Time to be bold
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The following is a speech delivered by Common Cause Australia’s co-director Mark Chenery at the Leadership 2025 conference in Canberra on 11-12 June 2025. Mark was asked to speak to how civil society can take the recent Australian election outcome and turn it into bold progressive change in the months and years ahead.
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Over the past decade, Common Cause Australia has worked with dozens of progressive organisations across Australia and beyond to help them engage more persuasively with the public on social justice, health and environmental issues.
Based on our focus groups, interviews and message testing with over forty thousand Australians in that time, I have three top tips for how we can build public support for the bold changes we need in the months and years ahead.
#1 - Don’t meet people where they are at, take them somewhere better.
People are increasingly disillusioned with the status quo and are more open than ever to alternatives. Now is not the time to be modest, but to think big.
The hard right gets this. Trump’s literally written the book on it. Arguably it’s working for them right now.
But in our research when we ask progressive advocates what sort of change they’d like good messaging to help them achieve, we’re often met with incrementalist policy ideas that do nothing to challenge the status quo.
In part, that’s because even small changes these days seem impossibly difficult. But I’d argue that it’s the pursuit of incrementalist change itself that makes it difficult to build public support. To put it bluntly, it’s hard to get people excited about a polished turd.
So we’ll often ask advocates what they’d do if we gave them a magic policy wand that could turn any policy wish into reality overnight. And then we take those ideas and throw them into the mix of policies we test with the public.
More often than not, those “radical” ideas turn out to be far more popular than anyone predicted.
For example, in our recent research around housing policies, we found a huge degree of support for ideas that strongly challenged the neoliberal status quo. We found:
74% agreed we should double the proportion of social housing vs private housing stock
69% agreed the government should create a publicly owned building company to create more and better homes faster.
And here’s a stat no politician I know would have predicted:
81% were happy for house prices to go down if it made housing for others more affordable. That included 71% of homeowners and 73% of property investors.
These ideas are well outside where many, if not most, political commentators and advocates would place the Overton window on this issue.
So, we don’t often talk about big ideas like this. But we need to if we want to take people somewhere better.
#2 - Stop dressing your progressive change in neoliberal clothing
All too often we assume the only way to build public support for our causes is to copy our opposition and frame issues in terms of impacts on the economy, jobs or taxpayer dollars.
But decades of global research, including our own message testing in Australia, shows that framing social justice, health and environmental issues from this perspective actually reduces public support by activating anti-social and environmentally destructive cognitive frames in people’s brains.
In fact, in our testing, the economic frame is always among the worst performing messages.
Meanwhile, messages framed in terms of progressive values including equality, freedom, helpfulness and love win every time - by toggling persuadable people into thinking about issues from our perspective.
For example, we’ve seen time and again that framing regulation of harmful product marketing in terms of healthcare costs for government or broader economic impacts is far less effective then framing them in terms of health and wellbeing impacts on people themselves.
If we want build support for bold progressive policies, we first need to be bold about our progressive values and place them front and centre in our messaging. If you’d like some examples of what this looks like, check out our regular Nailed it! blog series.
#3 - You have to push for things. Not just against them
As the hard right becomes increasingly emboldened to say horrible things publicly, it’s easy to get drawn into spending all of our airtime condemning them.
Here’s the problem: if all we do is talk about our opposition and their ideas, those are the only bold ideas people are hearing.
At worst, we’re actually doing our opposition’s job for them by spreading their narrative. And at best, even if we’re successful at turning people against our opposition’s bold ideas, we’ve done nothing to sell them on ours. Which leaves us no better off than where we started.
Take the recent election, while there were exceptions, the vast majority of comms coming from progressive campaigners was focussed not on selling our vision of a better future, but on Keeping Dutton Out.
Look, I’m not denying it worked, but we’re left with a super majority Labor government with little mandate or pressure to implement bold progressive policies that are urgently needed. Instead, we’ve given them a free pass to continue business as usual - approving carbon bombs, leaving housing to the private market, ignoring the genocide in Gaza, and pretending our own country wasn’t built upon genocide too.
The good news is we can change that - by changing how we do our work in the months and years ahead. To recap, that means:
Thinking big.
Framing our issues, based on our values
Spending less time pushing against the right, and more time pushing for big bold progressive ideas that tap into the growing yearning Australians have for something better.
