Michelle D

An Open Letter to GetUp and the Tactical Geniuses Behind the National Press Club Stunt Dear GetUp, I just wanted to take a moment, as a deeply concerned Australian who watches your work with great interest, to say thank you. Genuinely. From the bottom of my heart. What you achieved at the National Press Club during Pauline Hanson's address was nothing short of strategic brilliance. I want to make sure the people responsible get the credit they deserve, because too often the truly transformative work in Australian politics goes unrecognised. Let me walk through what you accomplished. Step 1: You took an event that was already going to dominate the news cycle for 24 hours. Step 2: You ensured, through your guerrilla intervention, that it now dominates the news cycle for 72 hours, possibly longer. Step 3: You handed Pauline Hanson the single most valuable thing any politician can ever receive: footage of being interrupted by activists that will be clipped, shared, reposted, and weaponised across every social platform in the country for the next month. Step 4: You confirmed, in front of a national audience, the exact narrative One Nation has been selling for thirty years: that the political establishment, the activist class, and the legacy media cannot tolerate dissenting voices and will literally storm a stage to silence them. Step 5: You converted millions of Australians who had never voted One Nation, never thought about One Nation, and never seriously considered One Nation into people who just watched a small group of well-resourced inner-city activists try to shout down a woman addressing the National Press Club. Some of those Australians will have nodded along with you. Most won't. Because here's the part of the political playbook you seem to have missed. Every time you do this, you make her stronger. You made her stronger in 1996. You made her stronger in 1998. You made her stronger in 2016 when she returned to the Senate. And you've just made her stronger again in 2026, when One Nation is already polling at 28%, neck and neck with Labor as the most popular party in Australia. You didn't dent her. You boosted her. You didn't expose her. You amplified her. You didn't shut her down. You handed her the microphone, the camera angle, and the editing room. Every Australian who has been quietly fed up with the cost of living, the housing crisis, the immigration debate, and the gaslighting from Canberra just watched a group of activists confirm everything they suspected about the political class: that it would rather scream over the top of ordinary people than engage with what they're actually saying. You think you're fighting "the far right." You're actually its single greatest recruiter. So thank you. Thank you for ensuring that the National Press Club address gets played on every news bulletin for another three days. Thank you for giving One Nation a fundraising email so good it practically wrote itself. Thank you for converting Pauline Hanson from a politician into a martyr, again. Thank you for proving, in front of the entire country, that the people who claim to defend democracy are the first ones to disrupt it the moment someone they disagree with steps up to a podium. And most of all, thank you for showing every undecided voter in Australia that the activist class has no arguments left, no policies to offer, no plan for the cost of living, no plan for housing, no plan for productivity, no plan for anything, except shouting. You are not the resistance to One Nation. You are its undercover marketing department. Please, keep going. Keep storming the stages. Keep interrupting the speeches. Keep handing her the contrast she needs. Because every time you do, another ten thousand Australians who were sitting on the fence quietly make up their minds. You are not stopping the reset of Australian culture back to common sense. You are accelerating it. Sincerely. - Nathan Hulls (FB)