With Scott Morrison careering from one disaster to the next, it’s hard to remember when the games that pass for politics in Canberra were last done well, or at least competently. When I co-founded GetUp! back in 2005, the big issues were: refugees, instability in the Middle East and climate change. For all of GetUp’s success at annoying the far right of the Liberal Party, not a lot has changed on the big issues. Australia feels a bit stuck. So,…
Episode 1: Brooklyn 99 What can we learn when a Hollywood TV show gets into ChangeMaking? Comedy show Brooklyn 99 took on police racism. How did they do it in a way that people didn’t turn off? Listen to the episode on Podcast One, Stitcher or Apple iTunes (or click the episode link to stream here). Episode 2: Umbrella Movement In 2014 Hong Kong hundreds of thousands of citizens staged a mass street occupation demanding the vote. Why did it happen?…
Get ready to be inspired by some of the best people on the planet – Series 2 of the ChangeMakers launches on Monday 29 October 2018. We will be releasing 9 story based episodes: 5 on 29 October then a further 4 at the end of November. The stories include: Episode One – an inside look at Hollywood TV show Brooklyn 99 and its story on systemic police racism. Episode Two – the 2014 Umbrella Movement from Hong Kong when…
Have you ever clicked on an online petition and wondered whether it worked? In 2016, GetUp – a digital campaign organisation best known for its online petitions and email campaigns – decided to go offline. They came up a strategy to remove extreme conservative politicians from the Australian parliament. One of the places they went to was the seat of Bass in Northern Tasmania – a seat not known for being welcoming to out-of-towners. What did they do, and how…
What would you do if someone wanted to bulldoze an oil pipeline through your country, threatening not just your land, but your water and air? And what if the nation backing them had a history of playing dirty? That’s the situation the people in today’s episode found themselves in. The battle over building an oil pipeline in Standing Rock in South Dakota, USA. Should they take the high road? Or respond in kind? Click the play button above to stream…
On the western side of Cape Town’s downtown are a string of what looks like unused buildings. From the outside they appear like they must be empty. Broken windows, damaged roofs. If you were a tourist here you wouldn’t “see” them – just a haze as you enter the city on one of the major highways. But today my 9 year old son and I came to find one of those buildings because we were there for a meeting about…
What would you do if someone wanted to illegally concrete over your local park, and build an apartment block on it? And what would you do if the authorities supported the illegal construction? Today episode looks at how to organise genuine opposition in a place where the one thing they hate is genuine opposition. How a small protest against destruction of a local park turned into a mass movement that’s sweeping Russia. Click the play button above to stream it…
When a growing movement of young people places itself in harms way to stop injustice, it can be powerful and unpredictable. Often it is fueled by the white-hot anger of knowing that you’re on the side of justice when those in power have failed to make the change you need. We can see this with the powerful #FeesMustFall student movement in South Africa. This is a two part episode about times when direct action was used to confront an overwhelming…
Sometimes when you need radical change it helps to not know how things are ‘meant to be done’ In both of the stories in the third episode of ChangeMakers, we see women who had very little experience, entering male-dominated spaces and smashing it. By disrupting the business-as-usual approach, their innovations have had lasting impact. The first story is about mothers who are standing up to the gun lobby in the USA, and the second is about the women on the…
On 14 February 2018 at about 2pm in the afternoon, a 19 year old former student, armed with a duffle bag packed with loaded weapons, entered Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. In a rampage that lasted 6 minutes he killed 17 people – 14 students and 3 teachers. Like so many, tragic, brutal school gun massacres before, there has been an immediate widespread outpouring of anger, and a desperate plea for tighter gun controls. Powerfully, this clarion call has…