Don’t panic! But there’s young women with phones in Parliament! And it creates a better politics

The budget lock-up is sacred political territory. Journalists sweat over hundreds of pages in an internet-free chamber, carefully crafting the stories that will set the nation’s agenda for months to come. But this year, something was different: 13 influencers walked through the doors and sent metaphorical papers flying through the corridors of Parliament House. 

If you’re over 40 you might be alarmed, shocked and horrified at these non-journalist types being granted access to the government’s day of days. If you’re under 40, it’s safe to assume your heart rate is under control and you understand exactly why the Albanese government is changing its approach to the media ahead of the May 3 federal election. Things aren’t just changing, they’ve already changed — but many of us are still catching up. 

There’s a Black Mirror feeling to the news of late, in large part thanks to the publicity machine of President Donald Trump. His AI-generated vision of Gaza as Vegas-meets-Monaco is just one in a slew of announcements shared on social media from the most online president in history. In the two and a half months following his reelection, Trump was mentioned approximately 236 million times on social media platforms, averaging 3.3 million mentions per day.

Regardless of your feelings towards Trump — and this column could not fit mine — you can’t dispute the efficacy of his digital domination. The special ingredient? Engaging with new media. Throughout his election campaign, Trump homed in on young men by collaborating with content creators, streaming on Twitch and Kick, and making podcast appearances, including on three of the top five Spotify podcasts. 

The podcast strategy alone proved to be a major win, with research showing it boosted his support by between 1-2.6%.  His chat on Joe Rogan’s vodcast was the driving factor in this, receiving 57 million views on YouTube. Oh, and he won men under 30 by a 14-point margin — young men being the largest cohort of Rogan’s listeners. 

Far from old school, Kamala Harris enlisted a “digital rapid response” unit of gen Z-ers, a far-reaching creator program, a strong podcasting strategy and an ever bigger digital media spend — but to lesser effect. Trump’s collaboration with new media was more widespread and, teamed with targeted messaging and digital advertising spend, proved to be a winning combination. 

With these results, it’s no wonder the White House has opened up press briefings to new media representatives. 

This is no anomaly — a number of far-right parties have seen success with the strategy. In 2024, France’s National Rally secured 28% of votes from under-35s thanks in part to creators who mixed fashion and music with anti-immigration policies, while Germany’s AfD doubled their vote share to 20.8% with the help of TikTok and AI-generated influencer “Larissa”. 

The same playbook has been alive and well for a while now: NZ-born agency Topham Guerin leveraged video and creators for Christopher Luxon in New Zealand, Boris Johnson in the UK and Scott Morrison in his prime. It’s just that in 2025, it’s so much more powerful — and Australia is starting to catch on.

During the Voice to Parliament referendum, the No-pushing Fair Australia account (owned by Advance Australia) received nearly 2.6 million likes on TikTok, more than eight times the Uluru Statement and Yes23 accounts combined. That wasn’t just thanks to the platform or the algorithm; Advance Australia used a swathe of real voices, and played the strategy on repeat. That combination of diverse but interconnected narratives, volume, real voices and influencers blew the Yes campaign out of the water.

In the past few months, we’ve seen the leaders of both major parties frequent podcasts of all different flavours. From Mark Bouris’ Straight Talk and The Squiz’s News Club to Abbie Chatfield’s It’s A Lot, Hannah Ferguson’s Big Small Talk and Olympian Sam Fricker’s Diving Deep, it appears they’ve cottoned on to the power of finding voters where they actually are. This week in Parliament, Albo even used the sentence “they’re delulu with no solulu” after he learned the slang on Happy Hour with Lucy and Nikki. 

And with gen Z and millennials making up 70% of podcast listeners  — the same cohort that will overtake baby boomers as the dominant voting bloc this election — politicians need to tune in. 

The Greens and independents are wise to it, too — and have been since the 2022 election. During the last federal race, a combination of meme culture, community engagement and creator outreach saw massive organic impact, mobilising young, disengaged voters with campaigns like It Takes 3 (Climate 200). The strategy is one that will only ramp up this campaign season. 

Yet despite all of this, inviting 13 creators to the holiest day on the political calendar really seemed to ruffle the feathers of traditional media and the political elite. Coalition Senator Andrew Bragg described Tuesday’s influencer inclusion as “cash for comment”, while the AFR boldly labelled the content creators as “self-obsessed and self-promoting gen Z and millennial influencers” who will “regurgitate the government’s messages directly into the phone screens of hundreds of thousands of young people”. I’d quickly point out that gen Z and millennials themselves feel exactly the same way about traditional media — that it’s self obsessed, cash for comment, and regurgitating the messages of the interests it serves. 

While the old guard might scoff at courting for content, YouTubers, TikTokers, SubStackers, Podcasters and Instagrammers have something that institutions do not — they’re people. Not representatives of a party, a platform or a conglomerate, but people who have built a one-to-many relationship that still feels deeply connected, relatable and real to their audiences. 

I promise you, they are not seeking to become the media, nor do many of them consider themselves “journalists”. It will remain the media’s job to reimagine itself to (rightly) re-engage younger audiences. Political campaigns and the news itself are foot soldiers in an information war that is coming at people from all angles, 24/7 and on repeat. It’s not ideal, but it’s reality. 

Media and politics alike are numbers games. You have to go where your audience is going, otherwise you’ll go nowhere. The numbers point to a new future for political coverage and perhaps politics itself — one that is less centralised, more personalised and more real. 

Creators have something most legacy institutions no longer possess: trust. And in an age of fractured attention spans, that’s the ultimate currency. TLDR: Entertain or die.

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