Influencers! At The Budget

Normally the idea of locking a bunch of social media creators in a room without access to the internet would be the media’s wet-dream, yet when it happened recently it was so controversial that it nearly overshadowed the boringness of the 2025 federal budget.

As a Gen Z person, my reaction to hearing that so-called ‘influencers’ were invited to the budget lock-up was ‘yeah that makes sense’ then moving on with my life. Clearly, based on a week-long tantrum by some in the media, not everyone felt that way.

For the amount that I am told that young people are not engaging with politics, it’s strange that many are actively against the idea of engaging with young people.

Many acted as if inviting people with young audiences tainted the sacred halls of the budget lock-up. As all the creators, including some with traditional finance and journalism backgrounds, were immediately dismissed as just ‘self-obsessed influencers’ who lack the professionalism to cover it. Personally I think inviting Sky News is a much bigger affront to journalism.

Apparently, when comparing journalists at Missing Perspectives making budget breakdowns and Sky News getting caught watching MAFS during their coverage, Missing Perspectives were the ones undeserving of the opportunity simply due to having a mainly social media audience.

It’s important to acknowledge that this is another example of Australian media seeing predominately young women entering a space and immediately attempting to undermine them and those who listen to them. 

A big criticism of inviting creators was that it allows for soft-ball interviews. After listening to many of the interviews, I can say that a lot were soft-ball, usually failing to offer follow up questions or fact-checks to the rehearsed talking points. However, are we going to sit here and pretend that most ‘traditional media’ interviews with politicians are hard-hitting journalism?

For my job I’ve endured a month straight of Sky After-Dark, as well as Kitchen Cabinet and Karl Stefanovic’s 60 Minutes election interviews. Only one interviewer this year has spent time to focus on the flirting techniques and breakfast choices of both major party leaders in their election coverage and it wasn’t a podcaster, it was a multi-award winning tv host.

If you are wondering, Albanese had salmon for breakfast in a photo-op to appeal to Tassie salmon lovers and Dutton had his regular avocado toast, the thing his party used to blame for the housing crisis.

Every week there are interviews from ‘traditional’ outlets that are far worse than the worst of what these creators put out, which makes the focus on the influencers feel petty and just reminds young people why we aren’t engaging with the traditional outlets. You can’t demand a different standard than the one you accept from your teams.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a very valid criticism of how it went down.

It was revealed by NineFax outlets that some (important to note NOT ALL) of the creators took undeclared payment in the form of travel and accommodation expenses. This was confirmed by creator Millie Rose Bannister when asked by Pedestrian, who admitted that she took that payment but denied that any other money exchanged hands. 

Bannister defended taking the deal by saying there were no editorial requirements and that she wouldn’t have been able to afford to go otherwise. Even still, I think political coverage should be free from those deals with political parties, but if you are going to accept them you should obviously declare that on the posts like you would with any other travel deal for a brand, which Bannister did not do.

Plainly put, that is unethical and disappointing.

Numerous creators expressed frustration at the sweeping nature of the ‘cash for comment’ coverage which left many falsely thinking that all the creators took part. That is a fair criticism to have, too.

When traditional outlets have ‘cash for comment’ controversies, the coverage focuses on just those involved, not everyone who covered the story it’s related to. That courtesy should also apply here with the content creators. Specifically name and shame those involved and leave the rest out of it.

This poor framing led to the Liberal Party’s Jane Hume baselessly implying in Senate Estimates that creators like Abbie Chatfield and Holly MacAlpine, neither of whom were at the budget, were paid for other posts.

Jane, if you are reading this, not every young person who dislikes the Liberal Party feels that way because of shady money, most of us just think you guys are fuckwits.

Abbie Chatfield, was even investigated by the AEC over claims made by Hume but was cleared of wrongdoing in less than 24 hours. 

But while Chatfield, who I respect, didn’t take any money when talking to her large platform, she did still do something else that was disappointing to see.

After liking the Pedestrian article where a creator admits to taking an undisclosed paid trip from Labor to the budget last week on Instagram, this week both on her podcast and social media Chatfield denied it would ever happen.

She claimed on her podcast that there were no verified examples of it happening, when there were, then said on TikTok it wouldn’t have happened because people would lose their platforms, but again it did happen. 

Chatfield was not the only big creator to try and discredit the reporting, but since content creators become rightfully outraged when ‘traditional media’ tries to sweep unethical behaviour under the rug, it’s disappointing to see creators do the same thing when it’s someone in ‘new media’ acting unethically.

Ultimately, despite the bad decisions from a small few of the creators and coverage that could have been better from others, I think overall it remains a net positive that creators were there and I hope it happens again.

Missing Perspectives in particular did a solid job of acting ethically while getting out good budget content that young people will see, and I would recommend following them if you don’t already.

They’ve proven to be far more valuable than when Karl Stefanovic thought voters needed to know what Dutton was drinking when he met his now wife.

Again, those 60 Minutes interviews deserve the hate, not these content creators.

There is no magic switch that will get young people trusting ‘traditional media’ and thank fuck there isn’t, so we need to not diminish the sources that young people actually look to. We need to encourage those sources to be better than that which they aim to be an alternative for.