Radical Moderate

Radical Moderate Leading with boldness & balance

an enterprise of:an enterprise of:

Radical Moderate: Leading with boldness and balance Published by Our Community Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia © Our Community Pty Ltd Published November 2025.

This publication is copyright. Apart from any fair use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be produced by any process without permission from the publisher.

Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to: Our Community Pty Ltd, PO Box 354, North Melbourne 3051, Victoria, AUSTRALIA (service@ourcommunity.com.au); Please note: While all care has been taken in the preparation of this material, no responsibility is accepted by the author(s) or Our Community, or their staff, for any errors, omissions or inaccuracies. The material provided in this guide has been prepared to provide general information only. It is not intended to be relied upon or be a substitute for legal or other professional advice. No responsibility can be accepted by the author(s) or Our Community or for any known or unknown consequences that may result from reliance on any information provided in this publication.

Contents Introduction What it means to be a Radical Moderate 4

Principled leadership and good governance Leadership The Radical Moderate as Leader 6

Australian community Ethical bridge builders in a divided democracy 9

Principled pragmatism Leadership in a polarised political environment? The case for principled pragmatism 12

Leadership Is it an oxymoron to conceive of radical moderation?

14

Advocacy and social change

Diversity, inclusion and community engagement Pluralist governance

Governance

The centre must hold: navigating pluralist governance across ideological divides 24

AI and governance: Will artificial intelligence support moderation or reinforce extremes?

44

Faith & cultural

Ethical fundraising

Balancing tradition and progress: Radical moderation in faith and cultural groups 27

AI and ethical fundraising – can it be effective and responsible?

47

Fundraising

Ethical Innovation: How to lead responsibly in an age of rapid change 50

Beyond the Binary: Fundraising isn't just “good vs bad money” 30

Media How political journalism shapes public perceptions of compromise and pragmatism 33

Navigating complexity & building resilience Impact evaluation

Government engagement The case for bipartisan political advocacy 17

Advocacy Managing tensions in public discourse: Speak up or step back?

19

Changemakers The power to create change 21

The future of radical moderation

Measuring impact without ideological bias 36

Political map The end of extremes: How the generational divide redrew politics in 2025 39

Constructive journalism Creating a constructive news culture of solutions, not division 42

Innovation

Polarisation Bridging the divide: Understanding polarisation in Australia 52

Polarisation Healthy conflict exists beyond stances and slogans 55

Legacy The Radical Moderate’s legacy: What history might say 59

Help sheets

Experiment Tracker 63 Fair Discussion Guide for Chairs 65 De-escalation language prompts 67 Reduce the heat in your meetings 68 Values-based deliberation process 69 Media engagement checklist 70

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

3

Introduction

What it means to be a Radical Moderate It takes courage to prosecute strongly held views in a respectful manner without alienating those who feel differently. That’s all the more reason to try, writes GREG THOM.

D

Critically, it is not a progressive enterprise, nor is it a conservative one.

Arguing a point with nuance, moderation and a willingness to give weight to opposing views is much harder.

How do you know if you’re a Radical Moderate? Because you believe civil discourse, shared ground and democratic process are worth fiercely defending.

oggedly arguing a point from an extreme position – from the political left or right – is easy.

It takes work. It takes mental discipline. It takes a degree of thoughtfulness and open-mindedness that seems to be becoming rarer in an increasingly polarised world.

And because you want to be one! You see Radical Moderation as something to walk towards, not rail against.

It is this increasing polarisation that prompted the Institute of Community Directors Australia to explore the concept of the Radical Moderate and the role their approach can play in civic discourse.

Radical Moderation is not a quiet, bland consensus – it’s a noisy, argumentative space where challenges are posed by those determined to hold space for nuance, complexity and coexistence.

We picture the Radical Moderate as someone who is capable of holding strong views and advocating for change, but in a respectful and reasoned manner that does not stoke division.

Radical Moderation welcomes centrists, yes, but also progressives, conservatives and combinations of the two. Radical Moderation welcomes those who insist on principled dialogue, moral clarity, and civic courage – even when it unsettles.

Radical Moderation is a broad church that encompasses differing and opposing opinions. It allows us to challenge each other, explore new ideas, and consider creative solutions to solve emerging problems.

“ 4

Radical Moderation is not a quiet, bland consensus – it’s a noisy, argumentative space where challenges are posed by those determined to hold space for nuance, complexity and coexistence.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

The Radical Moderate rejects extremes that flatten complexity, yet remains deeply open to bold, transformative ideas that can withstand rigorous questioning.

To explore Radical Moderation further, we asked thought leaders from a diverse range of backgrounds – politics, not-for-profit, technology and other sectors – to address a series of questions on what they believe it means to be a Radical Moderate, and why adopting such an approach matters.

The 20 writers who have contributed to this project agree on one thing: it matters a great deal.

The topics they have covered in such an accessible and well-argued way range from the generational change underscored by the 2025 federal election result to the media’s role in shaping public debate to the rapidly

evolving influence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the subsequent implications for societal cohesion.

Most take a macro approach to exploring the diverse ways in which a Radical Moderate approach can offer pathways through poisonous and polarised debates, yet their insights resonate on an individual level, too.

Like many of us, I have learned some of these hard lessons from personal experience.

My family has always valued and encouraged robust discussions around the dinner table, on politics, religion or the news of the day.

Our two children have grown into fine young adults with progressive views of their own that they are confident in defending in a respectful manner; a fact that fills my wife and I with pride.

That doesn’t mean things never go off the rails.

At the end of one recent family dinner, my son and I found ourselves embroiled in an increasingly passionate debate about the role of “legacy media” in a world dominated by short attention spans and online engagement.

I lamented the fact that many young people consume their news in short bites on social media platforms such as TikTok. I thought it was more than reasonable to suggest that they had a responsibility to seek out a wider range of views by also consuming other forms of media – such as TV news, radio and newspapers.

These legacy media are undeniably under threat and battling to remain viable. In my mind that night, this had no bearing on the role they play in offering balanced news coverage and a diversity of views to counter the spread of misinformation online.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, our son – who is 28 – took my line of thinking as an attack on his generation and argued that it was the responsibility of legacy media such as TV news to adapt and cater to the demands of a demographic that largely considers it irrelevant.

As a journalist of 40 years’ experience, I saw his dismissal of the mainstream media model and the shift in how a younger generation keeps itself informed as an existential threat.

The debate, although it escalated to an uncomfortable degree, remained respectful, and we both agreed to disagree.

However, I also found myself thinking about the merits of my son’s views and why they were important to him. I didn’t dismiss their validity. I could see that it was possible for both positions to be based in truth.

Since the upending of societal cohesion in the wake of the covid pandemic, the self-censorship of privately held views that might be viewed as contentious by friends and family has become part of daily life for many people across the world.

In my own life, I see lifelong friendships tested when political fault lines open over a beer with mates from my own working-class background, magnified by (in my eyes) their increasing conservatism, which comes with ageing – a political shift that I don’t share.

Such situations test our skills in knowing when to keep arguing, when to acknowledge that there is more than one way to skin a cat, and when to take the heat out of the debate by offering to buy the next round.

I could not, however, ignore a chance encounter on a LinkedIn thread in which participants were celebrating the election of Donald Trump and all the good that would flow from that result.

As is the way with conflicting views, I made what I believed were rational, measured counter arguments to what quickly developed into a pile on.

The online encounter left me mentally hot under the collar, but it had been important to me to enter the lion’s den and present a reasoned argument – not name calling, not vilification, but a different point of view.

To me, that is the essence of what it means to be a Radical Moderate. To reject self-censorship at one extreme, and stridency at the other, in favour of a willingness to do the challenging work of engaging in difficult conversations, from a place of empathy, respect and principled pragmatism.

After all, when the talking stops, the fighting truly begins.

Greg Thom is a journalist at the Institute of Community Directors Australia. Over a 40-year career, he worked as a reporter at the Herald Sun newspaper and in communications at Telstra and the National Broadband Network.

It made me reflect later on my own capacity to dig in my heels and not give ground on something I believe in.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

5

Leadership Principled leadership and good governance

The Radical Moderate as Leader In an era of deep division, where extreme views dominate discourse, what does it mean to lead with both courage and conviction? Radical Moderates do not sit on the fence, and they are not vanilla – they actively and courageously build the bridges that keep democracy strong, says ADELE STOWE-LINDNER, Executive Director of the Institute of Community Directors Australia.

T

he best leaders are not those who avoid conflict or stay neutral to keep the peace. The Radical Moderate leader engages deeply with complexity and refers to their values to carefully resist the pull of ideological extremes.

They refuse to accept simplistic solutions.

They see leadership as the hard work of holding tensions – between tradition and progress, security and change, individual needs and collective responsibilities. A Radical Moderate is committed to principled action and leads by ensuring diverse voices are heard.

Autocratic leadership from the left and the right centres on the individual leader. More democratic-style leadership, by contrast, requires collaboration, compromise, and balancing the needs of the minority and the majority. A culture that recognises only the majority risks accusations – sometimes justified, sometimes not – of racism, misogyny or ablism, among other excluding behaviours.

If we fixate on the individual leader, we risk a culture of fragility, where compromise is betrayal and collaboration is impossible. How can we work together if disagreement itself is seen as harmful? Collaborating requires some

6

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

tussling, so for effective collaboration you need to be sitting at the same metaphorical table and focused on the same goal.

Being a Radical Moderate does not mean being passive or indecisive. It takes courage to hold competing priorities of majority and minority in tension, to reject extremism without retreating into complacency.

A healthy culture embraces contradictions – security and freedom, stability and change, individuality and community – without defaulting to easy answers. Empathy sustains the trust and collaboration democracy depends on. And democracy, in turn, requires enough people to prioritise it above other concerns. It demands a delicate balance: the majority making space for the minority, and the minority engaging with the broader collective.

Trust is the foundation of all leadership, especially in democratic contexts. Democracy depends on a social contract based on the belief that other people will hear and represent our needs. This trust must be evident at every level, from community organisations to local, state and federal politics.

Credit: wildpixel/iStock

It extends to our media, our healthcare system, our schools. Leadership in any organisation relies on trust, built through predictability, accountability, transparency, and a willingness to listen. Trust is eroded when leaders dismiss dissent or engage only with their inner circle.

Good governance relies on transparency and accountability and requires thinking of the future, not only the present.

A Radical Moderate approach to governance asks good questions, seeks nuance and evidence, and resists easy answers.

Many community organisations are governed by an elected board, and to that end they use democratic means, but their most important role in a country’s democracy is contributing to building a socially cohesive, trusting society from the bottom up. They are democracy incubators.

I once belonged to two separate cultural community organisations that sat on opposite sides of a long-standing ideological divide. A mentor asked why I stayed involved in both. I told her neither gave my young family everything we needed – one offered authenticity, the other gave us music, close friends and intellectual stimulation – but together, they gave us the full spectrum. She reminded me that no community is flawless.

One aspect of that role is their commitment to good governance. Governance entails ethical responsibility, which entails a commitment to real-world impact and long-term integrity.

“

Leadership today requires engaging with imperfection rather than demanding total adherence to one set of narrow beliefs.

Through active participation, we can address flaws, fill gaps, and extend grace to others, just as we hope to receive it ourselves. This mirrors the Radical Moderate approach – staying present in imperfect spaces and working toward change without demanding ideological perfection.

Eventually, I committed fully to one community and joined its board, tacitly agreeing to share the responsibility for the community’s imperfections. My mentor had passed by then. I wish I could have told her that I had followed her advice and learned to aspire to her generosity of spirit – the true essence of community mindedness.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

7

Democracy is imperfect and so is every community and society. When ideological purity becomes the standard, even well-intentioned movements, schools, communities and countries can become exclusionary. Leadership today requires engaging with imperfection rather than demanding total adherence to one set of narrow beliefs.

Many political movements thrive on polarisation because it energises their base. Leaders who benefit from binary narratives – who frame the world as "us versus them" – may see Radical Moderation as a threat to their ability to mobilise support.

Radical Moderation is a counterforce to polarisation, offering an alternative model of leadership that builds bridges rather than deepens divides. When a Radical Moderate leads, it is clear to see that people who are different from them stand beside them. This kind of leadership is uncomfortable for the leader. It is risky. It requires sitting with disagreement instead of shutting it down. When the Radical Moderate leader asks questions, they are seeking to understand, not just to affirm.

Certainty is easy. But it rarely solves problems or accomplishes progress. A psychologist once told me their role was to make people uncomfortable, but only after building trust: “My job is to build rapport so I can bring discomfort into the room.” Radical Moderation does the same. It resists the urge to simplify or cling to control. It leads with questions rather than rigid answers.

The digital age has a lot to answer for in fuelling disharmony, but it also offers some free materials to help build social cohesion. Social media, free podcasts and free traditional media online provide quality information that challenges us, that we disagree with, freely, at any time we like. There is nothing standing in the way between us and consumption of discomfort.

Radical Moderation sounds noble until it asks something of us. What if you are the one being asked to compromise on a deeply held belief, or to keep talking with someone whose views you find offensive or even harmful? What if you are being asked to negotiate with somebody who holds far more power than you? Or less power? What if you are told that to build bridges, you must sometimes pause your own campaign for justice?

8

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

On the other hand, what is at stake if we do not aspire towards Radical Moderation? Democracy? Trust? Reform?

Social cohesion? Progress does not come from purity. It comes from people willing to stay present, even when the conversation is awkward or challenging. What would it take for you to embrace the discomfort of Radical Moderation in your own leadership life?

Questions the Radical Moderate leader can ask themselves and others to help navigate messy spaces include these: To seek evidence over ideology •

"That’s an interesting perspective – what data or examples support that and where did it come from?"

•

"How do we know this is true? What evidence would change your mind?"

To encourage nuance

•

"I see the principle behind what you are saying – how does it hold up in practice?"

•

"Can we find a way to balance these competing priorities rather than choosing one over the other?"

To test ideas without dismissing them first

•

"If we followed that logic, where might it lead? Would there be unintended consequences?"

•

"Let’s explore whether this is driven by ideology or by outcomes – what is the real-world impact?"

To keep the conversation open

•

"I’m hearing a strong conviction here – what would it take to shift your perspective even slightly?"

•

"How do we make space for both principled beliefs and practical realities?"

Adele Stowe-Lindner is the Executive Director of the Institute of Community Directors Australia.

Australian community Principled leadership and good governance

Ethical bridge builders in a divided democracy A Radical Moderate’s role is to give voice to the overwhelmed middle, says REBECCA HUNTLEY, director of research at 89 Degrees East.

In an age where political theatre dominates headlines and outrage is a form of currency, it’s easy to forget about the quiet majority – the ones juggling mortgage repayments, supporting elderly parents, helping with school fundraisers and wondering if their next energy bill will push them over the edge.

They don’t live on [social media platform] X. They’re not storming Parliament or waving flags. They do however, care deeply. They want a better society. They just don’t always know how – or if – they’ll find the time to help create one.

These are the Australians who make up the "Positive Preoccupied" and "Isolated Believers" – two of the six key audience segments identified in the Community Compass Report by 89 Degrees East, a segmentation of – Australia’s views and engagement with the community sector.

Together, they represent 32 per cent of the population.

They may also be the most important Australians to understand right now. Why? Because they are the conscientious centre of the country. Not necessarily the loudest or the most visible – but the ones who still believe that working hard, helping others and doing your bit matters. Even when it feels like the world is falling apart.

The centre is not empty — it’s exhausted Let’s start with the Positive Preoccupied (16 per cent of Australians). They support the community sector in principle and often advocate for it within their social circles. However, they’re buried under the pressures of modern life. They’re more likely to be raising kids, working long hours and facing escalating living costs. They believe in the value of community organisations, they want to help, but they’re exhausted.

Then there are the Isolated Believers (also 16 per cent).

Their situation is different but no less important. They are often the most economically and socially vulnerable, and although they’re deeply supportive of community organisations – especially those filling the gaps left by government – they feel disconnected and uncertain of their place in society. They want to get involved but lack the confidence or means. They prioritise security and stability because their lives rarely afford them either.

What both groups have in common is this: they want Australia to work. They still believe in contribution, fairness and decency. They’re not drawn to ideological wars though. They don’t have time for it – and they don’t see the point.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

9

The great polarisation disconnect This is why our obsession with polarisation – especially in the media and politics – feels so disconnected from the lived experience of these Australians.

“

Ethical leadership in this moment means understanding not just what people believe, but what they’re living through.

While elite voices debate “culture wars,” most people are in a different battle: trying to stretch their pay packet far enough to afford childcare, energy, and groceries in the same week. Yet they’re watching the news – or scrolling past it – and seeing leaders and commentators talk in absolutes. Us versus them. Left versus right. Win versus lose.

The Community Compass clearly shows this tension.

Australians are split down the middle: 56 per cent think community organisations should speak out on social and political issues, however 49 per cent believe they should “stick to services” and avoid politics.

It’s tempting to interpret that as division. In truth however, it reflects ambivalence, not extremism. People aren’t against advocacy – they’re against point scoring.

And this is the space where Radical Moderates must lead.

Credit: Dmitrii_Guzhanin

10

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

The radical moderate isn’t a fence-sitter

Leadership that resonates in the real world

Let’s redefine the centre. Not as a location on the political spectrum, but as a posture.

Ethical leadership in this moment means understanding not just what people believe, but what they’re living through. It means responding to their genuine desire to contribute — even when they can’t volunteer on weekends or attend local forums. It means making space for those who are cautious, tired and tentative. It also means leading with values that transcend party lines: care, safety, opportunity, connection.

Radical Moderates are not indecisive or uninterested.

They’re deeply values driven. They’re also allergic to dogma. They believe in taking action with others — not against them. They know that compromise isn’t a failure; it’s a function of democracy.

They’re not trying to avoid hard questions. They’re trying to ask better ones.

What does good leadership look like when people are overwhelmed, not outraged? When citizens are too tired to protest, but still care deeply about fairness and inclusion? When people don’t have strong ideological convictions, but still know instinctively what feels right?

The Positive Preoccupied and Isolated Believers don’t want a revolution. They want reassurance. They want stability.

They want practical progress, not perfect ideology. And they are far more representative of the Australian public than the noisiest voices we so often hear.

Moving past media’s two-dimensional thinking The media, in particular, has struggled to read the centre.

Too often, Australians are flattened into binary categories: progressive or conservative, for or against, elite or battler.

The Community Compass gives us a more nuanced view.

Take the Isolated Believers, for example. They overwhelmingly support more government funding for the community sector. They also believe that service delivery should be prioritised over advocacy. These aren’t contradictions — they’re reflections of real-life priorities.

They see the good in the system, even if they feel abandoned by it.

Meanwhile, the Positive Preoccupied are full of hope, but paradoxically feel they lack agency. They may say, "I think my MP is working in my interest," and also, “I don’t feel I have a say.” This is not confusion — it’s fatigue. It’s the slow erosion of civic confidence.

The lesson? We need more leaders who listen closely enough to hold these contradictions with compassion, and who speak clearly enough to be trusted amid the noise.

Radical Moderates don’t draw their strength from outrage.

They draw it from empathy, evidence and action. They understand that for most Australians, politics isn’t a performance — it’s whether or not their kid’s school has enough teachers, or their community has a functioning mental health service.

The work ahead If you’re a policymaker, advocate or community leader reading this, remember that your most important audience may not be the ones tweeting your last quote.

It may be the preoccupied parents who support your mission but haven’t found the time to donate. Or the isolated neighbour who reads your flyers but hasn’t yet walked through the door.

Don’t assume silence means apathy. More often than not, it means people are waiting for you to make it easier, safer and more worthwhile to get involved.

The future of Australian democracy doesn’t belong to those who shout the loudest. It belongs to those who do the work — quietly, consistently, courageously — in the centre.

Dr Rebecca Huntley is one of Australia’s foremost social researchers and a Fellow of the Research Society of Australia.

She is also author of How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way That Makes a Difference (2020).

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

11

Principled pragmatism Principled leadership and good governance

Leadership in a polarised political environment: The case for principled pragmatism While human instinct is to stubbornly insist on ‘victory’ in political debate, experience shows that it is step-by-step compromise than can craft a pathway to trust, says former president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, EMERITUS PROFESSOR GILLIAN TRIGGS.

In 1966, my third year at Melbourne Law School, I went to my first lecture on International Law, the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I was hooked.

In the Second World War my father had been a British tank commander in North Africa and my mother was in the Women’s Royal Navy. My world was to be very different from theirs; one of optimism, opportunity and humanism.

The international rule of law would bring global peace and justice and an end to discrimination and inequality.

What could possibly go wrong?

Eighty years after the United Nations Charter was signed, the then Pope, Francis, when asked about the risk of a third world war, observed that ‘a third world war fought piecemeal’ is already underway. He had good reason.

War, violence, poverty and famine, are igniting across the globe, forcing people from their homes in unprecedented numbers and killing hundreds of thousands.

At the time of writing, the UN Refugee Agency estimates

12

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

123 million refugees are seeking international protection and hundreds of millions of migrants are pursuing better lives in wealthier, democratic countries. More than 12 million Sudanese have been displaced, three million to Chad, Egypt, and the Central African Republic (CAR).

More than a million Rohingya have found a measure of protection in Bangladesh. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced 8.3 million refugees to Poland and Moldovia and on to Europe. The UN estimates that 1.9 million people have been displaced in Gaza. There have also been thousands of deaths across the world due to war and conflict.

Armed conflict is the norm in many parts of Africa, and gang warfare in North Central America overwhelms efforts to bring criminals to justice. Climate change and drought are driving conflict among herders, fishers and farmers who have lived together peacefully for hundreds of years.

Afghanistan under the Taliban denies basic freedoms to women and persecutes minorities, while thousands of Syrians hope to return home if peace can be sustained.

“

Today, political debate, national or international, is deeply polarised, moving to extreme, dogmatic, binary responses that leave no room for nuance, complexity or compassion.

As instability and violence mount globally, some political leaders have rejected the international rule of law and human rights in favour of closed borders, denying procedural due process, mandatory detention without access to the courts, forced deportation of asylum seekers to third countries and abuse of executive power by avoiding democratic processes.

Raw power, whether military, economic or political, has driven a retreat from multilateral collaboration to unilateral ‘beggar thy neighbour’ trade policies of the 1930’s, the very policies that prompted the rise of dictators and yet another world war.

Today, political debate, national or international, is deeply polarised, moving to extreme, dogmatic, binary responses that leave no room for nuance, complexity or compassion.

Yet effective problem-solving requires compromise, recognition of just concerns and practical rather than ideological or ‘perfect’ outcomes. That is why the idea of a ‘sensible middle’ or ‘radical moderation’ is attractive.

Principled pragmatism In my job with the United Nations Refugee Agency, I learned the value of "principled pragmatism". Is this a contradiction in terms? How can one, at the same time, advocate for the right of refugees to asylum, or the integrity of territorial sovereignty, or the prosecution of war criminals, while also make concessions to other priorities?

Is ‘appeasement’ always wrong, naïve or blind to evil?

Some core international legal rights cannot be compromised, including the absolute prohibition of torture, slavery, and territorial aggression. Most international legal rights however are relative to the reasonable and proportionate exercise of the rights of others.

Much of the humanitarian work of non-government organisations (NGOs), local faith communities, international organisations such as the Red Cross and Red Crescent and the United Nations agencies, are highly pragmatic, bringing practical, compassionate help in often illegal and unjust situations.

I well remember a meeting I had with the President of a sub-Saharan African nation. My role was to ask him to respect the 1958 Refugee Convention by granting asylum to the thousands of people seeking protection from violence in neighbouring countries.

The President was courteous. He listened as I explained that refugees in his country were not allowed to work or travel outside refugee camps; their children could not attend school and access to social services or medical care was limited. Then it was his turn.

He rightly pointed out that it was part of the African tradition to offer asylum to people in need of protection and that, as a party to the Refugee Convention, his country respected its principles. The President then set out the huge challenges facing his impoverished country.

The borders were porous, with non-government armed groups, such as Al Shabab, attacking local villages and kidnapping schoolgirls for ransom and recruiting boys at the end of Kalashnikov rifles. National security of his own citizens was a top priority, and it was hard to identify a genuine asylum seeker from a terrorist. The costs of providing sanctuary to so many refugees from war torn neighbours were prohibitive and the global community was reluctant to share the burden.

Yes, he believed in the international rule of law, but poor governance, tribal conflicts over access to resources, foreign interference and corruption were his daily priorities. I left the meeting overwhelmed by the scale of the problems his country faced, feeling chastened for advocating compliance with the Refugee Convention despite so many existential security threats.

And yet, by the end of the meeting, the President agreed to ensure that all refugee children would be given access to primary school in his country. This was something; a not so small step to inclusion in the community and an opportunity for refugee children to be ready for the future.

The country would continue to be in breach of the Refugee Convention in many respects, but a practical and humane outcome had been promised.

While our instincts are to fight for the right outcome, to insist on "victory" in political debate, experience shows how step-by-step compromises can craft a pathway to trust in the rule of law and measurable improvements in the human condition.

While we must hold fast to fundamental principles of human rights and justice, we also need influential leaders of integrity, at all levels of society, with the courage to find practical and humane solutions to rising global challenges.

Emeritus Professor Gillian Triggs AC is an international lawyer and former UN Assistant Secretary-General and High Commissioner for Protection with UNHCR. She received the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Medal in 2022, was named 2023 International Law Woman of the Year, and appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2025.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

13

Leadership Principled leadership and good governance

Is it an oxymoron to conceive of radical moderation?

For an outstanding example of an effective Radical Moderate, look no further than the late Pope Francis, argues Adjunct Professor SUSAN PASCOE AM, chair, Community Directors Council.

It’s an unsettling feeling directly facing hostile senators in Senate Estimates when sustained critique comes from the government of the day and not the opposition. How to respond?

As inaugural Commissioner of the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, my colleagues and I decided to prepare carefully, rehearsing every possible line of attack, to respond with unfailing politeness, and

to maintain respect for parliamentary process and our legislated role.

To do this we needed political nous borne of assiduous environmental scanning, a confidence in our interpretation of the ACNC Act (Cth 2012), a capacity to read the interpersonal dynamic in the chamber, and resultant behaviour which modelled values and respected norms of parliamentary process.

Credit: oguzdemirel/iStock

14

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

No doubt to the Government of the day (who opposed our existence) we were radical. To the recently unseated Opposition, however, we were moderately implementing an Act of the Parliament – simply doing our job as democratic procedure prescribed.

This is a simple example of the challenges in determining what constitutes radical or moderate behaviour – it is in the eye of the beholder.

Is it an oxymoron to conceive of radical moderation? Or is it a hybrid disposition needed in a fractured and fractious world? Is there a role for people of credibility to identify and occupy the common ground and to work toward the common good? Is such a conception naïve and idealistic?

I don’t think so.

We live in historically disruptive times. The rancour and incivility which marks much political discourse; the attempts to normalise extremist views and actions; the rise in authoritarian regimes globally; the attendant stifling of advocacy and media; and the systematic undermining or dismantling of democratic institutions all call for response.

Passivity, or waiting for others to take action will not suffice. Activism is one response, such as those distressed by government inaction in the pace of climate change making their voices heard: this can be an individual consumer making purchasing choices in harmony with their values and beliefs or collective action such as letter writing, demonstrations or litigation.

Advocacy is critical, and many in the community and charitable sector play an effective role maintaining a focus on justice, equity and sustainability locally and globally.

“

We live in historically disruptive times. The rancour and incivility which marks much political discourse; the attempts to normalise extremist views and actions; the rise in authoritarian regimes globally; the attendant stifling of advocacy and media; and the systematic undermining or dismantling of democratic institutions all call for response.

There is a role for the Radical Moderate, the principled pragmatist, the daringly prudent. Such people can be disruptive with positive effect holding their causes and enterprises together. They can attract critique and adulation contemporaneously reflecting the outlook of those who react to them.

A good exemplar is Pope Francis. His death on Easter Monday 21st April 2025, prompted a global outpouring of grief at his passing, and gratitude for his voice of compassion and conviction. As British Labor MP Maurice Glassman, wrote of him, "He defies the orthodoxies of left and right in the name of common-good policies in which there is an active reconciliation between estranged interests, including class interests."

Pope Francis tried to hold together a church believed to be overly ‘Europeanised’ by many in the global south where numbers are growing, and out of touch in the more prosperous north where numbers are declining and touchstone issues related to the role of women and the acceptance of LGBTQI+ invite reproach.

The changes he introduced into the Catholic Church as Pope over a period of twelve years may seem lame to outsiders, but they initiated a cultural revolution it will be hard to erase. He was committed to being simultaneously pastoral and traditional, describing the church as a "field hospital", going to the margins in keeping with the social teaching of a "preferential option for the poor and vulnerable".

He modelled behaviours of humility, compassion, fortitude and engagement, choosing to stay in the Vatican workers accommodation, Casa Santa Marta, rather than the papal palace; installing a huge sculpture in St Peter’s Square graphically depicting the circumstances of migrants and refugees; standing firm on core values in the face of critical onslaught from opponents; and making himself accessible both in Rome and on numerous global visits to ‘the peripheries’ demonstrating values in action.

This is the courage of a leader of conviction – a Radical Moderate.

In the political sphere, there is a critical need for leadership that holds together consensus in the face of a cacophony of opposing views. During our most recent federal election, the major parties sought to attract an historically high number of undecided voters – and marginalise the independents and minor parties. Global trade disruption and Trumpian politics bled into our discourse, and many voters again cast their lot with the teal independents.

The old political arrangement of a "two-party system" is fragmenting. The future political dynamic calls for radical moderation. What are some of the qualities and behaviours that make this situation workable?

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

15

•

Holding to core shared values such as equity, fairness and justice without rigidity and uncompromising certitude

•

Listening to those impacted by change and engaging with them to identify common ground and alleviate the impact on peoples’ lives and livelihoods

•

Continuously scanning the local and global environment to anticipate and plan for disruption to be positioned to resist coercion and anti-democratic approaches

•

Adopting a disposition of humility which recognises that the "strongman" leader is an archaic model that underinvests in the power of collectivism and community capability

•

Understanding we live in a globally connected world, and there is inherent decency and neighbourliness in sharing our riches and knowledge with others, especially in humanitarian crises

•

Exercising good judgement free of entrenched ideological dogma or righteous certitude

“

16

There is a role for the radical moderate, the principled pragmatist, the daringly prudent.

Such people can be disruptive with positive effect holding their causes and enterprises together.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Aside from political leadership, how each of us responds depends on our disposition and experience.

The birth of the ACNC described here illustrates the need for personal credibility, consistency, and integrity with work teams, the community, and the political process. To offset the bureaucratic and parliamentary onslaught of a hostile government we had to be adroit, well prepared, and effective communicators.

We had to be radical moderates, continuing to implement an Act of Parliament not supported by the government of the day who did not have the numbers to remove us and quash the legislation. We needed stoicism, empathy for our team who chose to stay despite the uncertainty, and engagement with both supporters and detractors.

This story has a happy ending – we survived, and under the current Commissioner, the ACNC is thriving. Values and dispositions such as prudence and pragmatism, courage, conviction, nous, and nimbleness, got us there – all attributes of the "Radical Moderate". And some of those hostile senators were convinced.

Susan Pascoe was inaugural ACNC Commissioner, and also chairs the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID) and the Principals Australia Institute Certification Advisory Board. She was appointed as Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Australia in November 2018.

Government engagement Advocacy and social change

The case for bipartisan political advocacy Balancing the left and right of politics isn’t fence-sitting, it’s a tightrope walk that offers both risk and reward, says RORY PARKER, associate director at not-for-profit government engagement specialists Tanck.

It seems like there’s always an election on the horizon.

That’s because – between each of the states and territories, local governments, and even the federal government (as we went through this year) – there often is.

For the social sector, elections mean opportunity – it’s a great time to engage with politicians, reset policy agendas, and seek funding through election commitments.

In an increasingly divisive political environment however, where the likely outcome may clash with your own personal convictions, it begs the question: how do you know which side to back?

“

You don’t have to agree with each other on everything — so don’t waste time arguing about what you don’t agree on, when you can build connection by talking about what you do.

Simply put: you don’t.

You may have heard the saying that ‘the only poll that matters in the one on election day’ which has proven true time and again. There’s no such thing as an unlosable election, endured recently by both the Labor Party and the Liberal-National Coalition (in 2019 and 2025 respectively).

Despite the prevailing media rhetoric, even with Labor’s significant majority in the House of Representatives the next federal election isn’t a guaranteed victory for Labor.

So, the safest bet for a NFP is to engage with all sides – not just government, but also the opposition and crossbench.

Unfortunately, this may mean having to grit your teeth and play nice with a politician that you don’t necessarily entirely agree with.

The key thing to remember here is that you can do this without selling your soul (that’s an activity you can leave for politicians and lobbyists!), by not compromising on your values and bringing government stakeholders with you on your organisation’s journey.

You don’t have to agree with each other on everything – so don’t waste time arguing about what you don’t agree on, when you can build connection by talking about what you do.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

17

Believe it or not, (almost) every politician in our parliament is in it for the right reason: they want to make Australia a better place. We just all have differing views on what that looks like or how to get there. So, by taking a step back and considering what is important to that politician personally, you can have a far stronger likelihood of appealing to them and their values.

At Tanck, this is our bread-and-butter: we work with organisations to build bipartisan support so that they can achieve their funding or policy objectives.

One of our clients was a small documentary filmmaking team who had been telling stories of vulnerable Australians making it through hardship, with a focus on First Nations and migrant stories. The thing was, the particularly progressive subject matter wasn’t making cut-through with the conservative government of the day.

So, together, we considered where their overlap in values lay and identified a story regarding a farming community doing it tough. By leaning into this messaging, we were able to connect with a very senior Nationals Minister who delivered them more funding than we could have possibly expected otherwise.

Who could have expected that an incredibly conservative Nationals MP would become the champion of a small, progressive documentary team? Perhaps it was a long shot, but by being pragmatic and reaching across the aisle they were successful in not only securing funding, but also building a relationship that has since helped them to have a greater impact on vulnerable communities across Australia.

Too often organisations, advocates, and change-makers believe that taking a principled stand against certain politicians is the courageous thing to do.

Sure, this may be true in some cases – but for many it could be argued that refusing to engage with your political adversaries and only speaking with those in your ideological bubble, is safe, timid, and ultimately a waste of time. What takes courage is accepting that people come from differing backgrounds, viewpoints, and perspectives and it takes time and effort to bring them on your journey.

When you view the first step of advocacy not necessarily as advancing your goal but building relationships with the people who can help you to do so, things can shift into gear. Despite the prevailing thought, politicians are people – they aren’t just a means to an end.

So, instead of focussing on what you want it’s important to initially focus on them. What makes them tick? What

18

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

are their values? Focus on them as a person first and the rest will follow. Just as you might disagree with your drunk uncle’s political rant at Christmas lunch, you can still have a positive relationship with someone without agreeing with them on everything. Sometimes swallowing your pride can be the real bravery.

On the other hand, it’s useful to keep in mind that not all political rivals are personal adversaries. You may or may not be surprised by the relationships that cross party-lines, that your organisation could benefit from by taking the time to seek them out.

Any political staffer can tell you a story of a particularly savvy opposition or crossbench MP who swallowed their pride and worked closely with the government to deliver for their community: and if they can do it, you can too.

Another reason to engage with both sides of the aisle is because it can help bring the other side with you. Time and time again we’ve seen clients be told by governments ‘we’d love to help, but there’s just no money’ who then miraculously find millions to match a commitment made by the opposition.

Progressive governments benefit when progressive organisations refuse to engage with conservatives, and vice versa. They may even make you feel awkward for doing so. But governments change, and your organisation can’t afford to keep all its eggs in one basket.

Balancing the left and right of politics isn’t fence-sitting, it’s a tightrope walk. It’s risky and exhilarating, and if you aren’t careful there’s a long way that you can fall. If, however, you keep your chin up and confidently put one foot in front of the other, it can be rewarding.

One thing is for sure: it takes a lot more bravery to do than sitting idly by, watching from the ground.

Rory Parker brings a diverse, creative skillset to his role as associate director at Tanck, focusing on values-driven policy and people-led campaigns. He previously worked as an advisor in Federal Parliament and as a policy advisor to a senior state Minister.

Advocacy Advocacy and social change

Managing tensions in public discourse: Speak up or step back?

Australian Democracy Network executive director SAFFRON ZOMER offers some guidelines for organisations navigating social and political advocacy.

T

he idea of moderation in public discourse appeals to me: when we moderate ourselves, turn down the volume or the intensity of how we communicate, we can hear and be better heard by others.

We can all be less defensive, and more thoughtful. When the algorithms and ratings numbers that determine so much of our public discourse drive extremism, outrage, and lies, moderation can be profoundly and positively counter-cultural.

However, the concept of moderation or balance can also degrade our discourse, leading, for example, to public broadcasters that platform lies or nonsense in the name of ‘both sides’ coverage, and advocates who get labelled "extreme", naive or impractical when they call for evidence-based change.

We live in times of extreme crisis - sometimes the very necessary, practical steps we must take to preserve our own futures are also ‘extreme’ or radical - they match the scale of the problem. As advocates we have all felt the pressure to make our advocacy palatable and be less "radical". That’s not our job.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

19

So how should advocates navigate a time when we must call for bold action, and face hard truths, in a way that invites genuine dialogue and doesn’t drive us further apart into our different tribes? Can you speak to extreme situations from the centre? Here are some thoughts on how we could try:

When our public discourse is dominated by the loudest voices, they are usually the most extreme and the least interested in finding common ground.

Start from shared values - we have so much in common

Anytime I see a genuine deliberative process (researchprofiles.canberra.edu.au/en/publications/ deliberative-democracy-and-the-climate-crisis) to tackle a hard problem, I am astonished and delighted by how good a representative group of regular people is at solving a hard problem. In the right setting, most people are sensible, smart, bold, and focused on what matters.

We have a great deal in common, if we look for it.

For example, research by our colleagues at Australia Remade into the idea of the public good (www. australiaremade.org/public-good) found that Australians from all walks of life share strong agreement on the importance of housing, healthcare, education, jobs, access to nature, and the internet.

They summarised their findings as a close to universal aspiration to be connected to communities, be cared for, and make a meaningful contribution. If we start from shared values, we can talk about any issue in a way that builds connection instead of division.

Don’t compromise on facts, but be thoughtful about language Words can carry a lot of extra baggage. Their meanings can change over time, and they can mean different things to different groups. The Bridging Dictionary (bridgingdictionary.org/info/) from the MIT Centre for Constructive Communication lists words of this type in the US, suggesting alternatives that don’t evoke ideological loyalties.

If you’re like me, it takes conscious attention to use bridging language – the other sort is so much more intuitive! Taking care in the words we choose however, can help us to say things that are radical, in the sense of matching the extremity of our times, in a moderate tone that anyone can hear.

Make room for someone who hasn’t had a turn speaking yet Even in the age of social media, when anyone with an internet connection can be a journalist, not all of us get to have a say.

Who speaks also matters a lot. If we’re to be truly Radical Moderates, we need to be attentive to who gets to participate in social and political advocacy. Whose voices are missing, and how might we hand over the mic?

20

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Make spaces for genuine deliberation, and participation

Community organising (www.sydneyalliance.org.au/) done well is another way to see moderate radicalism in action, based again on the starting point of the things we hold in common. Investing in supporting communities to engage in genuine deliberation or building active communities powerfully shifts public discourse to both moderation and courage – that’s what connecting people does.

Solutions produced in these settings can cut through the artificial limitations of politics and really move discourse on hard problems forward.

We can be radical in speaking truth to power, and moderate in the way we do it.

When we’re contributing to public discourse in ways that are values based, thoughtfully framed, inclusive, and based in active communities, we can build powerful coalitions of shared interests and values. Honestly, it’s hard to see how we win unless we do.

Saffron Zomer is the founder and executive director of the Australian Democracy Network.

With experience in government relations and campaigning in both the US and Australia, she believes collaboration drives social change.

Changemakers Advocacy and social change

The power to create change The role of a Radical Moderate is to drive change, through having the confidence and passion to dream big, recognise and be prepared to use their power, and to engage with opposing views, says ANN SHERRY AO, Chancellor, Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

hat is a Radical Moderate? Someone who takes "power" to create change, to shape the world we hope for, or is it about the preparedness to use power?

W

So, the question for me is how can a Radical Moderate unlock this potential? How does he or she drive innovation? Drive debate? How do we move forward?

Individuals in big corporate jobs, leading not-for-profits, or inhabiting any major leadership role, actually possess a great deal of power and influence, but only a handful of people use it fully. Think of the resources, the skills, the ability and the sway they potentially hold to drive change, to innovate and influence the world.

I believe a strong motivator can come from being always slightly dissatisfied with the status quo – a healthy state of being. I believe this is where the Radical Moderate sits – in that moment where dissatisfaction can be the driver for how you unearth ideas, even ones that people might have tried before but they haven’t worked, possibly just because the time wasn’t right when they were tried. Not accepting the current reality can lead to ideas that seem radical at the time, but can become the new normality over time. It’s that interesting junction between pushing hard into what is seen as radical ideas or thoughts, to eventually change the centre of gravity.

I have no doubt that others looking on see these leaders as collective holders of power and influence, and yet, I find their use of power and influence is often lacking or episodic. By failing to act, they don’t grab the opportunity that is presented by the power they hold.

“

Not accepting the current reality can lead to ideas that seem radical at the time, but can become the new normality over time.

An example of what I’m talking about happened three decades ago, when I was in a big corporate job at Westpac, with an influential national profile, and became part of an experiment, with a collective of corporate and community leaders, to truly move the needle on assisting Indigenous communities on Cape York. We knew government wasn’t about to try anything radical in that space, and Indigenous leader Noel Pearson had told us he believed what the

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

21

communities needed were the executive-level smarts and skills of big corporates to try and solve systemic problems, and so we seconded top staff to the Cape. It turned out many of the problems were not insurmountable. There were things like how do you set up a bakery in Hope Vale?

How does a community get itself financially sustainable?

Then more complex and ambitious work, such as dealing with mining companies, setting up fishing enterprises, strategizing ways that locals could make a proper income out of their increasingly popular artwork.

We shifted the dial, by using resources and power in ways nobody had attempted before. At the time it was seen as a really radical idea, to send skilled corporate people into communities but, of course, what we learned quickly was the value to the indigenous organisations was the skill transfer, but the value to the corporate organisations was the extraordinary experience that seconded staff got – taking one’s soul to work – at a time when they might have otherwise felt that their jobs didn’t give them enough purpose. It was truly a win-win.

To me, this is where the Radical Moderate can be so powerful. It’s about using the power you possess to grab an opportunity to do something constructive and

different, on a systemic problem, and then watch it develop and become normal over time.

I believe the lack of willingness or ability to exploit power by those leaders who have it is a major issue holding back Australia’s potential in many areas of business, not-forprofit work and the reduction and elimination of broad spectrum well understood endemic issues.

In that Cape York case, a group of corporate and community leaders used our power to try something new and ambitious. Thirty years later, as Jawun, it is still operating.

Having power, and using power well, isn’t necessarily about just doing what everybody else has always done.

It’s about seeking the gaps, tuning into where you feel dissatisfaction. Asking where your organisation can try something that’s much more innovative, more radical, to potentially deliver a completely different sort of outcome. Part of that answer might be considering nontraditional, surprising partnerships that could shift your view of the world.

It exasperates me in today’s world when, instead of exploring such unlikely partnerships, I see people diving into partisan camps, slinging mud at one another across

Credit: themacxiStock

22

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

the corridor, taking sides and refusing to understand and engage. To me, when that happens, the world just seems … smaller.

This is not the way that leads to breakthroughs, that leads to system-change, that will solve the giant issues of our time. We need to think bigger; we need to have more ambition. I believe this is the vital role that a Radical Moderate can play: to ask the big questions and think beyond the smallness of so much of today’s work and debate.

The purpose of the Radical Moderate is to move beyond the binary ways of today’s discourse – to not get caught up in the disabling "You are wrong. I am right". Instead, the Radical Moderate has a different path – to find ways into issues that are solution-oriented.

As Chancellor of Queensland University of Technology (QUT), I feel strongly that universities have a role to play here. They must play a much bigger role than only teaching practical skills that directly translate to work, although that is clearly one important part of their existence.

But there is also the need to help students develop their world view. Universities are places where we all learn to think and learn to engage with the world. University students come out of a very structured secondary education system and need to adapt, to learn at their own pace, and find ways of getting information. They must find ways of distilling what they hear and learn to engage with completely different groups of people.

In today’s world, the attempts to shut down voices that don’t conform with the norm, or the use of violence to shut down views that are opposed to yours, is making the world smaller, not bigger.

So, I ask, where are our inner radicals? Where are we all, and why aren’t we all pushing harder? We need more ambition in so many fields. Why aren’t more groups working together to make greater collective change?

We need bigger thinking, rather than everybody in their isolated, small pockets of thought. It doesn’t matter that people have opposing views – surely, that should be a strength, not a divisive barrier. Good solutions come from a position where people might have very different views, but they’re committed to find a way forward.

Reinvigorating regional Australia, saving the Barrier Reef, taking action on climate change to support our Pacific Island neighbours. None of these are radical ideas, but coming together with bigger thinking, unlikely partnerships and a collective action to achieve these things. That’s radical. And it needs to happen. I think the time is right.

Ann Sherry AO, is Chancellor of Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and one of Australia's leading business executives, with a career spanning government, banking, and tourism. She has held executive, board, and chair roles across major Australian entities. An active philanthropist, she is passionate about improving opportunities for women in STEM and sport, and supporting Indigenous Australians.

I think all of us with authority, whether it’s in the university sector, corporate sector, or not-for-profit sector, have a fundamental and important role to keep people discussing, debating and looking for opportunities, finding the cracks and the gaps where we can try things, even if they don’t work, as opposed to shutting everything down and getting everyone to agree with us.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

23

Pluralist governance Diversity, inclusion and community engagement

The centre must hold: navigating pluralist governance across ideological divides Pluralism is the town square that defies the polarising algorithm, validating, embracing and encouraging a diversity of views. That makes it worth fighting for writes JEREMY STOWE-LINDNER.

W

e live in a pluralistic society, yet we are surrounded by orthodoxies; of faith, of politics, of logic and reasoning, and therefore orthodoxies of direction.

The very word ‘orthodox’ is derived from the Greek and was first used by the early Christian ideologues to mean ‘of the right opinion’.

“ 24

Pluralism by its nature is a shape shifter, reflective of a society in that moment and constantly introspecting and reevaluating. Pluralistic leaders are value navigators rather than value imposers.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Whilst to orthodoxy, pluralism is its (so to speak) antiChrist, to pluralism, orthodoxy is one set of equally valid opinions in the spectrum of variance. The love, therefore, offered by pluralism to orthodoxy, is necessarily unrequited.

The orthodoxies of interest groups and social media algorithms, encapsulated by identity politics, is on the one hand a search for justice and truth, whilst on the other hand risks being a descent into a mutually exclusive scramble for special treatment, polarisation and privilege.

So how do we navigate this landscape as organisations which strive for pluralism?

We begin with definition. A common criticism of pluralism is that ‘anything goes’. From a religious perspective, this means that pluralism enables and validates inauthentic beliefs and practices at best, and heretical ones at worst. From a societal cohesion perspective, it facilitates ideologies and movements which to its detractors undermine the safety and security of society itself.

Yet these arguments lead us down a rabbit hole, since in reality, these critics of pluralism are critiquing anarchy.

Pluralism is not anarchy. It is a broad set of beliefs or practices (or whatever the modus operandi of the organisation may be) that is defined by an agreed set of guardrails.

A pluralistic definition will, as a result, identify what it is, and also what it is not – in other words what actions or behaviours are beyond the pale.

We then consider membership and strive to ensure that our membership throughout our stakeholder groups reflect the pluralism of our mission, and not just the orthodoxy of some. Governance groups, employees, service users and so forth all fall within this. The risk, of course, is that we create an orthodoxy of type in our membership, so ensuring that our definitions are constantly reflected in these groups is essential.

In Talmudic times, the Jewish sages spoke of the Acher, the ‘Other.’ The Acher was a sage, presumed to be Elisha ben Abuyah, who became a heretic. The Talmud is replete with stories of the Acher, it presents his opinions, and it narrates his logic. What the Talmud has found is a balance between representation versus voice. The Acher’s voice is

valued, but albeit with a credibly weakened reputation.

In other words, whilst some cultures may be tempted to redact their heretics (or in ancient times burn them, and in contemporary times cancel them), the tradition is teaching that the inclusion of the counterpoint is as important as the inclusion of the point.

Process and practice in pluralistic governance is a necessary and public process. How is disagreement and dissonance managed? Governance documents and processes which resolve (or attempt to resolve) disagreement embrace respectful disagreement as healthy and necessary, not as divisive, or inappropriate.

Thus, a model such as deliberative democracy, which has consensus building and facilitated dialogue as part of its conflict management ethos, may be embedded in the organisation.

The challenge always is that pluralism requires leaders to be interpreters, and not just implementers, of pluralistic vision. This is because orthodoxies have a defined, often publicly available, and doctrinally ‘approved’ set of values, beliefs and practices which can be used as a reference point for decision-making. Orthodoxies stand (or fail) the test of time, like weathered statues on a blustering hilltop.

Credit: DNY59/iStock

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

25

“

The centre does not hold by itself. It is held, and articulated, and fought for, by people like you and me.

Pluralism by its nature is a shape shifter, reflective of a society in that moment and constantly introspecting and reevaluating. Pluralistic leaders are value navigators rather than value imposers.

Consider in the political realm leaders such as the German Chancellor Angela Merkel who in 2015 navigated enormous ideological divides within Germany and the EU during the refugee crisis.

Her statement Wir schaffen das (We can do this) framed a moral vision in the context of the time that tried to bridge humanitarian obligation and national concern, despite political backlash.

In contrast, consider British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who declared, "There is no alternative," pushing through free-market reforms and union restrictions with little tolerance for dissent. Her style exemplified conviction politics – a refusal to compromise or mediate between competing ideologies.

With the structures, policies and definitions in place, the pluralist organisation only transcends the theoretical by successfully translating these into action. Tools such as value mapping, scenario planning or multi-criteria decision-making (a quick Google search will give you examples of these in practice) help organisations implement the change they wish to see, with constant reference and deference to their governance documents.

W B Yeats coined the phrase "The centre cannot hold" in his apocalyptic 1919 poem The Second Coming. Written after the First World War, at the start of the Irish War of Independence and in the midst of the Great Flu Pandemic, it was a time when things were falling apart.

26

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

We live in a world of increasing polarisation, in which (paraphrasing Jonathan Sacks) multiculturalism is leading to coexistence and tolerance, rather than engagement and respect. Exemplified by the urban street of international takeaways – Indian, Chinese, Malaysian, Ethiopian, we coexist side-by-side but do not genuinely interact and learn from each other. Even customers simply dip in and out, extract what they can take, and then carry on, unchanged, with their lives.

Yet it is my thesis that pluralism is the Centre. It is not the mid-point between extremes of orthodoxies. It is the town square that defies the polarising algorithm, since it gives time and space for, validates, embraces and encourages diversity.

The apocalypse of Yeats need not come about; the centre need not fall. Predating Yeats, the liberal conservative Edmund Burke is alleged to have said that "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

The centre does not hold by itself. It is held, and articulated, and fought for, by people like you and me.

Jeremy Stowe-Lindner has served on a number of not-for-profit boards in Australia and the UK and is Principal of a pluralist Jewish school.

Faith & culture Diversity, inclusion and community engagement

Balancing tradition and progress: Radical moderation in faith and cultural groups Radical moderation is not about endless conversation. It’s about action grounded in shared values, says VIOLET ROUMELIOTIS, CEO of migrant and refugee advocacy organisation Settlement Services International (SSI).

I’ve learned that progress doesn’t always roar. Sometimes, it hums. It sounds like a quiet conversation over tea with a community elder who is cautious about change but curious. It feels like shared laughter in a cultural centre after a heated debate. These moments – delicate, human, real – are where radical moderation lives.

At Settlement Services International (SSI), we work with thousands of people every day, each carrying their heritage, trauma, resilience and dreams. From refugee mothers navigating new norms to young leaders questioning cultural traditions, our role isn’t to impose change but to walk alongside it.

That’s why radical moderation, bold yet balanced leadership, resonates deeply. It’s the middle path where dignity, tradition and justice meet.

“

Radical moderation may sound like a contradiction, but in these increasingly polarised times, it’s a vital strategy.

And at the heart of it all is diversity, inclusion, and community engagement – not as buzzwords, but as the compass guiding how we build bridges between old and new, between what is and what can be.

Radical moderation may sound like a contradiction, but in these increasingly polarised times, it’s a vital strategy.

It means standing firm on principles such as human dignity and equity while having the courage to listen, adapt and co-create.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

27

At SSI, we navigate complex terrain daily. How do we support women from patriarchal communities without disregarding the voices of elders? How do we uplift LGBTQIA+ individuals in faith-based settings without rupturing fragile trust? The answer lies in what I call principled pragmatism: meeting people where they are and walking forward together.

This thinking echoes the approach of Eboo Patel’s Interfaith Youth Core in the United States. Rather than erasing difference, it fosters shared action rooted in mutual respect.

Here in Australia, we see this same ethos in the Interfaith Network in the City of Greater Dandenong and its partnerships with Hume City Council—two local governments SSI is proud to collaborate with.

“

These partnerships help faith leaders across traditions work together to address local social issues while preserving the integrity of their beliefs. It’s change rooted in trust, not confrontation.

Too often, tradition is framed as a barrier to inclusion.

What if we saw it as an anchor though, a source of strength and belonging?

One powerful example is our work in Armidale, a regional city in New South Wales, where SSI led efforts to resettle Ezidi refugees. As one of the most persecuted religious minorities in the world, the Ezidi community brought with them not only trauma but deep cultural traditions and spiritual values. Rather than asking them to assimilate, we asked: How can we honour your traditions while helping you thrive in a new context?

Through our "All in for Armidale" initiative, SSI facilitated conversations between Ezidi families, service providers, schools and civic leaders.

Change sticks when it grows from roots, not when it's dropped from above.

We translated settlement through the lens of cultural preservation and participation. The result? A communityled, whole-of-town response that welcomed the Ezidis as neighbours, not strangers.

Credit: Sandipkumar Patel/iStock

28

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Change sticks when it grows from roots, not when it's dropped from above.

If tradition is our anchor, listening is our compass.

Listening isn’t passive, however. It requires presence, trust and humility.

At SSI, we’ve learned the value of what I call "listening loudly." It means creating real opportunities for marginalised voices to be heard – and acted upon.

One example is the NSW Refugee Women’s Advisory Board, developed with SSI’s support. This wasn’t a symbolic gesture. It was a shift in power. Women who had once been spoken for were now co-designing policy, advising government, and leading change. These outcomes are documented through SSI’s public policy submissions, program evaluations, and project updates.

We’ve seen this approach succeed with faith-based communities as well.

When introducing programs on family violence prevention, we engaged local imams, ministers and elders early in the process. These leaders helped frame the conversation in culturally resonant ways, building bridges rather than barriers. By being invited in – not sidelined – they became powerful advocates for safety and equity.

Radical moderation is not about endless conversation. It’s about action grounded in shared values.

When SSI advocated for more inclusive housing policy, we didn’t start with government. We started with communities – migrant families, religious leaders and civic volunteers – asking what "home" really meant. This bottom-up approach allowed us to reframe housing not just as a right, but as a shared social responsibility.

That collective framing led to broader public support and more innovative partnerships. These lessons are reflected in SSI’s housing policy submissions and collaborative work with sector-wide campaigns such as Everybody’s Home.

The best ideas I’ve heard don’t come from extremes.

They come from leaders who know how to balance ambition with empathy, policy with people.

In a world that often demands loudness and certainty, radical moderation offers a more grounded, humane way forward. It reminds us that we don’t have to choose between tradition and progress. We can have both if we’re willing to do the work.

This is the kind of leadership that all community-based organisations need today – from smaller faith-based and diaspora groups to migrant resource centres and specialist service providers.

Not the flashiest. Not the loudest. The kind that listens deeply, speaks clearly, and brings people along. It's a model rooted in inclusion, sustained by diversity, and activated through authentic community engagement.

As I reflect on my own leadership, I keep coming back to one simple truth: progress doesn’t come from leaving people behind. It comes from bringing them with you.

Violet Roumeliotis AM is CEO of Settlement Services International (SSI), an organisation committed to supporting newcomers and diverse communities to reach their full potential. She is a member of the Metropolis International Steering Committee and a past Telstra Australian Business Woman of the Year.

Internationally, I’ve seen similar lessons echoed through Metropolis International, where I serve on the International Steering Committee. Metropolis brings together policymakers, researchers and practitioners from across the globe to discuss migration and integration.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

29

Fundraising Diversity, inclusion and community engagement

Beyond the Binary: Fundraising isn't just “good vs bad money” In an era where extreme positions dominate discourse, the Radical Moderate does not sit on the fence. They build the fundraising bridges that keep democracy strong, says CEO of Equitable Philanthropy CATHERINE BROOKS.

F

undraising is often framed as a moral battleground: the righteous not-for-profit defending its mission against the temptation of “bad money.”

It’s a compelling narrative but an overly simplistic one. In reality, not-for-profit leaders face complex, high-stakes decisions about funding sources every day – decisions that rarely fit neatly into “good” or “bad” categories.

As someone who has spent years navigating the intersections of funding, ethics, and impact, I’ve come to see myself as a Radical Moderate in this space. Not because I lack conviction, but because I believe the redistribution of wealth is a necessary and urgent priority – one that requires pragmatism as much as principle.

My ultimate goal is to strengthen the community sector, shift more money into its hands, and ensure that those with power and privilege give back in ways that truly make a difference.

30

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

In an era where extreme positions dominate discourse, the Radical Moderate does not sit on the fence.

We build the bridges that keep democracy strong – bridges between philanthropy and not-for-profits, between social justice and financial sustainability, between ethical rigor and the practical realities our not-for-profit leaders face when running mission-driven organisations.

This means navigating the grey areas of fundraising with both courage and conviction, but in a thoughtful way.

The historical context: where wealth comes from One of the uncomfortable realities of Australian philanthropy is that a significant portion of the wealth being distributed today has its roots in colonisation, land dispossession, and the exploitation of natural and human resources over the past couple of hundred years.

Many of the families and corporations now engaged in philanthropy are, in some ways, trying to "make good" with their wealth. And I love working with them as they do this work.

However, this can sometimes raise the question for fundraisers and not-for-profit leaders: Do we reject this money because of its origins, or do we accept it and use it to drive meaningful change?

“

My ultimate goal is to strengthen the community sector, shift more money into its hands, and ensure that those with power and privilege give back in ways that truly make a difference.

This is where I find myself firmly in the centrist position.

While I deeply acknowledge the structural inequities that led to wealth accumulation, I also believe that philanthropy and fundraising are fundamentally about redistribution.

The more money that can flow into grassroots organisations, community services, and systemic change efforts, the better.

Rather than taking an absolutist stance, I advocate for a nuanced, transparent, and values-driven approach – one where not-for-profits have the tools to assess and negotiate funding decisions in a way that aligns with their mission.

The Radical Moderate Approach to Fundraising Radical Moderates understand that fundraising decisions exist in shades of grey, not black and white. Rejecting all funding that comes with ethical complexities may lead to financial instability, while indiscriminately accepting funds can erode trust and credibility.

Instead of asking, "Is this money good or bad?" we should be asking: •

Does accepting this money advance or undermine our mission?

•

Can we mitigate potential reputational risks?

•

Are we compromising our core values, or are we making a strategic decision in service of our larger goals?

By focusing on these questions rather than moral absolutes, not-for-profits can make informed, valuesdriven choices that balance financial sustainability with mission integrity.

Case Study #1: Taking Gambling Money for Good One of my clients faced a decision that exemplifies the complexities of ethical fundraising. A major gambling company offered a substantial grant to support their programs for vulnerable communities. On the surface, this funding could be seen as problematic – gambling addiction disproportionately affects disadvantaged populations, and some stakeholders viewed the money as tainted.

However, after careful evaluation, the not-for-profit determined that the grant would enable them to expand critical services that directly supported the very people most affected by gambling-related harm. They accepted the funds but did so with strict guidelines: •

The funding would be transparently disclosed to stakeholders.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

31

•

It would be used exclusively for harm reduction and support services.

•

The organisation would retain its ability to advocate for responsible gambling policies without restriction.

This decision wasn’t about absolving the gambling industry of responsibility, nor was it about rejecting much-needed funding. It was about strategic compromise – using available resources to maximise positive impact while maintaining organisational integrity. Further, the Board made a considered and informed decision that it felt was right for the organisation.

Case Study #2: Rejecting a Soft Drink Company’s Sponsorship Conversely, another client made the decision to reject a lucrative sponsorship from a major soft drink company.

Their organisation was dedicated to improving health outcomes for disadvantaged children, many of whom were at higher risk of obesity and diet-related diseases.

Even though the sponsorship would have provided valuable funding, the leadership team determined that accepting money from a company whose products contributed to the very issues they were working to address would undermine their credibility. Stakeholders, including public health experts and community members, expected the nonprofit to be consistent in its mission and values.

By refusing the funds, they reaffirmed their commitment to health advocacy and strengthened trust with their community. While this decision meant turning away muchneeded resources, it also ensured that their message and integrity remained uncompromised.

Navigating the grey areas: The role of an ethical fundraising policy These case studies illustrate why fundraising isn’t black and white. Every not-for-profit must define its own boundaries when it comes to ethical fundraising, and one way to do this is by having a clear, transparent ethical gift acceptance policy.

At Left Write Hook, we developed an ethical gift acceptance policy to guide our decision-making process, ensuring that funding aligns with its mission, values, and stakeholder expectations. Our policy includes: •

A decision-making framework that assesses reputational risks, alignment with mission, and resource implications.

•

A transparent review process that ensures major gifts undergo appropriate evaluation before acceptance.

•

A clear stance on rejecting gifts that pose ethical conflicts or operational burdens.

32

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

By implementing a structured approach, not-for-profits can move beyond knee-jerk reactions and make wellinformed, values-driven decisions about funding sources.

It’s more about asking the right questions than having black and white rules.

Encouraging More Open-Minded Fundraising As a Radical Moderate, I believe fundraisers and not-forprofit leaders should generally be more open-minded about accepting money than rejecting it outright.

However, this doesn’t mean abandoning ethical considerations – it means applying a rigorous decisionmaking process that allows nonprofits to: 1.

Assess funding opportunities with nuance rather than defaulting to "yes" or "no" reactions.

2. Engage donors in conversations about their philanthropic intentions – ensuring that giving is done with accountability, not just as reputation management.

3. Use ethical policies as a guide, not a weapon – allowing for mission-aligned, pragmatic decisions without unnecessary moral rigidity.

Leading with Conviction and Complexity The work of not-for-profit leaders is rarely easy, and fundraising decisions are among the most challenging.

However, the goal is not to seek moral perfection – it is to make thoughtful, informed, and mission-aligned choices.

Radical Moderates in the not-for-profit sector do not avoid tough conversations; they lean into them. They acknowledge complexity, navigate ethical dilemmas with care, and ultimately make decisions that maximise impact while upholding integrity.

In an increasingly polarised world, this kind of leadership is more necessary than ever, and I stand with you, notfor-profit leader, as a Radical Moderate committed to building the bridges between social justice and financial sustainability for the sector.

Catherine Brooks is the CEO of Equitable Philanthropy, where she acts as a strategic bridge between charities and philanthropists. Through her work in strategic fundraising, governance planning, and philanthropic advisory, Catherine supports both funders and not-for-profit organisations to increase their impact and build meaningful, long-term relationships.

Media Diversity, inclusion and community engagement

How political journalism shapes public perceptions of compromise and pragmatism An impoverished media serving a diverse population weighed down by the cost and complexity of modern living characterised by a litany of broken political promises and an eroded attention span is not an atmosphere that welcomes big ideas or radical solutions, says communications expert BRETT DE HOEDT.

P

ragmatism can easily be perceived as weakness – the death knell for anyone aspiring to office. Certainty, action and a willingness to pursue a course of action play well but sentiment in the electorate swings like a pendulum.

Those that care less about politics (most folk) are generally far milder and more specific with their demands – a freeway bypass here, an instant asset write off there, a childcare subsidy boost and they’re largely satisfied. They feel no need to reshape the political landscape.

Globally we’ve seen a swing away from wanting strong men and bold action. Trump’s mendacity has created a new appreciation for… you know… democracy. Voters in Australia, Canada, the UK and France have swung back to seeking a more measured, democracy-as-usual approach.

It’s doubtful to me that big ideas that we take for granted – Medicare, public funding of private schools, NDIS and compulsory voting – would be adopted today. The Voice referendum failure and the lacklustre victory of the same sex marriage plebiscite (61.6 per cent support) point to this. Progress through moderation may be the unsexy way to go.

Overwhelmingly it is the political class – political operatives, party members, think tankers, volunteers and those that closely follow politics and policy between elections – who yearn for fundamental reforms, big ideas and bold initiatives. That said, their concerns and solutions differ radically.

BREAKING NEWS: commercial media does not exist to report, reveal or expose. It exists to make money. In an increasingly atomised cultural and information landscape, with advertising revenues spread thinner than ever, it

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

33

makes sense that media outlets chase the eyeballs that come with coverage of more extreme positions, hotter takes and less nuanced reporting.

Media welcomes those with outsized personalities and radical ideas insofar as they create interest.

superannuation balances in excess of $3million. About 85,000 of us. This may seem like a mild reform impacting a small and privileged group. The Opposition has come down against the move and the media responded thus:

Protestors such as Extinction Rebellion or those supporting Palestine may gain coverage for their demonstrations, but this coverage is unlikely to inspire a deeper exploration of the underpinning issues.

Media coverage characterises people, parties and ideas in the public mind.

Once the dreaded word “embattled” is used to describe one’s leadership, it’s pretty much game over. Similarly hard to shake are adjectives such as “extreme”, “ultraconservative”, “far right”, “transphobic” or “antisemitic”.

When is a change of policy weakness and when is it pragmatism? Is extending the licence of Woodside’s North-West Shelf gas mine a sign of compromise, support of business and farsightedness? Or is it a betrayal of ALP voters and our environment?

Any policy idea aiming at the hip pocket nerve will see an outsized response.

The message for those in power is clear – forget tackling franking credits, negative gearing or capital gains tax on the family home. We can’t even reduce some of the tax concessions for rich people without upheaval.

When affable Treasurer Jim Chalmers, fresh from a huge electoral endorsement, decided to spend his political capital on some tax reform he chose to increase taxes on

Media reveals its priorities (some might use the phrase “biases") through what it does and doesn’t cover and how it reports on the issues it deems worthy of coverage.

Depends on who you ask and what media you consume.

Photo by Simone Fischer on Unsplash

34

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Sure, personal experience and social media is a factor but its media that still does the heavy lifting. So what issues are covered and how they are covered is key.

That’s why I’ve devoted so much of my career to assisting my clients raise their off-Broadway issues in mainstream media. Recently I had the CEO of Sexual Assault Services Victoria talking to ABC Melbourne about their work with schools to tackle the rise of sexual assault in schools by students. The issue was raised, dealt with maturely (if only briefly) and we controlled the message. I’m chalking this up as a small victory.

Defund the police. Really – “no police?”

Silence is compliance. “So, I have to speak up about everything, in a way you agree with, all the time?”

My advice for campaigners is simple: do you want to speak your mind? Or would you rather win?

As circulation and listenership shrinks, influence wanes.

That’s why our politicians are increasingly likely to decline tough interviews and opt for cosy chats with commercial media outlets and their own social media channels. Why go through some pesky intermediary?

I’ve seen again and again how the media can be encouraged to cover a story at all and the way in which it is covered. Media wants topicality, experts, insights, data and a big dollop of humanity. It wants strong opinion but steer away from those who want to recreate the wheel.

The media ain’t what it used to be. News Corp publications have wholeheartedly backed conservative politics, campaigning against the likes of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews and Chris Minns even in opposition, yet both men prevailed. Likewise, the Teal independents.

My fellow progressives do themselves no favours when they adopt slogans such as:

Reporters are fewer, younger and in possession of less specialist knowledge than ever before. They are less likely to challenge their boss’ editorial judgement or the responses of interviewees. They have less time and space to explain their stories than ever before.

•

Always was, always will be,

•

Defund the police,

•

Silence is compliance.

These slogans are interpreted by media (and plenty of people) as extreme and binary. A case of: You’re either with us or against us. This goes quadruple for decapitation and vandalism of statues and public spaces.

Always was, always will be. “But I thought this country belonged to all of us?”

“

Media reveals its priorities (some might use the phrase “biases) through what it does and doesn’t cover and how it reports on the issues it deems worthy of coverage.

No wonder so much ‘news’ is devoted to sport, weather and consumer stories that not only cross the border into advertising, once there, they take up citizenship.

An impoverished media, a radically diverse population weighed down by the cost and complexity of simply living in 2025. A litany of broken promises and an eroded attention span.

This is not an atmosphere that welcomes big ideas or radical solutions. A thought for my fellow progressives: a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.

Brett de Hoedt is the mayor of Hootville Communications, which assists not-for-profits with media, marketing and communications.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

35

Impact evaluation Navigating complexity & building resilience

Measuring impact without ideological bias Adopting a Radical Moderate approach to grantmaking analysis can help recognise bias, manage it transparently, and design more inclusive, ethical, and useful measurement systems writes JEN RILEY, former Chief Impact Officer, SmartyGrants.

In the grantmaking world, impact measurement has become an increasingly central concern.

Funders want to know if their investments are making a difference. Boards want evidence of outcomes. Grantees want space to tell authentic stories of change.

Yet across my work at SmartyGrants, supporting hundreds of grantmakers and not-for-profit organisations, I saw how easily impact measurement can become distorted by hidden ideological biases.

At a time when public discourse is often polarised, and when data itself is increasingly politicised, distorted, or disregarded, there is a particular responsibility on those of us working in evaluation and measurement to take a balanced and inclusive approach.

We must resist the pull of both extremes: the temptation to treat data as an unquestioned arbiter of truth, and the impulse to reject evidence entirely in favour of narrative alone. The Radical Moderate path in this work is one of principled pragmatism, striving to honour diverse perspectives while building robust systems for understanding impact.

The risk is that we end up privileging what is easiest to quantify or what looks impressive, at the expense of the deeper, more complex changes that matter most.

The goal is not to eliminate bias, as that is impossible.

36

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Rather, we should aim to recognise it, manage it, and design more balanced, inclusive, and ethical measurement systems. This is particularly important for community directors and leaders, whose decisions shape what gets valued and whose voices get heard.

Across the grantmaking and community sectors, five key ideological tensions often shape the way we measure impact: •

accountability vs. learning

•

positivism vs. constructivism

•

external evaluator vs. community ownership

•

rigour vs. relevance

•

data-driven vs. human-centred.

These tensions have been well documented by thought leaders such as Michael Quinn Patton and Patricia Rogers.

They remind us that evaluation is never neutral, and that choices about what we measure and how we interpret evidence always reflect underlying values.

Can we truly measure impact without ideological bias? In short, no. All measurement is shaped by values: what we choose to measure, how we collect evidence, and whose perspectives we privilege. However, while we cannot eliminate bias, we can strive to recognise it, manage it transparently, and design measurement systems that are more inclusive, ethical, and useful.

Based on my work with the SmartyGrants community and broader sector practice, I offer several reflections on how we can navigate this challenge in practice.

First, we must be transparent about values. Evaluation is inherently value-driven, so we should clearly state the worldviews and priorities behind what we measure. For example, a grant program might prioritise communitydefined outcomes over standard KPIs. Being explicit allows funders, boards and communities to understand and question these choices, rather than accept them as neutral.

Next, we need to value multiple forms of evidence.

A pluralist approach to evidence, combining numbers with stories, community insights, and reflective practice, offers a richer and more authentic picture of impact. Funders must guard against privileging quantitative evidence at the expense of other ways of knowing.

A program that builds trust and cultural safety may not shift short-term numbers but may lay the groundwork for long-term change. This perspective is supported by Thomas Schwandt’s work on practical hermeneutics, which reminds us that meaning is co-constructed and that qualitative and interpretive approaches are essential for understanding complex social change.

Crucially, we need to co-design what success looks like.

Too often, grantees are asked to report against predefined funder outcomes that do not reflect community priorities.

In one grant program I reviewed, several First Nations organisations were asked to report on employment outcomes when their actual priority was cultural strengthening and language revival. Where possible, we must support grantees and affected communities to define what success looks like in their own terms.

There is a growing global movement toward decolonising evaluation, led by Indigenous and Global South scholars and practitioners such as Kataraina Pipi Wehipeihana (Aotearoa), Bagele Chilisa (Botswana), Fiona Cram (Aotearoa), and Zenda Ofir (South Africa). This movement promotes Indigenous-led and community-driven approaches and challenges dominant Western paradigms of what constitutes valid evidence and success.

If we are to take these shifts seriously, we must also embed reflexivity in the evaluation process. Evaluation should never be mechanical. We must encourage evaluators, funders, and boards to reflect on their own assumptions and biases, and to ask whose voices are heard, and whose are missing.

Credit: Philip Thurston/iStock

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

37

“

We must keep the focus ethical. It is not enough to ask whether outcomes are achieved; we must also ask how, for whom, and with what consequences.

Across the SmartyGrants community, I saw growing interest in embedding reflexive practice into grant reporting cycles. This aligns with Donna Mertens' work on transformative evaluation, which centres reflexivity, power awareness, and the pursuit of social justice through evaluation practice.

At the same time, we must strike the right balance between rigour and usefulness. Evaluation should be fit for purpose, designed to match the decisions that need to be made and the complexity of the program. High standards of rigour are important, but not if they render findings irrelevant or unusable.

In one large government-funded program, I saw grantees producing 80-page evaluation reports to meet funder requirements, with little uptake or learning. In contrast, a set of short, user-friendly insights reports created in partnership with grantees were read and acted upon by board members and policy teams. Patricia Rogers’ advocacy for fit-for-purpose evaluation offers a valuable lens here.

Finally, we must keep the focus ethical. It is not enough to ask whether outcomes are achieved; we must also ask how, for whom, and with what consequences. This demands a willingness to disaggregate data to examine equity impacts and to challenge models that produce positive aggregate outcomes while leaving some groups behind.

These ideas are already being explored in practice. In one national grant program, I saw grantees under pressure to report only positive outcomes. The result? Final reports were so "polished" as to be laughably good, and unusable as genuine learning tools. Separating learning-focused reflection from accountability reporting would have supported a more honest and useful process.

38

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

In another program, community organisations were asked to report against standard funder outcomes that did not align with local priorities. Following strong advocacy from grantees, the funder shifted to a dual reporting model, tracking both standard metrics and community-defined outcomes, a small but important step toward a more balanced approach.

Encouragingly, several local government partners across the SmartyGrants community are now embedding participatory workshops to co-design evaluation frameworks for their social impact grants. This process builds trust, surfaces community priorities, and leads to a richer, more meaningful understanding of impact.

Can we measure impact without ideological bias? No, and claiming otherwise would only obscure the values already shaping our work. We can, however, strive to recognise bias, manage it transparently, and design more inclusive, ethical, and useful measurement systems.

Building on the work of leaders such as Michael Quinn Patton, Patricia Rogers, Kataraina Pipi Wehipeihana, Donna Mertens, Thomas Schwandt, and many others, we can move toward practices that strengthen community voice, support genuine learning, and foster evaluation approaches that honour nuance, balance evidence with lived experience, and contribute to more just and equitable outcomes.

In doing so, we enact the very spirit of Radical Moderate leadership, holding space for nuance, fostering dialogue across differences, and building resilient organisations equipped to navigate the complexities of our time.

That is an ongoing journey, and one worth taking.

Jen Riley is the former Chief Impact Officer at SmartyGrants. She works across government, philanthropy, and the community sector to help grantmakers and social purpose organisations design more ethical, inclusive, and practical approaches to measuring impact. Jen is a longstanding advocate for pluralist evaluation and community voice.

Political map Navigating complexity & building resilience

The end of extremes: How the generational divide redrew politics in 2025 Voters at the heart of the new political centre demand results and reject the notion that leadership must be animated by extremes to be authentic, argues veteran political pollster KOS SAMARAS, Director of Analytics and Strategy at Redbridge Group.

T

he 2025 federal election will be remembered not merely for its result, but for the symbolic fall of two ideological opposites: Peter Dutton and Adam Bandt.

Both men entered the campaign representing vastly different visions of Australia’s future, yet exited politics victims of the same force, a generational and demographic realignment that is reshaping the country’s political landscape.

Dutton’s political persona, policies, and campaign tone sought to animate a base increasingly confined to regional Australia and older Australians, while largely alienating the groups that are now at the heart of electoral power: Millennials, Gen Z, renters, diverse Australians, and university-educated women.

Their defeats signal the end of an era dominated by rigid ideological purity and the emergence of a more generationally conscious, pragmatically aligned electorate.

Peter Dutton’s political career was forged in the twilight of the Howard era, an era where “middle Australia” was defined primarily through the lens of older, suburban Baby Boomers. His final campaign, however, clung to a version of the electorate that has been slowly fading from view.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

39

Dutton’s pitch was built on cultural grievance, law-andorder rhetoric, and a refusal to acknowledge the concerns of a younger, more pluralistic generation.

His opposition to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament and continued focus on issues such as immigration control and climate policy obstructionism were not just policy positions, they became emblematic of a deeper resistance to Australia’s demographic evolution.

The strategy might have once resonated in a country where Baby Boomers were the largest electoral bloc. In 2025 however, those born after 1980 made up more than 42 per cent of enrolled voters and that cohort rejected Dutton’s vision overwhelmingly.

In key outer-suburban seats, areas with high proportions of young families, migrants, and renters, the Coalition’s vote collapsed. This collapse wasn’t just due to policy; it was existential.

Younger Australians, particularly Millennials and Gen Z, didn’t see themselves in Dutton’s campaign. Many had spent the past decade grappling with stagnant wages, insecure housing, climate anxiety, and rising living costs.

Dutton offered nostalgia. They were asking for solutions.

The electorate didn’t only punish the Right. The Greens, under Adam Bandt, also suffered losses, and notably, Bandt himself lost his seat in inner-city Melbourne. The Greens’ strategy this past term leaned heavily into activist politics, framing their approach through moral absolutism, often disconnected from the real-life material concerns of the very people they claimed to represent.

Their focus on radical housing reforms, environmental maximalism, and aggressive opposition tactics in parliament often felt more attuned to the ethos of student unions than the complex, negotiated politics of a diverse nation in economic stress.

In doing so, the Greens made two strategic errors. First, they mistook the online volume of youth activism for realworld electoral breadth. Second, they failed to recognise the maturation of the Millennial vote.

The same generation that once marched for climate justice is now trying to buy homes, raise families, and navigate the childcare system. Older Millennials in particular, now in their late 30s and 40s were receptive to progressive values, but not to the Greens’ often performative radicalism. They shifted towards Labor not because they abandoned their ideals, but because Labor presented a more stable, socially cohesive path to reform.

Labor’s resurgence in this election was not driven by nostalgia or ideology but by a clear and targeted appeal to the lived experiences of generational Australia.

Across the nation, Labor’s strongest two-party preferred support came from Millennials and Gen Z, universityeducated progressives, renters, and migrant communities.

In Victoria, Labor polled 61 per cent among Gen Z and Millennials; 65 per cent among university-educated voters in this group; and 62 per cent among renters. These voters saw in Labor not perfection, but a vehicle for change that was realistic, inclusive, and aware of the compromises required to govern.

Credit: piranka/iStock

40

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

This result reflects a broader shift taking place across Western democracies, one in which younger, more diverse, and more economically insecure voters are demanding that politics reflect their realities.

These voters are less loyal to major parties, more valuesdriven, but increasingly sceptical of ideological purity when it comes at the expense of outcomes. They want action on climate change, yes, but not at the cost of social division or political inertia. They want housing reform, but they also want results, not just slogans shouted across parliamentary benches.

The fall of Bandt and Dutton also underlines a growing political truism in Australia: electoral success no longer hinges on appealing to the loudest ideological fringes but on understanding the generational centre.

For the Coalition, that means letting go of a base-first strategy obsessed with culture wars and reclaiming economic relevance among younger voters. The obsession with resurrecting the 2019 playbook, believing in mythical preference flows from One Nation or assuming younger Australians would abandon Labor over gas projects, revealed just how disconnected the conservative strategy had become from the new demographic reality.

In Melbourne, the Coalition’s primary vote among Millennials (minus Boomers) hovered in the high teens.

In Sydney, it barely reached the low 30s.

For the Greens, it means reimagining themselves not as permanent outsiders but as contributors to tangible reform. The romanticism of protest politics must be tempered by an understanding that many of their potential voters, especially older Millennials and young families, now crave stability and collective problem-solving more than street theatre or political grandstanding.

“

Ultimately, this election showed that Australia’s political future will not be shaped by extremes but by the preferences and pragmatism of a generation that has grown up in the shadow of crisis, economic, environmental, and social.

Ultimately, this election showed that Australia’s political future will not be shaped by extremes but by the preferences and pragmatism of a generation that has grown up in the shadow of crisis, economic, environmental, and social. Millennials and Gen Z voters aren’t apolitical. They’re deeply political. They’re also deeply impatient with political actors who refuse to evolve.

Peter Dutton represented the ghosts of Australia’s past, a parochial, monocultural electorate that once held enormous power but is now fading demographically.

Adam Bandt, in contrast, represented an imagined political future, one of radical grassroots upheaval without the necessary groundwork to expand beyond a niche. Both misread the moment.

In their place, a new political centre is being formed, not centrist in ideology, but in generational perspective. It is multiracial, values-based, economically anxious but socially tolerant. It is a centre that demands results and rejects the notion that leadership must be animated by extremes to be authentic.

The fall of Dutton and Bandt is not merely a story of individual failure. It is a generational reckoning and a warning to those who seek to lead this country without first understanding the people who will define its future.

Kosmos Samaras is a leading political strategist and director at RedBridge Group, one of Australia’s foremost research and campaign consultancies.

With decades of experience in public affairs, electoral analysis, and grassroots campaigning, Kosmos is known for his deep insights into voter behaviour, demographic shifts, and the evolving landscape of Australian politics. He previously served as a senior political operative, playing a pivotal role in state and federal election campaigns across the country.

Kosmos grew up in Broadmeadows, Victoria, and brings a working-class lens to his analysis, grounded in lived experience and a deep understanding of Australia’s outer-suburban and multicultural communities.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

41

Constructive Journalism Navigating complexity & building resilience

Creating a constructive news culture of solutions, not division A plan a decade in the making aims to move journalism past the hungry appetite of the 24-hour news cycle, instead evolving media to seek and report potential solutions, writes Professor KATE TORNEY OAM, director, Constructive Institute Asia Pacific.

In an age of echo chambers, outrage and collapsing trust in media, the need to radically transform our public discourse has never been more important and a new approach to journalism must be at the heart of that.

Constructive journalism reimagines news by rejecting the noise, cynicism and extremes that dominate so much of our reporting, instead focusing on nuance, evidence, empathy and a radical belief that truth and progress are not found in the loudest voices, but in the most thoughtful.

A constructive approach to news seeks not only to report the problem, but to also explore solutions. It avoids sensationalism and click-bait negativity, prioritising context, evidence, balance and curiosity.

“ 42

Reporting should not only inform but also empower citizens to engage with complex challenges and contribute to solving them.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

This doesn’t mean sugar-coating news; it means reporting with a focus on the future, always asking – what next?

Emerging in Denmark over a decade ago, constructive journalism recognises that journalism has contributed to both our deepening social divide and the erosion of respectful disagreement.

The 24-hour news cycle is a hungry beast, and polarisation and sensationalism are quick, easy fuel. The "us vs them" narrative, urging us to pick sides, is the easiest – and laziest – way to fill bulletins, papers, and feeds.

Unsurprisingly, people worldwide are turning away from news. In Australia, Canberra University’s Digital News Report Australia 2025 shows 69 per cent now actively avoid it – rising to 72 per cent among women.

The most common reason? News feels overwhelming and leaves people feeling helpless.

When we turn away from trusted sources, there’s no shortage of content to fill the void – fueling misinformation, echo chambers, and deeper polarisation.

Strong democracies rely on informed citizens, actively engaged in helping shape the future.

Credit: alashi/iStock

Like radical moderation, constructive journalism is a thoughtful approach beyond the binary. It returns to the first principles of journalism, that reporting should not only inform but also empower citizens to engage with complex challenges and contribute to solving them.

Like radical moderation, constructive journalism elevates complexity and nuance above simplification; it promotes evidence-based information over ideology; it focuses on solutions rather than problem-admiration. It fosters listening, learning and curiosity, over grandstanding.

And importantly both celebrate constructive community dialogue and engagement, with the aim of rebuilding our ability to disagree, agreeably and to benefit from the vast opportunities that this affords in democratic decisionmaking and problem solving.

In Scandinavia, constructive journalism has been rolled out in dozens of newsrooms in various ways. In some cases, the principles apply to the commissioning of all news stories; in others, they’re used in specific rounds like environmental reporting or local government coverage.

It has shaped debate formats where the aim is not domination and a winner-takes-all approach, rather a shared commitment to a set of outcomes for which participants are jointly accountable. And that accountability is tracked – they report back to the community on progress.

On learning about this particular format, my first reaction was "Imagine that kind of debate happening in Australia!".

And then my constructive brain kicked in: "Why not?".

If we want to model constructive problem-solving and discourse, inviting political, industry, and community leaders to lead is a great start.

By having forums where the only aim is a shared outcome and where listening, empathy, and collaboration on shared solutions are rewarded, we move away from the cynicism and hostility that pervades public life.

When we witness people working together across social, political, and cultural divides we are far more likely to believe that progress is possible and participate in making it happen.

Hope and collective agency are fundamental to a healthy democracy. Australia has a proud history of strong, independent journalism – newsrooms that have consistently served communities big and small, shaping our democracy. That tradition is not broken; it is at a crossroad.

We can keep amplifying division, or choose to report, lead, and engage with courage, curiosity, and collaboration.

This isn’t just about reframing journalism – it’s about changing what we reward in public life: thoughtfulness over theatrics, progress over point scoring.

When constructive journalism lifts the conversation, democracy rises with it.

Kate Torney, OAM, is Director of the Constructive Institute Asia Pacific at Monash University. A former ABC News Director, she led 1,400 staff over two decades. She has also served as CEO of the State Library of Victoria and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Foundation.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

43

Governance The future of radical moderation

AI and governance: Will artificial intelligence support moderation or reinforce extremes?

The propensity for artificial intelligence (AI) to supercharge extremist views means the moderating influence of community life guided by human connection has never been more important, says futurist SIMON WALLER.

O

nce, long ago I was told the definition of an economist is ‘someone who will tell you tomorrow why the prediction they made yesterday didn't happen today’.

Clearly this is a little tongue in cheek, but even still, unlike economists, futurists tend to avoid making predictions altogether. Mostly I believe it’s because we are acutely aware of how uncertain the future really is.

That being said, there are patterns from the past that can certainly provide indicators of the direction the future might take. Sadly, when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), those patterns aren’t necessarily that reassuring.

Although we tend to anthropomorphise technology and give it human attributes (such as calling it "intelligence") this comparison is not always helpful. One way in which it’s entirely unhelpful is when we think about agency and motivation. A human has its own agency, makes its own decisions and acts towards its own self-interests.

AI’s agency, on the other hand, is controlled entirely by the technology company that sits behind it. Ultimately, the words generated by ChatGPT are dictated by OpenAI, Copilot does the bidding of Microsoft and Llama responses are shaped by the whims of Meta.

44

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

So, if we want to understand the output of AI, we really need to understand the underlying motivations of the organisations that control it. When we look at AI through this lens, there are some good reasons to be concerned about the level of balance and moderation of its output.

First, the dominant business model of many of these tech companies is dictated by advertising, which in turn is dictated by "time on site" or other such metrics that focus on keeping users engaged for extended periods of time.

It’s now well understood that platforms such as Facebook and YouTube that are driven by these types of metrics tend

“

Sadly, we live in a society where outrage and conflict is more compelling than compassion, and it is easy to imagine a world where the output of AI models is skewed towards extremism as a way of keeping users engaged longer.

towards more extreme content (www.wbs.ac.uk/news/ how-social-media-platforms-fuel-extreme-opinions-andhate-speech/).

Sadly, we live in a society where outrage and conflict is more compelling than compassion, and it is easy to imagine a world where the output of AI models is skewed towards extremism as a way of keeping users engaged longer.

Second, the content these platforms are trained on is not without bias. Although current court cases are revealing that Meta has trained its AI on whole libraries of pirated books (https://theconversation.com/meta-allegedlyused-pirated-books-to-train-ai-australian-authorshave-objected-but-us-courts-may-decide-if-this-isfair-use-253105), research papers and pirated material, the simplest and easiest information for technology companies to access is what is published openly on the internet and social platforms. In fact, platforms such as Reddit are now licensing all their user generated content to big tech for the training of AI (https://arstechnica.com/ ai/2024/02/reddit-has-already-booked-203m-in-revenuelicensing-data-for-ai-training/).

Credit: Moor Studio/iStock

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

45

However, if we look at who is it that is most active when it comes to creating information and posting in on the internet and on social media sites we find a strong bias towards young to middle aged white men (https://khoros. com/resources/social-media-demographics-guide). So much of the diversity of opinion and perspective that exists in the real world is missing online. And as the saying goes, what goes in is what comes out.

The AIs don’t have the ability to discern what is fact and what is fiction; they are there to predict the next most likely word in a sequence. They cannot provide balance and moderation unless that balance and moderation already exists in the underlying data.

Finally, whereas traditionally technology companies have been philosophically aligned to progressivism and liberal ideals, this has now been challenged. During his first term of office US president Donald Trump openly criticised big tech as being biased against right wing views and even went so far as to develop Truth Social, his own social network (https://apnews.com/article/truth-social-donaldtrump-djt-ipo-digital-world-7437d5dcc491a1459a078195 ae547987), after he was barred from Facebook and Twitter (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/technology/ trump-social-media-ban-timeline.html) (yes, it was still called Twitter then).

Fearing a backlash after his re-election, many big tech companies have "bent the knee" to Trump and agreed to reduce oversight over what can be shared on their platforms. In a video released just days before Trumps inauguration Mark Zuckerberg announced the removal of fact checkers (https://www.facebook.com/zuck/ videos/1525382954801931/) because there was "too much censorship”.

Zuckerberg is instead following Twitter (or X), and replacing fact checkers with Community Notes (corrections made by the community and placed on the bottom of misleading or factually incorrect posts). However, the effectiveness of this approach is questionable.

A deep dive into the effectiveness of Community Notes was undertaken by Tom Stafford for the London School of Economics and Political Science (https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ impactofsocialsciences/2025/01/14/do-community-noteswork/). It found Community Notes often appear well after the damage has been done or do not appear at all. It also pointed out that the selection of which Community Notes are worthy of sharing is in itself decided by an algorithm and at the whim of the technology company that owns the platform.

46

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

What this means is that in the rush to appease Trump the underlying data AIs continue to be trained on is likely to become less moderate and more extreme. As a result, once these large language models have ingested this new content and are asked to generate "the next best word in a sentence," that word is likely to become more extreme as well.

The problem isn’t just that the guard rails are being taken away from what humans can post on social media sites. The guardrails have also been removed from the AI models themselves.

Some of the content filters that limit what type of content these models can generate are being tweaked, allowing them to generate more offensive and radical content.

I know I said that futurists avoid making predictions but all of this points towards a future of more extreme content online and less moderation. It’s likely that we’ve already passed peak online trust, and the decline from this point could be rapid.

A combination of technologies including AI and deep faked voice and video means we can no longer be sure what is real online.

Although this enshitification of the internet is now happening on the grandest of scales, the silver lining is that what we do in real life, what we do in our communities and the human-to-human connections that many of us are making, well, that’s more important than ever.

Simon Waller is a strategist and futurist who works extensively with the public and for-purpose sectors.

He is also the independent board chair for Myli, a not-for-profit library corporation that provides library services across much of Melbourne’s outer east. Simon’s new podcast can be found at thefuturewithfriends.com

Fundraising The future of radical moderation

AI and ethical fundraising – can it be effective and responsible?

We need leaders who are prepared to take a brave, but moderate approach when it comes to navigating the risks and rewards offered by AI, says DAN LALOR, director of client success at Home Made Digital.

I still remember vividly the first time I tried an AI image generator. It was early 2023 and Twitter was humming with excitement about the latest release of a tool called MidJourney. I was initially sceptical. "Surely, AI can’t develop anything close to useful for my day-to-day," I thought.

As a fan of AI artists such as Claire Silver and Orkhan Mammadov, I had been exposed to AI-generated creations earlier than most and was certainly open-minded to its use cases. So a tool like MidJourney which I might be able to use myself, without any design skills, was nevertheless enticing.

Prompting was easy enough, however every image just seemed "off" in some way. We were deep in the "uncanny valley" of outputs, where every human had seven fingers, faces blurred into backgrounds, and prompts didn’t quite translate into finer details. I felt validated. "This is cool but isn’t replacing designers any time soon." I cancelled the MidJourney subscription and shut the laptop. Many people did the same and stopped here.

For me though, with each update of MidJourney, alongside the launch of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude, I’d (re)subscribe each time and repeat the same process for testing image generation, this time with the inclusion of copywriting task prompts as well.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

47

Prompt a few things, be unhappy with the output quality, shut the laptop.

Each time leaving a little more deflated with the reality vs hype of it all – but also always with the nagging awareness that this was the worst it would ever be, given how fast the technology was improving.

This process continued over the proceeding years, until recently, the laptop didn’t shut. I was now suddenly in awe of the output. It was harder to tell the humans were AI generated. The copywriting was more contextual and refined. Details sharpened. My prompts translated with surprising accuracy. I felt more at the wheel of it all.

“

AI isn’t coming; it has firmly arrived.

My most tangible experience with AI had been in this creative space, but the technology was already transforming many other fields too. From medical diagnoses and drug discovery in the healthcare sector, to legal contract reviews and policy simulations in the law industry. From fraud detection AI tools in finance, to personalised learning plans and automated AI grading in the education sector.

It was at that moment, where my own tangible experience with AI had improved so greatly, in such a short amount of time, that the future became clearer to me. We are living through a moment that may prove as transformative as the Industrial Revolution – a time when the nature of work, value, and human contribution was irrevocably changed.

AI isn’t coming; it has firmly arrived.

Like the steam engine before it, AI is poised to reshape industries, redefine professions, and rewire our relationship with labour and creativity. Yet, many people, workplaces, and entire sectors – the charity sector included - remain fundamentally unprepared.

In my professional life working with nonprofits, this technological shift is landing at a time when charity fundraising is getting tougher each year. Recent benchmarking data shows donor numbers remain flat; with overall revenue for social impact much the same.

The sector seems fixated on the looming intergenerational transfer of wealth – and what it means to be "ready" for it, but little attention is being paid to how emerging technologies like AI will interface with donors, reshape fundraising teams, and surface new risks and opportunities to consider.

In this context of shrinking donor numbers and an intensified focus on building lasting relationships, the question becomes: what role will AI play in finding and engaging donors, and who sets the ethical guardrails for its use?

The temptation, of course, is to rush in. When budgets are tight, it’s easy to see a new tool like AI as a silver bullet. And to be fair, the appeal is real. One of the most enticing promises of AI in fundraising is its ability to target with near-surgical precision. Predictive modelling, AIpowered donor scoring, algorithm-driven copywriting, and machine-learning-optimised messaging all offer the potential to lift conversion rates while reducing cost.

Huzzah!

Surely these developments aren’t inherently bad? In fact, from a donor perspective, more relevant and timely communications might be a welcome improvement. The benefits alone, however, don’t guarantee responsible use of these new tools.

AI isn’t inherently unethical – but it is undeniably powerful.

48

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

And in a potential system optimised for metrics such as clicks, revenue and conversion, there’s a risk we may unintentionally reward manipulative or exclusionary strategies.

Even when donors benefit, they may not have offered true informed consent. AI is often bundled into broader customer relationship management (CRM) systems without transparent opt-ins or clear privacy settings.

We are left trusting that the model’s training data is unbiased – an assumption that can quietly distort targeting strategies over time.

There’s also the real risk of data privacy breaches where input material containing sensitive information, unknowingly gets resurfaced for all to use, forever part of the AI’s training data.

In this context, those rushing to be radically innovative might, in fact, need to be reined in.

What’s needed is a radically moderate approach. Perhaps the most ethical – and truly radical – thing a fundraising leader can do right now is to pause the use of AI. Allowing for time to build their own (and their team's) AI literacy and to make some conscious decisions as to what AI systems you will (and won’t) use and for what purpose.

At a recent fundraising conference I attended, it was clear through a basic canvassing of audience hands that most not-for-profits have started to experiment with AI tools in some way, without an overarching organisational AI policy, training or conversation to help guide them on the risks and opportunities.

“

Importantly, we need leaders who are neither tech evangelists nor technophobes.

Leaders who take a considered, moderate approach, open to both the promise and the pitfalls. Not a middle ground, but a higher ground.

In a sector built on public trust, our obligation is clear: every fundraising activity, AI-powered or not, must be conducted with honesty, dignity, and transparency.

Supporting your team’s education in this new technology starts to provide the appropriate guardrails for its use.

Simply, understanding how AI tools work is no longer optional. It is a core aspect of professional due diligence.

Leaders must ensure that their use of data-driven targeting and content generation upholds the values enshrined in the Fundraising Institute Australia (FIA) Code: dignity, respect for privacy, and a clear, informed choice for donors. AI doesn’t absolve responsibility; it amplifies the need for thoughtful governance.

Good governance within our own organisations though is just the beginning.

The choices we make as a sector ripple outward, impacting how the public experiences giving and how trust is built or eroded. That’s why ethical AI in fundraising is not just a sector issue – it’s a public trust issue. Governments, tech companies, philanthropists, donors and society generally, all have a stake in shaping the norms that will define this new era.

What we need are open standards, shared frameworks, and deep transparency across the tools we use.

Importantly, we need leaders who are neither tech evangelists nor technophobes. Leaders who take a considered, moderate approach, open to both the promise and the pitfalls. Not a middle ground, but a higher ground.

A space where we embrace the tools of the future that help inspire people to give, without ever losing touch with the raw humanity that giving represents.

Dan Lalor has more than 15 years' experience in the not-for-profit industry, in various leadership roles with some of Queensland and Australia’s leading charities. He is committed to the advancement of the fundraising profession and sits on several non-profit Boards. The views expressed in the article are Dan’s alone.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

49

Innovation The future of radical moderation

Ethical Innovation: How to lead responsibly in an age of rapid change Rather than be viewed as lacking in conviction, moderation should be embraced as something vital for the life of a democracy, writes SIMON LONGSTAFF, Executive Director of The Ethics Centre.

It is an interesting quirk of the English language that the word "radical" has come to mean "extreme".

As it happens, the original meaning of the term, as it developed in the 14th Century, related to the "root" (or ground). That is, it referred to something "vital for life".

Only much later did the term "radical" become associated with a form of political extremism.

For my part, I hope that we might recover something of the original concept as a way of "grounding" the practice of moderation. Seen in this light, "moderation" should not be regarded as something insipid or lacking in conviction.

Rather, it should be embraced as something vital for the life of a democracy.

An aspiration for democratic life in Australia is that traditional sources of division are best left behind when coming to this continent. This lesson was not quickly or easily learned.

Colonisation brought with it all of the social ills that plagued the coloniser’s homeland. Most notable were divisions between Roman Catholics and Protestants, between free settlers and convicts, between the different classes… the list could go on.

50

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

In some cases, these divisions only faded to irrelevance in the latter part of the 20th Century. Fade they did though.

Part of the reason for this lies in the land itself.

As the traditional owners have learned over millennia, typically one can only flourish in this country when cooperating with others. That is why being cast out from community often amounted to a death sentence. So, although the lessons have been learned by the rest of us only slowly and painfully, the country we call home has been schooling us to avoid the kind of extremes that can lead to fatal divisions.

Unfortunately, our modern lives tend to be defined by disengagement from our natural environment.

Water is on tap. Our homes are often automatically heated and cooled. We travel in hermetically sealed vehicles that effectively isolate us from the world through which we move. There has been an equivalent "dislocation" in our social lives. The lives of far fewer people are entwined with the communities in which we live.

The decline in organised religion means that there is less mingling in shared places of worship. Online shopping means we are less likely to congregate in those "cathedrals" of capitalism (shopping centres).

Sporting venues (large and small) seem to be the last remaining place for large-scale, collective gathering and an ‘embodied’ experience of community which ignores all distinctions of wealth, rank and status.

This "atomisation" of our lives has been exacerbated by the rise of social media – which has displaced yet another form of ‘communal experience’ offered by a shared mass media.

There is something very "grounding" in encountering stories about the world that you never thought to look for. That is possible when you pick up a newspaper and scan its pages. Every now and then your eye is drawn to an article that offers a view of the world that challenges your own. That is far less likely to happen when your sources of information and engagement are curated to fit your existing beliefs and prejudices.

The corrosive danger in this is exacerbated when belonging to online communities becomes a source of personal identity. This is because those communities have a tendency to escalate the conditions under which each person proves their right to "belong". That is, the demands one needs to meet in order to enjoy acceptance tend to become more extreme.

“

There is something very ‘grounding’ in encountering stories about the world that you never thought to look for.

For example, the expectation that you should express disapproval of views that are at odds with the group "norm," can escalate over time to a point that you must drive out ("cancel") anyone who deviates from the crystalline, ideological purity that defines the group’s identity. Not surprisingly, the demand for such purity ultimately causes irreparable fractures.

Radical moderation is an antidote to this tendency.

It makes a strong, positive claim for a mode of engagement that distinguishes between "listening" and "agreeing". As my colleague, Tim Dean, would say it invites people to come into a shared space where you are not "safe from" ideas that challenge your world view but, instead "safe to" experience such an encounter.

Of course, holding open such spaces requires that there be sufficient people with the moral courage to be radically moderate. At the root of such a disposition lies one of the most fundamental principles of ethics – "respect for persons".

This is the idea that every person has an intrinsic dignity that exists irrespective of their beliefs or conduct – no matter how much this might offend or threaten anyone else. This is truly a "radical" claim that provides the ground on which we encounter each other.

It establishes moderation as a positive duty based on the recognition that even those who seem to be most fundamentally at odds with us deserve to have their intrinsic dignity affirmed. We do this not by "shutting them out of our world" – but by maintaining a space in which engagement is possible. Radical moderates maintain that space even if no one is willing to enter.

In his poem, The Four Zoas, William Blake writes, "Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where no one comes to buy".

I can attest to the sad truth of this. Yet, radical moderation requires that we lay out our wares all the same.

Because only then is it possible to build the kind of community that sustains us all.

Dr Simon Longstaff AO is Executive Director of The Ethics Centre and a director of Our Community. Along with Richard Evans, Simon cofounded the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI). The Ethics Centre’s purpose is to bring ethics to the centre of everyday life. Simon is an Adjunct Professor of the Australian Graduate School of Management at UNSW, a Fellow of CPA Australia, the Royal Society of NSW, and the Australian Risk Policy Institute.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

51

Polarisation The future of radical moderation

Bridging the divide: Understanding polarisation in Australia Is Australian society more deeply divided or are existing differences simply more apparent in our increasingly connected and communicative world, asks TRISH PRENTICE, Senior Researcher with the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute.

Recently, various commentators have suggested that Australia is polarised or at least greatly at risk of becoming so. Yet polarisation is a difficult phenomenon to study.

How do we know when division in a society reaches an unhealthy level?

Where is the tipping point between robust disagreement and social fragmentation and who decides when we have reached that point? There are also different ways to measure polarisation. We can measure the extent of divergence of peoples’ views on a particular issue (ideological polarisation).

We can measure how people feel about others that they disagree with (affective polarisation) and we can measure peoples’ perceptions of polarisation – which is not actually measuring polarisation itself.

All of these factors can make determining whether Australia is polarised difficult to determine.

This study on polarisation was conducted as part of the

52

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

2024 Mapping Social Cohesion study. Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews with Australians across a range of political views, age groups and backgrounds, the study sought to understand how Australians perceive unity and division in society and how the dynamics of public conversation are shifting.

As a qualitative study it provides a snapshot of Australians’ perceptions during a particular period in 2024. Yet it also revealed worrying trends that we should take note of.

Are Australians Becoming More Divided?

When asked whether Australians today are more united or divided in their beliefs and opinions, a majority of participants – particularly older Australians – said "more divided." They described a sense of political and generational fragmentation, growing partisanship and the erosion of national identity. Many highlighted the increasing prevalence of antagonism between opposing viewpoints, especially in the political spheres.

Younger Australians, however, tended to offer a more qualified view. While many acknowledged that disagreements appear more prominent today, they did not necessarily see this as a sign of deeper division.

Rather, they suggested that digital platforms – especially social media – have simply created more spaces for expression. As one 18-year-old participant observed, divergent opinions are now much more visible. This raises an important distinction: is Australian society more deeply divided, or are existing differences simply more apparent in our increasingly connected and communicative world?

What Issues Are Dividing – and Uniting – Australians?

The interviewees identified several areas in which Australians appear sharply divided. These include immigration, First Nations peoples’ rights and the Voice to Parliament, the war in Gaza and climate policy.

common concern. Both younger and older participants cited the cost of living as a unifying issue. Younger Australians also spoke of shared commitments to environmental sustainability and social justice, while older Australians pointed to enduring cultural reference points – such as sport and ANZAC day, as well as the importance of universal healthcare – as sources of cohesion.

Perceptions of Entrenchment and Diminishing Space for Dialogue One of the more concerning findings was a perception of entrenchment – a hardening of attitudes that many older Australians, in particular, described. Several lamented the decline of civil debate and the rise of dogmatism on both ends of the political spectrum. "There’s no exchange," said one 71-year-old interviewee. "It’s just ‘I’m right. I’m right… there’s no middle ground. There’s no compromise."

Older Australians more frequently pointed to immigration and cultural change as polarising, while younger participants highlighted the war in Gaza, foreign affairs and taxation.

This dynamic was often accompanied by reports of partisan animosity – negative sentiment between groups or opposing sides in public debate. Over a third of older respondents said they observed growing antagonism between ideological or demographic groups.

Despite these divisions, the study also revealed areas of

Some spoke of a generalised hostility in the public sphere,

Credit: AscentXmedia/iStock

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

53

while others named specific targets of criticism – political parties, activists, or social groups. Some individuals reported they were actively self-censoring themselves in social circles, even amongst family members or friends. Topics participants were loath to raise in conversation included gender, religion and foreign policy, amongst others.

Signs of Resilience However, the study also found evidence of a continuing commitment to democratic discourse.

Many participants reaffirmed the importance of public discussion. They described it as central not only to the functioning of democracy but also to individual and societal growth. One participant likened debate to the deliberative processes within families: a means through which values are shaped and understanding is deepened.

Several participants provided examples of how dialogue had influenced their own views – on issues ranging from environmental policy to taxation – suggesting that people remain open to persuasion when debate is conducted respectfully and with good evidence.

Despite their awareness of rising tension and division, several individuals also expressed a sense of enduring social trust. They noted a continued feeling of community belonging and affirmed that, notwithstanding disagreements, Australians remained connected by shared experiences and civic values.

The Role of Institutions in Shaping Public Discourse The research also highlighted the important role that institutions play in shaping public discourse. Teachers, community organisations and religious groups were widely seen as fostering unity and respectful engagement.

In contrast, political parties and media organisations were more often viewed as contributing to division – either by framing issues in adversarial terms or by amplifying polarising rhetoric.

Given the observation of these concerning trends, what can be done to strengthen Australia’s social cohesion amid polarising forces?

Fostering social cohesion amidst polarising forces I think there are several things we can do.

First, we must reassert the value of civic dialogue. This includes fostering environments – online and offline –where disagreement can occur without personal denigration, and where curiosity, not outrage, is rewarded.

Political leaders must show moral courage in seeking consensus, even at the expense of short-term advantage.

Leaders in politics, media, education, and civil society must model the kind of discourse they wish to see.

54

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Second, we need to cultivate a shared civic identity that transcends party lines and cultural differences. The research suggests Australians still want to feel part of something larger than themselves – whether it’s through sport, service, or shared struggle.

Third, we must safeguard spaces for respectful disagreement. Universities, schools, workplaces, and community forums all have a role to play in modelling how to disagree without dehumanising the other. Supporting educators, community leaders and faith groups to convene crosscutting conversations is a promising starting point.

Finally, we should not overlook the power of humility.

As this study shows, people can and do change their minds. The willingness to change one’s mind is a democratic virtue – one that the study’s participants have shown is still present in Australian society.

What it all means Australia is not yet defined by irreconcilable division, but nor is it immune from the forces that have polarised other democracies. The research suggests that Australians are concerned about the tone and quality of public discourse but remain committed to the values that underpin it.

Maintaining cohesion in such a context will require conscious effort. It will depend on nurturing institutions that encourage dialogue rather than discord, on fostering media and digital spaces that elevate thoughtful engagement, and on the courage of individuals to remain open to others even, and especially when, they disagree.

Social cohesion is not about eliminating difference but about sustaining the relationships and values that allow a diverse society to flourish together. It remains an achievable goal – despite forces working actively against it – if we choose to pursue it.

Trish Prentice is a qualitative researcher specialising in social cohesion. She has worked across government, academia, business, and the not-for-profit sector in Australia and overseas, including in Egypt with an organisation promoting Arab-West understanding and in Geneva with a UN-affiliated human rights group.

She holds degrees in Education and Law, has managed research projects in Indonesia, Singapore, Pakistan, and Australia, and joined the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute in 2020.

Polarisation The future of radical moderation

Healthy conflict exists beyond stances and slogans There are tools, rules of engagement and a considered approach that could move Australia beyond the simplistic slogans and debate-rejecting stances of opposing groups in our society, writes ROD MARSH, independent chair, facilitator and strategic advisor.

When "march for Australia" rallies were held across Australia at the end of August, the pattern was familiar: viral footage, moral certainties, zero compromise, planned rallies in response. From climate protesters who glue themselves to masterpieces to parents battling school boards over gender curricula, modern politics has confused virality with virtue. The result is a kind of secular evangelism where movements compete not on what works but on what spreads.

"Just follow the science." "Rights are non-negotiable."

"Stop the boats." "No debate." The slogans differ; the cadence is identical. Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders cut arrivals by 90% but polarised debate for a decade. Germany’s Energiewende promised a green revolution but delivered some of Europe’s highest electricity prices. These campaigns rally supporters and travel well online. They also harden attitudes, narrow the space for learning, and transform political opponents into moral enemies.

Two structural shifts explain this drift. Education has replaced income as the sharpest political fault line in rich democracies. As Thomas Piketty documents, graduates have drifted left on cultural issues while business owners lean right—his "Brahmin left" versus "merchant right."

These are the people who staff political parties, NGOs and newsrooms, shaping which arguments feel "obvious."

The media’s business model amplifies the split.

Subscriptions reward loyal, like-minded audiences; the market favours affirmation over hedging. When people see a stance as moral conviction, they become less open to compromise and counter-evidence. Moral language supercharges this mix – each side’s certainties become the other’s proof of bad faith.

The hazard is closure – when dissent becomes heresy and questions turn taboo. It arrives through the thoughtterminating cliché that ends inquiry by formula. "Trans women are women" obscures the genuine tensions between trans and women’s rights explored by thinkers like Kathleen Stock, Holly Lawford-Smith or Rosa Freedman. "Always was, always will be" and "If you don’t know, vote no" – the competing mantras of Australia’s Voice referendum – flattened a complex constitutional question into incompatible moral absolutes. As climate scientist Mike Hulme notes, we need "liquid knowledge" – mobile and responsive – not brittle certainties that shatter on contact with complexity.

Against this drift stands the Radical Moderate – not a

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

55

centrist splitting differences, but someone who disciplines ideology with evidence and faction with process. This is not compromise; it is institutional design. The point of liberal government is not to enforce one group’s preferences through statute and shame but to organise cooperation among people who disagree.

This stance has deep roots. Madison’s Federalist No. 10 understood that faction could not be eliminated, only channelled. The common law learns by cases rather than proclamations. Federalism creates what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called "laboratories of democracy" – many centres trying things and copying what works. Free speech and peer review are devices for organised error-correction. These institutions do not eliminate conflict; they metabolise it into progress.

The Radical Moderate updates this tradition for an age of viral politics.

The Tools Radical moderation is a procedural stance that keeps ideological mobilisation answerable to evidence, and evidence answerable to fairness and consent. This prevents disagreement from mutating into demonisation – opponents remain merely mistaken, never malevolent.

Four pillars give it spine: Muddle through – on purpose. Charles Lindblom’s "science of muddling through" beats grand designs.

The New Deal, often invoked as bold action, actually proceeded through furious experimentation – the NRA failed, Social Security endured. When Australia introduced HECS in 1989, it started with a simple income-contingent loan, then gradually refined thresholds and rates based on evidence. Now dozens of countries copy the model.

Polycentric problem-solving. Complex systems learn faster when many centres try, watch and copy. When cannabis legalisation swept America, states became laboratories – Colorado’s tax structure, Illinois’s expungement provisions, Vermont’s home-grow rules.

Australia’s states provided similar experiments during COVID: Western Australia’s hard border, NSW’s attempt to "live with the virus," Victoria’s lengthy lockdowns. Each approach generated evidence others could learn from, though tribal loyalties often prevented learning.

Score resolvable claims. Philip Tetlock’s forecasting tournaments show prediction improves when you train people, make them work in diverse teams, and score outcomes as the future reveals itself. The Reserve Bank of Australia now publishes fan charts showing its confidence intervals and tracks its forecasting errors publicly, emphasising Tetlock’s point: humility and learning from errors beats ideological certainty every time.

56

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Contain conflict, don’t suppress it. Chantal Mouffe is right: politics is ineradicably agonistic. The task is turning enemies into adversaries who compete under constraints.

Taiwan’s "vTaiwan" on-line consultation platform brings opposed groups into structured digital deliberation on contentious issues like Uber regulation. Rules that reward persuasion and penalise bulldozing keep passion in play while preventing total war.

Rules of Engagement These principles need concrete protocols: Split solutions from values. Every major proposal should separate "what we value" (equity, sovereignty, stewardship) from "how we’re responding" (a concrete proposal). The Voice referendum collapsed partly because it merged constitutional recognition (a value statement) with a specific representative body (an institutional solution) into one indivisible question. Splitting these two ideas into separate questions would have clarified where Australians agreed and where they differed.

Commission adversarial collaborations. Where experts disagree, make them co-design a test that both sides accept would validate or change their views. Instead, on important questions we tend to have duelling PhDs using different data to talk past each other. Adversarial collaboration is the alternative to what Daniel Kahneman calls "angry science".

Cultivate curiosity over suspicion. "[M]oral judgment is so much more common than constructive thought," Walter Lippmann wrote a century ago, "Yet in truly effective thinking the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted." Yes, some actors argue in bad faith.

But assuming danger in every disagreement makes dialogue impossible – the suspicion itself becomes selffulfilling. Curiosity reveals not just opponents' reasoning but blind spots in our own. The insight we lose by treating opponents as enemies includes insight into ourselves.

Use mini-publics for values and distribution. Forecasting reveals what is likely; it cannot determine what is right or fair. Ireland’s citizens’ assembly broke the abortion deadlock precisely because 99 ordinary citizens, given time and evidence, found terms politicians couldn’t.

Melbourne’s People’s Panel, 43 randomly selected residents, produced politically feasible proposals on a 10-year financial plan that improved the City Council’s thinking. These approaches are not silver bullets but beat letting Guardian Australia, Sky News or social media write the social contract.

Respect sacred values. If a community treats a landscape or identity as non-fungible, don’t start with price.

The Jabiluka uranium dispute showed what happens when you do: decades of deadlock. When mining companies learned to begin with recognition and listening to Indigenous voices rather than compensation, opposition could become negotiation. Trigger the taboo-trade-off reflex and you entrench resistance forever.

Design around media incentives. If business models pull outlets toward tribe-pleasing frames, build counterpressures: editorial exchanges between partisan outlets, public audits of stated predictions, funding for stories that challenge audiences rather than comfort them. The Guardian’s reader-funded model frees it from advertisers but chains it to its base’s priors. Acknowledge this reality and design around it.

The Counter-Arguments Critics will object from all sides.

"We don’t have time for incrementalism on climate change." Yet the Manhattan Project and Apollo Program – icons of bold action – succeeded through rapid experimentation, not grand plans. Germany’s renewable leap without enough storage or grid upgrades created backlash that slowed the energy transition across Europe.

Evangelical ambition without learning creates large, slow mistakes.

"Some values are non-negotiable – human rights, dignity, democracy itself." True. But distinguishing foundational principles from their policy applications is exactly what liberal institutions do. Indigenous recognition is nonnegotiable for many Australians; whether it requires a Voice, treaty, or truth-telling commission is negotiable.

The Radical Moderate defends the former while submitting the latter to evidence and deliberation.

"This assumes good faith, but what about disinformation and democratic sabotage?" Not everyone deserves a seat at the table. Actors who reject the game’s basic rules – accepting electoral defeat, eschewing violence, acknowledging demonstrable facts – exclude themselves from participation. The question is who decides exclusion and how? Better transparent criteria than shadowy deplatforming.

"Ordinary people want meaning, not scorecards." The most successful Radical Moderate reforms embedded technical changes in narratives about national values.

Medicare’s introduction succeeded through Labor’s story about fairness, rather than actuarial arguments. The GST passed when Howard won a mandate on tax reform, not economic modelling. Citizens’ assemblies and local experiments give people more agency than performative culture wars that change nothing but the mood.

Makhbubakhon Ismatova/iStock

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

57

"Every great advance required moral clarity – abolition, suffrage, civil rights, Mabo." Yes, but these movements succeeded precisely when they moved from pure moral appeal to institutional coordination. The 13th Amendment took institutional changes that continued through the civil rights era and up to the present. The Mabo decision required careful legal reasoning, followed by new institutions like the National Native Title Tribunal not just moral force. Marriage equality advanced through nation-by-nation experimentation that proved the sky wouldn’t fall. The Voice failed partly because it skipped the intermediate steps – time and experiment, legislated bodies, demonstrated success – that might have built confidence.

The Promise History suggests this approach travels. Rome’s laws spread because they helped strangers transact. The Han bureaucracy lasted centuries because it solved problems of coordination across vast distances. The Westminster system persists because it channels conflict through ritual combat rather than violence. What lasts is not zealotry but structures that help diverse people cooperate. The European Union, for all its flaws, shows that ancient enemies can become mere adversaries through institutional design.

Australia knows this in its bones. Compulsory preferential voting forces parties toward the median. The federal system lets states experiment – voluntary assisted dying, container deposit schemes, four-year terms. The Fair Work Commission turns industrial warfare into arbitrated peace.

These aren’t sexy institutions, but they work.

58

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

The Radical Moderate promises no harmony. Politics remains conflict all the way down. But with the right rules, democracies can learn fast enough to govern while keeping passion in play and opponents as opponents, not enemies.

In an age of secular evangelism, that may be the most radical proposition of all.

Rod Marsh is an independent chair, facilitator and strategic advisor with broad experience across public, private and NGO sectors. He has led strategic planning, governance and policy work in areas including natural resource management, justice, corruption prevention, energy and climate change. He has worked with governments, businesses and communities in Australia and internationally, and chaired advisory committees on key policy issues.

Legacy The future of radical moderation

The Radical Moderate’s legacy: What history might say about this leadership style In an increasingly polarised and uncertain world, Radical Moderates must have the values to know what they stand for, the perspective to be able to identify the enemies of progress, and the backbone to stand up for their principles, writes poet, author, journalist and speechwriter JOEL DEANE.

I was asked to write an essay about the legacy of embracing a "Radical Moderate" style of leadership.

What, I was encouraged to consider, might history say about those who embrace this leadership style? On the face of it, the subject matter sounded easy.

Couldn’t I just dash off some random thoughts – posing as wise – about the Sisyphean fate of the progressive: to be forever shouldering social policy boulders up economicrationalist hills. It turns out I couldn’t. Instead, my chosen subject confounded me for a week.

The first reason why I struggled to write this essay was defining the term. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of words – more like literary landfill – defining and redefining the term ‘radical moderate’, wheeling through Australian political history to make lateral connections without ever resolving the point in my mind.

I knew that most Australians equate radicalism with far-left

politics, going back to the Australian Communist Party.

I knew that, counter-intuitively, the most dangerous radicals in Australian political history – the ones most likely to resort to violence – have come from the farright. I knew that one of the largely unspoken parts of our history – together with the White Australia policy, the Stolen Generations, and the frontier wars – is the fact that an undercurrent of fascism has persisted in Australian farright politics since the 1920s.

And I knew that, although the fortunes of Australian fascists – like Australian communists – have waxed and waned, they have been gathering strength since 9/11.

The trouble for me, I realised, was that I’m not comfortable to identify as a Radical Moderate because I equate Australian radicalism more with the far-right – a group I’ve opposed all my life – than the far-left.

By the way, that doesn’t mean I’m a fan of the far-left.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

59

It’s just that, having seen first-hand how fundamentalist thought can twist the minds of well-meaning people, I’m opposed to extremism of all kinds – religious, political, economic; whatever – and, therefore, am more likely to call myself a unionist or a progressive or a humanist than a Radical Moderate.

My next semantic struggle was "moderate".

Reading that word reminded me of a book launch I’d attended where I met a fellow poet. We chatted amiably, ticking all the boxes of social niceties, until politics came up and my companion’s expression changed. She pulled a face and said that, as I’d worked as a staffer for the Australian Labor Party, we were on opposite sides of the political fence.

"Why?" I asked. She answered: "I’m progressive; I vote for the Greens." I was floored by the assumptions behind that statement. My companion and I had just met and knew nothing about each other’s positions on any political or policy matters, yet she assumed the worst about me. By the way, this kind of reflex antagonism is not unique to the Greens. I’ve seen plenty of Labor, Liberal and National supporters carry on in similar ways.

Why the aggro? Pick your cause. It could be the rise of social media, the fall of mainstream media and the shrinking middle class, the tech-bro powered march of libertarianism and neo-liberalism’s disdain for societal institutions, rises in tribalism and the denial of scientific fact, or maybe just all of the above.

In our cruel new world, moderation is – together with other old-fashioned virtues such as equality, justice, community – misunderstood. But moderation, like compromise, is fundamental to democracy. Otherwise, how can a nation of 26 million souls expect to coexist if we can’t moderate ourselves? Think beyond self-interest?

Be prepared to compromise for the common good?

All of which brings me back to being a Radical Moderate.

How could I write about the hypothetical future legacy of a leader who commits to being a Radical Moderate (read: progressive democrat) when the present is so uncertain?

“ 60

Radical Moderate leaders need to understand the machinery of Australian society and democracy—and commit to generational rather than revolutionary change.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Currently, democratic societies around the world are facing their greatest test since the rise of communism and fascism in the 1920s. The generation of people who lived through the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s – horrors created by unfettered radicalism on the far right and far left – have died, and the loss of that collective memory, together with growing economic inequality, is one of the major reasons why the world is in the grips of a pandemic of extremism. That’s why, right now, leaders need to be thinking more about legitimacy than legacy – and ensure their words and actions are founded on an understanding of our past.

With that in mind, I decided to share three quick stories offering glimpses into Australia’s Radical Moderate legacy.

The first story involves Vladimir Lenin. In 1922, the newlyformed Soviet Union hosted a gathering of international communists and revolutionaries. Jock Garden, a Sydneybased Baptist minister-turned-communist, was a part of the Australian delegation. Garden, who migrated to Australia from Aberdeen and tended to harangue people in a Scottish burr, met Lenin and tried to convince the Soviet leader that there was rising worker unrest in Australia.

Lenin wasn’t impressed. He reportedly scoffed: "If things are as favourable as you say, Comrade Garden, you had better go back to Australia and start the revolution."

Lenin had a point. Australia has never been a nation of revolutionaries. Instead, the Commonwealth of Australia was created by committee, through a series of colonial conventions and plebiscites, then an Act of the British Parliament. Domestically, the only Australians forced to fight for their freedom were the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the frontier wars.

The battle of the Eureka Stockade, by comparison, was more about equity and justice than freedom. Internationally, 1942 was the closest Australia came to an existential moment where its citizens felt their nation’s freedom – perhaps even its existence – was at stake, because that was the year that Singapore fell, Darwin was bombed, and Sydney Harbour was attacked by submarines. The Australia of 1942 responded to that crisis with radical action, mobilising the entire country for the war effort.

The lesson: Australians don’t back radical action unless they feel they have no other option. They prefer incremental, generational progress through systemic, universal initiatives such as Medicare, compulsory superannuation and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Compulsory and proportional voting are the systemic forces that have kept Australian politics to the middle of the road since Federation because they reward consensus rather than extremism. Thanks to compulsory voting, we all vote; and thanks to proportional voting, our electorates end up with the politician they hate the least rather than the one they love the most.

This democratic version of the tall-poppy syndrome moderates Australian public discourse because the major political parties are fighting over the same group of undecided voters rather than catering to their own rusted-on supporters. Radical Moderate leaders need to understand the machinery of Australian society and democracy – and commit to generational rather than revolutionary change.

“

Radical Moderate leaders need to understand that the real enemies of progress – the radicals who want to destroy the Australian way of life – don’t always look or sound like revolutionaries.

My second story involves Field Marshal Sir Thomas Blamey.

Blamey was Australia’s leading soldier during World War Two. A former Victorian police commissioner, he was highly esteemed by establishment figures. In fact, Blamey was so highly esteemed that an impressive statue of the Field Marshal – a modernist version of an equestrian pose with the soldier astride his jeep rather than his horse – was erected outside the gates of Victoria’s Government House in the 1950s.

But Blamey was opposed to democracy. He plotted to overthrow an elected federal government in the 1930s and install a dictator. He was also the clandestine leader of a fascist militia known as the White Army. And, in the 1940s, he was the staff officer who questioned the bravery of the 2/16 Battalion – the raw conscripts who heroically fought elite Japanese forces to a standstill on the Kokoda Trail – and, in a notorious address to the bedraggled survivors of that legendary battle, said, "The rabbit that runs away is the rabbit that gets shot."

Australian history is peppered with people like Blamey.

Far-right authoritarians who didn’t trust the Australian people to govern or, in the case of the 2/16 Battalion, defend themselves.

Credit: chrispecoraro/iStock

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

61

Radical Moderate leaders need to understand that the real enemies of progress – the radicals who want to destroy the Australian way of life – don’t always look or sound like revolutionaries.

My third story goes back to 1989, when I was working as a journalist for a Sunday newspaper in Melbourne. I was just 20 and had dodgy shorthand, but my chief of staff, Peter Maher, took a liking to my prose style. As a result, Peter regularly sent me on scouting missions across regional Victoria with a photographer. On one of those trips, winding through the Otways, I asked a local furniture maker whether there were any locals worth interviewing.

His answer was instantaneous: Harvey Buttonshaw.

I jotted down directions to Harvey’s place in my spiral notepad – this was before Google maps – and followed a winding road to a gate, then a dirt driveway to a house that sat in the crook of a small valley. The house, an old weatherboard with a wraparound veranda, was off grid.

There was no electricity, sewerage or mains water. Just an old man armed with an axe.

Buttonshaw, whippet-thin in his mid-seventies, was chopping wood and swearing like a trooper because he’d just whacked his shin with the blunt of the axe. He invited me inside and, over a cup of tea, told me about his exploits fighting the fascists during the Spanish Civil War, being alongside George Orwell when he was wounded in the neck, joining the French Foreign Legion, then deserting after the Legion came under the control of the Vichy French and he was ordered to fight the Allies during World War Two. It was an incredible story of political conviction and personal courage.

62

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Harvey died in the 1990s, but he’s been on my mind for the past decade. Buttonshaw wasn’t a communist. Like Orwell, he was a man of fundamentally humanitarian convictions who was prepared to fight for his beliefs.

I’ve wondered what he would think of this generation of strongmen – the Putins, Trumps, Xis, Modis – and what actions he would take.

I’m not saying that Radical Moderate leaders need to be like Buttonshaw and literally take up arms to prove their bona fides, but they do need to be able to have the values to know what they stand for, the perspective to be able to identify the enemies of progress, and the backbone to stand up for their principles.

Leaders with that combination of values, vision and backbone are most likely to earn the legitimacy they need to build the kind of support that drives change and creates a legacy.

Joel Deane is a poet, novelist, journalist and speechwriter. An author of nine books, he has been a finalist for numerous literary awards, including the Walkley Book Award, Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Melbourne Prize for Literature. He works as a freelance writer.

Help sheet

Experiment Tracker In not-for-profit governance, bold ideas often rise and fall on enthusiasm alone. A charismatic board member can deliver on an idea they are passionate about but does not have clear outcomes. Sometimes, we might announce a new project or policy, run hard for a few months, and then quietly move on when results feel uncertain or mixed. The Experiment Tracker is designed to interrupt that cycle, and ensure that we can collaborate effectively and make data-informed decisions.

Real progress usually comes less from grand gestures and more often, from trial-and-error. Learning happens when we make our assumptions visible without being defensive, test them in the real world, and record what actually happens, not what we hoped would happen.

This helpsheet provides a simple structure for that process. It helps to turns idealism into evidence-based practice, and helps replace defensiveness with curiosity. Each column of the table helps your board or team stay focused on learning rather than on protecting reputations or “winning” debates.

It can be used when launching a new policy, campaign, project or partnership. The aim is to find what works and then to share those lessons transparently with others.

1. Describe what you’re trying and why.

Write one or two sentences explaining the idea or experiment. Be clear about the problem you’re testing a new solution for and the assumption behind it.

Example: “We believe that holding shorter, more frequent board meetings will improve engagement and reduce fatigue.”

2. Define what success would look like.

Describe the measurable signs that would show your idea is working. Keep it specific and realistic.

Example: “Attendance above 90%, shorter meetings that still complete all agenda items, and improved satisfaction in post-meeting surveys.”

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

63

3. Plan what evidence you’ll gather and when.

Note how you’ll collect information to check progress, including numbers, feedback or observations, and set a review date.

Example: “Gather attendance data each month and run a quick anonymous survey after the third meeting.”

4. Record what you’ll adjust after reviewing results.

Note how you’ll collect information to check progress, including numbers, feedback or observations, and set a review date.

Example: “Gather attendance data each month and run a quick anonymous survey after the third meeting.”

5. Share what you’ve learned.

The final step is transparency. Report your findings to the board, staff, or community even if results are mixed.

This builds trust and models honest learning.

Example: Our board trialled shorter, more frequent meetings over a three-month period. We found that attendance rose from 72% to 89%, and discussions felt more focused. However, staff reported that the extra preparation time each month was difficult. We’ve decided to keep the shorter format but return to bi-monthly meetings to balance engagement and workload. We’ll review this again in six months.

64

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Help sheet

How to keep disagreement productive: a guide for chairs, leaders and other facilitators When good people disagree, it can bring out the best or the worst in a group. In healthy organisations, disagreement is evidence that people care deeply about the mission and are brave enough to speak.

The challenge is to keep that passion constructive. When conversations become heated, people often start defending their identity rather than their ideas, and the room shifts from collaborative to competitive and worse.

Chairing these kinds of discussions can be difficult, particularly when you are accountable for covering the whole agenda, ending meetings on time and overseeing the culture of the group.

This guide is designed to help board chairs, facilitators and team leaders structure disagreement so that everyone is heard, evidence is respected, and progress continues.

It offers an “if this happens, then try this” framework you can use when managing a tough agenda item, a community consultation, or a policy debate.

1. If people are talking past each other..

Try re-stating the question in neutral terms.

Reframe the issue as one clear, shared question: “What are we actually deciding today?” or “What’s the core problem we’re trying to solve?”

2. If one voice dominates..

Try asking people to speak in turns.

Invite contributions in order, use a timer if needed, and ask quieter members to speak first in the next round.

3. If people are reacting emotionally...

Try acknowledging the emotion before returning to substance or content.

Say, “I can see this matters a lot. Let’s take a breath and return to the issue itself.” Suppressing emotion fuels resentment, but naming it can help to cool the room.

4. If two members are locked in a back-and-forth...

Try pausing and then inviting “adversarial collaboration”.

Ask them to co-write a brief note outlining what they agree on, what they do not agree on, and what evidence could resolve the difference. Have them bring the note to the next meeting.

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

65

5. If the discussion loops without making progress...

Try asking for a synthesis moment.

Turn to the group: “What have we heard so far? Where’s the overlap?”

Summarise shared ground before moving on.

6. If participants start using “us and them” language...

Try shifting to collective phrasing.

Recast statements using “we”: “What can we do about this?” It reminds everyone they’re on the same team, tackling a common problem.

7. If people seem disengaged or fatigued...

Try breaking the group into small groups or pairs.

Let people talk through sub-issues or bite-sized parts of the larger discussion and report back. Smaller discussions often bring nuance and quieter insights.

8. If consensus still feels out of reach...

Try defining what can be agreed now and what needs more work.

Record areas of agreement, set a clear next step (“We’ll gather data X and revisit this issue in two weeks”), and close with appreciation for the effort.

9. If tension lingers after the meeting...

Try following up privately and kindly.

A quick call or email from the chair saying, “Thanks for your passion today; are you okay with where we landed?” prevents small rifts from hardening.

10. If someone feels personally criticised or undervalued...

Try acknowledging and validating, and refocus on contribution.

Pause the discussion long enough to recognise what’s happened: “I can see that comment may have landed personally.

That’s not our intention.” Reaffirm the person’s value to the group and steer the conversation back to the issue, not the individual.

If the hurt runs deep, offer a short break or a private check-in after the meeting.

Remember: people can recover from disagreement, but it is often more difficult to forget humiliation. Repairing trust in the moment protects the team’s long-term capacity to debate difficult things well.

66

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Help sheet

De-escalation language prompts The way we present our concerns and ideas in meetings and written communication can inflame opposition and push people to take entrenched binary positions. This can cause conflict and reduce the opportunity for nuanced decision making on not-for-profit boards and teams.

The table below shows 10 ideas for how to translate reactive or adversarial phrasing into phrases that are more likely to lead to a positive outcome in a meeting, a collaboration or written correspondence.

When you’re tempted to say…

Try instead…

Why it works

“You’re wrong.”

“That’s an interesting point; what led you there?”

Invites explanation instead of defensiveness.

“We demand…”

“We propose…”

Keeps agency without aggression.

“They don’t get it.”

“They see it differently; what can we learn from that?”

Acknowledges difference without disdain.

“That’s offensive.”

“I see that differently; can I explain why?”

Keeps dialogue open.

“It’s always been this way.” or “We’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.”

“Here’s what has worked before; shall we test it again?” or “We’ve had mixed results before; what might be different this time?”

Balances tradition with openness or Draws on the experience in the room without killing innovation.

“We have no choice.”

“Let’s map our options and possible consequences.”

Restores agency and collective problem-solving.

“You don’t understand the governance rules.”

“Let’s walk through the governance requirements together so we’re clear.”

Teaches without patronising and brings clarity to the process.

“This is a waste of time.”

“Can we clarify the purpose of this discussion so we’re using time well?”

Converts frustration into a process improvement.

“You’re being emotional.”

“I can see this matters to you deeply; can you tell us what’s at stake for you?”

Validates emotion while grounding it in substance.

“We’re going in circles.”

“Maybe we need to summarise what we agree on and name what’s unresolved.”

Refocuses the conversation and lowers tension .

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

67

Help sheet

How to reduce the heat in your meetings All boards and teams sometimes find themselves in hot water. A discussion about funding, staffing or strategy can quickly turn personal, tense or circular. Suddenly, clear thinking falters, defensiveness rises, and sound decisions slip away.

This helpsheet supports board chairs, CEOs, managers and facilitators to cool the temperature, refocus on respectful, constructive problem-solving, and keep the organisation’s best interests at the centre.

Productive tension is healthy – it tests and improves ideas.

The goal isn’t to avoid disagreement, but to keep it useful.

The following checklist helps you spot early signs of heat, reset tone and structure, and keep meetings anchored in purpose, not personalities.

 Re-frame language. Shift “We disagree” to “We have different starting points.”

 Summarise progress. Recap what’s been agreed so far; it grounds people.

 Invite quieter voices. “We haven’t heard from X yet.

Would you like to weigh in?”

 Name the heat. “I can feel that this topic matters

deeply. Let’s slow down so we can hear each other properly.”

 Move from abstract to specific. “What’s one small step we can agree on today?”

 Close the loop. End with a short reflection: “What have we learned from this discussion that will help next time?”

1. Quick temperature check A short list of signs that the emotional temperature is rising

3. If you’re feeling the heat For participants: self-calming techniques

 Voices getting louder or more clipped  People talking over each other or withdrawing

 Notice your physical signals (tight chest, raised voice,

 Repetition instead of progress  Sarcasm, blame, or side comments  Defensiveness or visible frustration  Someone leaves the room, upset

 Ask a question instead of making a point  Repeat what you heard before you disagreed  Focus on the issue, not the person  Take brief notes instead of reacting immediately  Ask yourself: “Am I trying to be right, or to get this

completely

If you spot two or more signs, pause the process before pressing on.

2. The chair’s or facilitator’s cool-down list Simple interventions that anyone leading the group can use

 Pause and breathe. Call a short break. Tension often needs a circuit-breaker.

 Re-state purpose. “Let’s remind ourselves what we’re deciding today.”

68

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

the urge to interrupt)

right?

For chairs: calming questions that can help you to refocus the group

 What’s the shared purpose here?  What’s the value we’re protecting?  What can we agree on right now?  What evidence do we still need?  Consider to yourself: how will each person leave this conversation with their dignity intact?

Help sheet

A values-based deliberation process: 10 steps to a solution Conflict often flares when people confuse their beliefs with the actions they take based on them. When the two are tangled, disagreement can feel personal—like challenging an idea is rejecting someone's values.

A value is the principle or ideal you are trying to uphold, such as fairness, safety, inclusion, work ethic, integrity or environmental care.

A solution is the concrete action, policy or project you think will best deliver that value, such as introducing new safety procedures, building more ramps, introducing a particular policy or banning single-use plastics.

By pulling those two layers apart, we can protect shared values while staying open to different ways of achieving them.

When someone disagrees with our proposed solution, it does not mean they are disagreeing with the value behind it. Ideally, the situation is an opportunity to seek a different, possibly more creative, solution – together.

This 10-step method separates values from solutions, helping boards or teams clarify their shared goals and generate better ways to achieve them.

ways. It helps us to recognise that our suggested solution is not a value in itself; it is just one way to express the value.

This reduces what is at stake.

4. List at least two alternative actions that could serve the same value.

Push beyond the first idea. There is always more than one way to live or express a principle. Even if you liked the first idea, it’s helpful to have options to compare it to.

5. Name the trade-offs honestly.

Every option will cost something – for example, time, money, reputation or attention. Sometimes a solution will come at a higher cost to one group of people than another. Write the costs down.

6. Separate evidence from ideology.

Ask “What do we actually know?”, not “What do we assume?” Gather data, examples or case studies.

7. Define what “success” means for this value.

Translate the principle into measurable or observable results, such as “fewer complaints,” “increased participation” or “lower energy costs”.

8. Ask “What evidence would change our minds?”

Identify the signals that would prompt a rethink. This builds humility and accountability. It takes courage and can feel very uncomfortable.

9. Check for alignment with other values.

1. Name the shared value.

Start by identifying the moral or civic principle driving the conversation – for example, fairness, safety, inclusion, stewardship, dignity, transparency or sustainability.

2. State the proposed action.

Write down the specific policy, program or decision on the table. Avoid using shorthand or making assumptions: spell it out.

3. Ask “What is this action trying to protect or express?”

Sometimes one value clashes with another (e.g. transparency vs privacy). Note where tensions exist so you can balance them deliberately.

10. Summarise the insight.

End with one short statement capturing what you have learned; for example: “We all value fairness, but we differ on the best way to achieve it. We will trial option A for six months and then review the data together.”

Connect the action to the value. This often reveals that opposing actions can serve the same value in different

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

69

Help sheet

Media engagement checklist Who has never spoken a throwaway line, attempted a joke or offered an opinion only to see it spark an uproar? We’ve all done it at least once, and we can all remember how it feels. Speaking publicly without inflaming opinions or fuelling controversy takes skill and practice.

The way leaders communicate in public, whether through interviews, social media, newsletters or op-eds, shapes how others see our organisation. But more than that, if what leaders say (and the way they say it) is compelling enough, it can also shape how they see democracy itself.

Outrage travels faster than nuance, and leaders have an opportunity to lift the conversation rather than amplify division.

This might sound lofty, and it is a long-term goal, but it matters: when leaders communicate with composure, honesty and curiosity, it has a positive effect on public trust and social cohesion.

Boards, CEOs, media officers and community spokespeople are invited to use this checklist as they engage with journalists and the public, to help them stay on message, stay grounded in facts, and stay humble.

1. Clarify your purpose before you speak Consider the goal of the communication you are engaged in. Do you aim to inform, to clarify, to invite, or to defend? If your purpose is not clear, your message won’t be either. Avoid speaking “to win”, as this can come across as defensive or aggressive. Instead, seek to explain and to advance understanding.

2. Be grounded in evidence, not ideology Before interviews or statements, check your facts twice. Then again. Consider the sources of your facts, and what the agenda of those sources might be. For credibility, cite data, case studies or lived experience. Avoid abstract claims or moral absolutes. Be transparent about what is known, what is uncertain, and what is still being tested.

3. Name shared values early Open by identifying the common ground: “We all want communities that are safe and thriving.” Statements of shared values lower defences and can help to make disagreement sound like partnership, not flat opposition.

4. Keep language neutral Wherever possible, use inclusive words: we, our community, people affected by this issue. “Us versus them” is rarely helpful, so steer clear of labels (the left, the activists, the corporates) and loaded adjectives (reckless, heartless, greedy).

5. Build bridges from binary questions to the wider context If you are asked “Are you for or against this?”, answer briefly, then expand: “That’s one way to see it, but the real issue is…”. Bridging reintroduces complexity into the conversation and keeps the audience thinking instead of choosing sides.

6. Avoid outrage traps Journalists and social media thrive on conflict, but it rarely serves those involved. If you’re provoked, avoid matching heat with heat. Pause, breathe, and bring the focus back to evidence or process: “I understand that concern. What the data shows is …” or “Let’s look at how we’re handling that question.”

70

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

7. Tell a story, not a slogan Stories provide images and details, while slogans can inflame. Share short, specific examples of constructive problemsolving: “When our volunteers in Shepparton tried this approach, engagement doubled. One recipient of our meals program told us that our visits were the highlight of her day, and that she now spends more time outside the house because she wants to show our volunteers what she’s capable of in the garden.” Stories are proven to be more engaging than “lecturing” and show progress without preaching. Consider how you can use emotion without invoking or provoking conflict.

8. Credit collaboration and acknowledge limits There is strength in acknowledging the contribution others to your achievements; for example, “We worked with local government / a business partner / another community group.” Admitting what your organisation cannot do alone builds credibility, models humility and casts you positively within a bigger picture and a larger community.

9. Plan your follow-through Before going public, decide which members of your board or staff team will handle questions, who will monitor coverage, and how you will correct errors if needed.

10. Reward curiosity over certainty End communications with an invitation: “We’d like to hear other perspectives,” or “We’ll review the results and report back.” By keeping the conversation open rather than closing it, you are modelling democracy at its best.

Quick self-check before you speak Ask yourself:

 Am I explaining or performing?  Would an informed opponent feel I’ve been fair?  Does this comment lower or raise the temperature?  What will this communication add to the public’s understanding?

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

71

an enterprise of:

OurCommunity.com.au Our Community is a world-leading social enterprise that provides advice, connections, training and easy-to-use tech tools for people and organisations working to build stronger communities.

The Our Community group of enterprises are:

CommunityDirectors.com.au The Institute of Community Directors Australia is the leading governance and leadership network for members of Australian not-for-profit and government boards, and their senior staff. an enterprise of:

FundingCentre.com.au Where not-for-profits go for money

The Funding Centre is Australia’s smartest grants database and fundraising capacity building website.

GiveNow.com.au GiveNow is Australia’s first and best giving platform, providing donations, ticketing and membership services for Australian not-for-profits.

SmartyGrants.com.au SmartyGrants delivers software, data science and grantmaking intelligence for funders.

OCHouse.com.au Our Community House is a green and creative co-working space for the social sector in Melbourne, Victoria.

SmartyFile.com.au SmartyFile is a red tape-busting data-storage and data-sharing tool for not-for-profits and other grant applicants.

Institute of Grants Management A hub for tools, research, innovation, and professional development for grantmakers.

Succession Media A news service for Australia’s not-for-profit sector including The Community Advocate.

Our Community International I N TE RN AT IONA L

72

Radical Moderate Institute of Community Directors Australia

Taking the Australian-born grantmaking revolution to the UK, Europe and beyond.