CHEERS TO… Holly Rankin
Holly Rankin AKA @jackriver for delivering the 2025 Speaker's Lecture in Parliament last week.
I was fortunate enough to watch a panel convened by Holly, alongside Senator Charlotte Walker, Lizzy Hedding and Daniel Dummer at SXSW Sydney last month, on the topic of ‘Youth, Civics and the Future of Democracy’ (you can read my takeaways here).
A week or so later, Holly's Speaker's Lecture explored how politicians and traditional media are eroding the trust of younger generations, and explored what a path to true civic engagement could look like in the digital age.
Her central argument: civic institutions (governments, parties, traditional media, cultural bodies) have increasingly failed to engage younger generations. Holly noted a shift “from institutions to individuals, from mastheads to personalities, from politicians to podcasts”.
This piece first appeared in Excessive Consumption - a weekly dispatch on culture, branding, politics and whatever other modern internet brain rot the algorithm has emotionally assigned me that week.
Subscribers get every edition first. The archive opens later.