This isn’t a messaging workshop. It’s not a six-month consultancy. It’s a rapid strategy intensive, designed to give you clarity, focus, and a concrete action plan in 2–3 weeks.

I work with you to:

• Sharpen your positioning for the election window

• Map the stakeholder landscape, who holds power, formally and informally

• Identify your three priority actions with specific timing and tactics

• Build your messaging framework for external communications and internal alignment

• Assess risks and navigate complexity

• Align your team so everyone’s moving in the same direction

You walk away with a clear roadmap. Not theory, action.

Organisations typically reach out when they’re:

• Preparing to approach MPs with policy asks, and want to test their positioning and timing before they do

• Trying to agree on advocacy priorities internally, when the team isn’t aligned on political strategy

• Deciding whether to take a public position, and how to do it without unintended consequences

• Preparing a media moment, campaign, or briefing, and want someone who’s been on both sides of those conversations

• Navigating risk and complexity, when timing matters as much as substance

My role is to help you pause, test your thinking, and strengthen your position before you move publicly. I’ve seen how small missteps compound under scrutiny. I’ve also seen how disciplined positioning can secure outcomes that rushed or reactive approaches never reach.

The process:

• Deep-dive strategy session with your leadership or campaigns team (2–3 hours)

• Rapid audit of your current messaging and tactics, what’s working, what’s not

• Stakeholder and MP mapping: the formal channels and the informal ones

• Strategic advice on timing, narrative framing, and delivery methods

• Risk assessment: political and reputational

What you receive:

• Strategic Action Brief (5–8 pages) including your positioning framework, MP and stakeholder engagement map, three priority actions with tactical guidance and timing, talking points and messaging framework, and risk assessment with mitigation strategies

• One-hour debrief session to walk through the brief and troubleshoot implementation

• Follow-up call two weeks after delivery to address questions as you execute

Optional add-ons:

• MP engagement support: briefing preparation, introductions, or debrief (2 hours)

• Media risk assessment and spokesperson coaching

• Campaign design or coalition-building facilitation

This works best for organisations who have something important at stake in this election and want to engage strategically, not just reactively.

That typically includes advocacy organisations and peak bodies, women’s and family violence prevention organisations, multicultural, refugee, and human rights groups, child protection and family welfare providers, disability advocacy organisations, and environmental and climate action groups.

If you serve marginalised communities, work on systemic reform, or advocate for social change, and you want to use this election window well, this is for you.

I’m not offering advice from the outside. I’ve sat in the rooms where these decisions get made. I’ve run parliamentary inquiries that required managing contested evidence from stakeholders with fundamentally different worldviews. I’ve introduced bills, run campaigns that moved from community organising to legislative reform, and held portfolios across the exact issue areas most of my clients work in.

I know what moves MPs because I was one. I know what advocacy organisations need because I’ve led them. And I know the difference between a strategy that looks good on paper and one that actually works in the political environment you’re operating in.

Career highlights:

• Member of Victorian Parliament (2014–2018), representing the South-Eastern Metropolitan Region

• Deputy Chair of the Legislative Council’s Legal and Social Issues Committee — led inquiries into assisted dying, youth justice, and medically supervised injecting centres

• Held portfolios across women’s rights, health, family violence prevention, child and family welfare, youth justice, waste management, and multicultural affairs

• Twenty years in the community sector — executive and leadership roles in community development, child and family welfare, and advocacy

• Post-parliament: advised and worked inside government agencies during major regulatory reforms, led state-level advocacy campaigns, managed multi-million dollar emergency response programs

• Trained with Marshall Ganz at Harvard Kennedy School on leadership and social movements