People power! Reflections on Progress 2026

“I say people, you say power!” Leading this roof-raising rallying cry at the opening plenary, Victorian Trades Hall Council’s Wil Stracke struck at the heart of what Progress 2026 was about: people power — and courage. In these increasingly uncertain times, we’re going to need both in spades.

Over the course of the two-day conference, it became clear we’re up against formidable challenges; ‘we’ being anyone seeking a just, equitable and sustainable Australia. For as Stracke rightly pointed out, wanting these things doesn’t necessarily mean you identify as ‘progressive’ or as part of a progressive movement.

Indeed, in the session on The Economy We Could Have, Katherine Trebeck pointed to research showing that Australians from all walks of life are increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo and open to alternatives. In engaging ‘the persuadable middle’, it’s our job to find common ground, offer genuine solutions to people’s material problems and communicate these plainly — something several speakers, including Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, argued the progressive movement can and must do better.

Fortunately, frameworks are at hand to help us establish a shared starting point. As the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Hugh de Kretser noted in his address, human rights are Australian values, and Australia can and should lead the world on protecting people’s human rights and ensuring everyone has the chance to live well. An Australian Human Rights Act, he argued, will provide a comprehensive legal framework for human rights in Australia, and a mechanism to push back on hate.

The progressive movement also has genuine solutions to offer, and some carefully chosen case studies scattered throughout the conference program gave us heart. Australia’s first Treaty with Traditional Owners in Victoria, the Australian Professional Association of Trans Health’s fight for accessible healthcare, the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change and their landmark climate victory — these, and many more case studies besides, showed we can effect meaningful change that makes people’s lives better. The challenge, argued Katherine Trebeck, is to move beyond these isolated wins and instead embed an economy that prioritises dignity, fairness, connection and ecological care.

To achieve this end, communication is crucial, as a strategy, a practice, and an organising principle. Underscoring its importance. Quid’s Ricardo Borges Martins — fighting back against authoritarianism in Brazil — went as far as to implore progressive funders to invest in communication as an end in itself. As Common Threads’ Millie Telford reminded us in the Passing the Message Stick workshop, “the contest of ideas is open” and right now, our opponents are louder.

We need to understand that people vote on how they feel, not on facts, counselled panelists taking part in the side event on polling strategy — we need to keep our messages grounded in shared values, keep them simple, and repeat them, again and again. We need to show up, building trust and relationships in the real world, not just online, a strategy used to spectacular effect by the Zohran For NYC campaign.

We also need to learn how to disagree better, not just with the far right, but amongst ourselves. This includes calling out the left’s tendency to overly focus on identity politics at the expense of building cohesive collective movements. As Ash Sarkar quipped in her plenary address Fighting Billionaires and Not Each other, micro-aggressions are not the basis of a political project.

“What we have to do is build organisations that centre resilience and relational intelligence — being tough, being strong, but also being good to one another,” Sarkar counselled. “Treat people like you’re already married to them, by which I mean, sometimes it’s better not to win the argument … kindness, consideration, curiosity, these are the things we want to cultivate.”

None of this work takes place in a vacuum. Caught in the death throes of the international rules-based order, the world has tumbled and turned upside down. The horrific consequences of our ongoing addiction to fossil fuels are now playing out in global supply shocks. And like the portal of COVID, this disruption is taking us somewhere else, as Naomi Klein cautioned in her conversation with Ash Sarkar: “You can’t ignore the planet — it will always reassert itself, for the planet is a player in our politics … extreme wealth itself has become a bomb.”

Our opportunity now, so beautifully encapsulated by Klein, is “to build broad coalitions in defense of the living world”. A project philanthropy is well placed — indeed by its very definition exists — to serve.