Community Independent candidate in Farrer. For much of that time, I stood beside the One Nation volunteers.

We talked, shared pastries and took turns doing the coffee run. I learnt their names and heard about their families, farms and communities.

I asked what had led them to One Nation. They talked about water, hospitals, services disappearing and decisions being made in cities by people who would never live with the results. Many had voted for the Coalition for decades and felt the party had stopped listening.

One Nation gave that disappointment somewhere to go. These people were talking about water buybacks, hospital visits and children leaving town. They were neither stupid nor aggressive. They had reasons for voting as they did.

One Nation tells people that educated elites look down on them. Call its voters stupid, backward or racist and you have helped One Nation prove its point.

It works both ways. Question a One Nation policy and you may be called woke before you have finished the sentence. Apparently, even a seventy-year-old dairy farmer can become an inner-city latte sipper without leaving the farm.

Once we put someone in a box, we stop being curious. We stop asking what happened, what changed and what might change again.

Labels end conversations. Questions start them.

If we want people to reconsider what they believe, insulting them is a very strange place to begin.

Dolly did it and other modern defences


When I was growing up one of Mary-Anne Fahey’s characters in The Comedy Company was a mischievous three-year-old named Jophesine.

Whenever she was accused of doing something wrong, Jophesine had her defence ready.

“I didn’t do it. Dolly did it.”

It was funny because she was three. Less amusing is the realisation that absolving ourselves of responsibility now appears to be a key driver of everyday life.

We have developed more sophisticated language than Jophesine, of course. We blame the system, the market, the government, the previous government, consumer demand, inadequate funding, misleading advertising, our parents or the person who failed to stop us.

Dolly has acquired an impressive number of job titles.

A recent opinion article in The New York Times tells the story of Bryce Martinez, who was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease at 16.

Martinez had developed obesity early in childhood. He grew up eating much of what the American food system made affordable and convenient. Sugary cereals, school lunches of pizza and burgers, ready-made meals, juice pouches, chips and ice cream were part of his everyday diet.

At 18, he sued 11 major food manufacturers. He argued that their ultra-processed products had been engineered to encourage overconsumption, marketed to children and had caused his illnesses.

The case was dismissed because the judge found insufficient evidence connecting particular products with Martinez’s illnesses. His lawyers intend to appeal, and similar cases are being brought against food companies across the United States.

The article argues that litigation may succeed where governments have failed. It compares these cases with the decades of legal action against tobacco companies that eventually exposed what the industry knew about addiction, cancer and marketing to children.

It is a powerful comparison. Food manufacturers have enormous resources and an extraordinary understanding of flavour, brain chemistry, advertising and consumer behaviour. If companies have deliberately designed products to override appetite signals and then marketed those products to children, they should be held accountable.

Martinez had very limited agency. He did not buy the groceries, formulate the products, design the school menu, write the advertising or regulate food additives. His parents worked full-time and relied on food that was affordable, available and quick to prepare.

Food companies, schools and governments therefore hold a greater share of responsibility, especially where products were deliberately engineered and marketed to encourage overconsumption.

Greater responsibility, however, is not exclusive responsibility.

The article presents responsibility as though it must belong either to the individual or to the food companies. Once it is transferred entirely to the company, everyone else in the chain can quietly leave the room.

The child can blame the parents. The parents can blame the manufacturer. The manufacturer can blame consumer demand. Retailers can blame price pressures. Schools can blame their budgets. Governments can blame insufficient evidence.

Then we can all go home satisfied that Dolly did it.

Type 2 diabetes also resists a single explanation. Diet and physical activity can contribute significantly, but so can genetics, age, ethnicity, family history and social and economic circumstances. Finding one contributor does not remove every other person or institution from the picture.

Agriculture has its own version of the Jophesine defence.

Farmers regularly tell governments and the community, “You can trust us to do the right thing.”

Then governments introduce laws covering firearms, land clearing, animal welfare, chemical use or environmental protection, and agriculture argues that the entire sector is being punished for the behaviour of a minority.

Sometimes that criticism is justified. Poorly designed regulation can burden responsible farmers without addressing the behaviour that prompted it.

But agriculture also has to confront the question beneath the regulation. What happens when enough people fail to exercise the responsibility they say should be left with them? At what point does legislation become the consequence of our collective failure to govern ourselves?

We cannot ask to be trusted and then insist that every failure belongs to somebody else.

The same question reaches well beyond food and farming. We can hold corporations accountable without pretending consumers have no agency. We can recognise the constraints facing parents without treating every decision as inevitable. We can regulate harmful behaviour without assuming legislation removes our responsibility to make better choices.

Responsibility is not a parcel passed along the chain until it reaches the person with the deepest pockets. Several people and institutions can hold it at the same time, in different proportions according to their power, knowledge and choices.

Perhaps the real test is not, “Who can I blame?”

It is, “Given the power and choices I had, what part of this belonged to me?”

 

Devastated Cathy Wilcox fangirl is grieving because she is leaving

I am an unabashed Cathy Wilcox fan girl, so I was devastated to hear that she is leaving The Sydney Morning Herald after 37 years.
Earlier this year, I wrote my first ever letter to the editor of the Herald. Cathy spotted it and shared it on Twitter with the words, “As ever the letter writers bring the wisdom.” I wasn’t on Twitter, but someone sent me a screenshot.  It is something I will always treasure.
Her departure comes after a bruising period. The Australian Press Council ruled against Cathy over her “Grass roots” cartoon about calls for a royal commission into antisemitism, finding that the imagery could evoke an antisemitic trope. The Herald apologised for the hurt caused.
Cathy later spoke about what she feared that decision could mean for political cartooning. Her concern was that editors, faced with something provocative or controversial, may increasingly decide it is “simply not worth the trouble” to publish it.
Political cartoonists question power and expose contradictions. Sometimes people will disagree strongly with them. That argument is part of public debate. Cathy’s concern is what happens when editors become so wary of the consequences that the cartoon never gets published and the argument never begins.
After 37 years at the Herald, Cathy leaves an extraordinary body of work behind, and one very grateful fan girl with a screenshot she will treasure forever. See the blog post I wrote about her acknowledgment of my letter here

Before we explain One Nation voters, perhaps we should listen to them

 

Yesterday I wrote about the extraordinary enthusiasm political parties have for studying unhappy voters rather than themselves. This morning the Sydney Morning Herald delivered me an article about researchers studying 1,000 One Nation voters. Sometimes the universe is unnecessarily helpful.

In my living history interviews with people in their late 80s and early 90s across my local government area, I often ask what has changed in their lifetime. I am hoping for the broad sweep, social change, physical change, how the place has changed around them.

The most common answer I get is: too many people.

They are talking about people moving into the area from somewhere else in Australia. Sydney gets mentioned a lot. Immigration does not.

So when I read Paul Sakkal’s article in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning on what 1,000 One Nation voters say is driving them, I smiled.

The headline finding is immigration. Of the One Nation supporters who believe Australia is heading in the wrong direction, 39 per cent name immigration as one of the reasons. Fifty-seven per cent fear Australia’s culture and identity are changing too quickly. Forty per cent point to pressure on housing and infrastructure.

Then you read what people actually say.

One supporter says the issue is arithmetic. You cannot bring in that many people without building the houses. Another says the issue is who comes and whether they want to become part of what is already here.

Suddenly “immigration” is being asked to explain quite a lot.

We do love a complicated explanation. Apparently understanding something counts for less if it doesn’t require a consultant.

The research into One Nation voters comes with focus groups, voter segments, demographic differences, loyal supporters, newer supporters and analysis of what might persuade people to change their vote. All useful.

But perhaps people are also saying exactly what they mean.

There are more people than there used to be, and they do not like some of the consequences.

People do not experience population growth as a percentage. They experience another housing development, another traffic jam, another doctor’s books closed to new patients, another paddock covered in houses and another place that takes longer to get to.

Ask someone in their late 80s in my LGA what has changed and I may hear “too many people”.

Ask a One Nation voter what is wrong with Australia and I may hear “too much immigration”.

Before deciding those are entirely different conversations, it might be useful to ask what each person is actually describing.

The Scanlon Foundation’s long-running social cohesion research adds an important clue. In 2024, 49 per cent of Australians thought immigration was too high. Yet 85 per cent said multiculturalism had been good for Australia, 82 per cent said migrants were good for the economy and 83 per cent rejected excluding immigrants on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion.

The 2025 research is equally interesting.

Among Australians who thought immigration was too high, 58 per cent nominated the economy or housing as the country’s biggest problem. Only 9 per cent nominated immigration itself.

That does not make concerns about race, culture or identity disappear. The One Nation research itself shows a difference between newer supporters worried about migration numbers and parts of Hanson’s traditional base who are more concerned about the background of migrants.

But it does suggest that “too much immigration” can sometimes be shorthand for something much broader.

Too many people for the houses.

Too many people for the roads.

Too many people for the services.

Too much change, too quickly.

In my interviews, the people causing all this pressure can be Australians who moved down the highway. Scale the same experience up from a town to a country and suddenly the new arrivals have passports.

This takes us straight back to the leadership question I wrote about yesterday.

Political parties confronted with dissatisfied voters have an extraordinary appetite for studying the voters. Who are they? What do they want? What are they angry about? What message will bring them back?

Now we have research into 1,000 One Nation voters.

To its credit, the research reaches an important conclusion: One Nation’s rise is as much a story of Liberal failure as One Nation success.

That is more interesting than another voter profile.

Because the real question may be what happens when population grows faster than people’s confidence that governments can manage the consequences.

Housing, roads, hospitals, schools and infrastructure are experienced locally. So is change. People notice the paddock disappearing long before they read the population statistics.

Then politics arrives with an answer. Immigration.

That is a powerful word because it can turn a collection of complicated experiences into one problem with one number attached to it.

Politics loves a number. Numbers can be cut. Systems are messier.

So before politicians hear “immigration” and start competing over who can promise the lower migration target, it might be worth listening a little longer.

What are people actually describing? Because sometimes when someone in their late 80s tells me the problem is “too many people”, the people causing all the trouble came from Wollongong.

Pauline Hanson did not invent that feeling.

She may simply have become very good at telling people what to call it.