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by Jessica Gardner

Months ago, Waleed Aly began pondering the sad fact that not much of substance goes viral.

Slapstick? Sure. Controversy? Certainly. Outrage? Most definitely.

But the things that really fire up the internet are “very rarely rich concepts”, he says. “Virtues very rarely go viral.”

The kernel of an idea formed: what if you could send forgiveness viral? For a while he worried he’d never find a hook with which to embed such a high ideal into the minds of the almost 1 million, mostly 20- to 40-year-olds who tune in each night to The Project, the Network Ten show he co-hosts.

Then along came Sonia Kruger. The breakfast television host blew up the internet one Monday in July after espousing her view that immigration of Muslims should be stopped so that she could “feel safe”. Progressives were outraged, deriding her use of a privileged position to demonise an entire section of society. Conservatives were equally outraged, arguing that the political correctness police were coming to arrest poor Sonia. The whole thing quickly descended down the gurgler of what passes for discourse.

But by 6.30pm the following night, Aly had a new take on the issue – one that would go on to be viewed by 11 million Facebook users and be shared about 190,000 times. Instead of piling onto Kruger, calling her racist and picking apart her argument, he suggested people take a moment to consider her fears and those of others, and come back with “radical generosity in the face of their hostility, even when it hurts”.

The next day, with the online response to Aly’s notion at 4 million and counting, a panel of business and political leaders seated around the Fairfax Media boardroom table voted the 38-year-old Aly the country’s most culturally powerful person.

“It is political commentary as entertainment, but it’s reaching young people in a way that a lot of other things and people don’t,” says Ben Oquist, executive director of The Australia Institute and a former Greens chief of staff. “In the context of the debate about racism, Islam and Muslims, he’s a hugely powerful voice at the moment.”

Katrina Sedgwick, the former ABC TV executive who now runs the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, agrees. “He’s a highly intelligent, very entertaining commentator who has an incredibly powerful platform speaking to the 20- to 40-year-old demographic, who are really difficult to get to,” she says. “It’s mostly quite light entertainment and then every now and then he absolutely nails it with a two- or three-minute diatribe that’s very, very effective and powerful.” 

Like Charlie Pickering, whom he replaced at the start of 2015 as a regular host on The Project, Aly started his working life as a lawyer. When he left the field in 2007 he already had a name for himself as head of public affairs at the Islamic Council of Victoria, plus a Walkley commendation for commentary under his belt. Over the years the father of two has held various public-facing roles, working not only as a television panellist but as a columnist for Fairfax Media, an ABC radio presenter, a politics lecturer at Monash University and a part-time comedian. In May this year he won the Gold Logie, TV’s most popular personality award.

Aly resonates strongly with his audience due to a combination of style – calm, sensible, accessible – and substance, dealing as he does with complex, often vexed issues. His three most popular pieces of commentary in the past year are instructive in this regard. “ISIL is Weak” quelled fear in the wake of the Paris attacks by building an argument out of the terrorist group’s own propaganda. “Send Forgiveness Viral” was a Muslim man’s response to Kruger’s fears, pitched in a way that would stem the flood of abuse she was copping. And “Milked Dry” tapped into the plight of dairy farmers and called on shoppers to reject cheap private label milk and cheese.

“He is not afraid to stand up and say publicly what we’re all thinking,” observes Nicola Wakefield Evans, a director at Bupa, Toll Holdings, Macquarie Group and Lendlease. “He’s not afraid to call out bad behaviour, nor wrong behaviour. On the positive side, he’s a passionate advocate for a whole lot of causes as well.”

Power of reason v outrage

The fear of terrorism, questions about multiculturalism, the rise of online abuse, suspicion about big corporations stamping on the little guy, worries about future prosperity. These are some of the issues contributing to the destabilisation of the country’s two-party political system, which culminated in a July federal election that delivered a tenuous lower house majority and a chaotic upper house speckled with fringe interests.

Technology is another thread running through this year’s cultural power list. Australia’s tech-savvy Prime Minister might argue that there’s never been a more exciting time to be Australian but for many it’s technology, combined with globalisation, that’s turning the world topsy-turvy, threatening jobs and, in some cases, whole industries. We like the convenience of Uber, net-a-porter and Amazon, and enjoy streaming movies on Netflix, as long as it’s not disrupting our own lives and livelihoods.

Add in the plight of women seeking equal pay or fleeing violence – sometimes both – and the mess that is the marriage equality debate, and you have a snow globe of cultural issues. Shake it and you have Australia. They’re not exclusively Australian issues, mind, with a combination of the above credited for the rise of Donald Trump in the US and the shock decision by British voters to leave the European Union.

Those who made the AFR Magazine’s cultural power list this year tend to be people with a voice on one or more of these issues – some positive, some negative.

Rosie Batty remains etched in the public consciousness two-and-a-half years after the murder of her son Luke by his father. Although she handed the Australian of the Year mantle on in January, to many she is still the face of the domestic violence scourge – and the person credited with a growing public appetite for doing something about it. Malcolm Turnbull announced a $100 million package to tackle the problem in September 2015, one of his first announcements after becoming Prime Minister. “She is still incredibly popular and influential with the public,” says Tony Mitchelmore, qualitative researcher and managing director of Visibility Consulting. “They listen to her and respect her.”

While business and political leaders ponder issues of family violence, the gender pay gap and board diversity, many families in middle Australia simply want to know what to say to their teenage girls and boys about sexting and Snapchat. The internet has thrown new light on gender relations, and what it’s exposed is not always pretty. “We can’t ignore that so much of the trolling online is misogynistic,” says Katrina Sedgwick.

Women are stepping forward to deal with this and other issues in their own particular styles. Where Batty used her own awful story to push for action, retaining a stoic air throughout, feminist commentators such as Clementine Ford have fought back by combining articulate opinion with rage. Bestselling novelist Liane Moriarty, meanwhile, has used fiction tinged with humour to tell stories of love and family that contain dark undercurrents ranging from domestic violence to fertility problems and divorce.

That gender issues are shaping Australian culture to a greater extent than they have in the past is illustrated by their emergence in the most unlikely of places … like at the footy. The 2016 Power panel almost cut Australian Football League chief executive Gillon McLachlan from this year’s list altogether for his inability to stand up for women against his mates. He failed to immediately sanction chief gaffe-maker Eddie McGuire mid-year when the Collingwood president joked about drowning journalist Caroline Wilson. The panel ultimately concluded, however, that the AFL was too much of a cultural force to be left off the list, arguing that initiatives such as its new women’s league and its round honouring Indigenous Australians underline its ability to influence behaviour among its broad fan base.

Speaking of role models, three sports stars, Adam Goodes and Michael O’Loughlin from the AFL and Johnathan Thurston from rugby league, together with the head of Netball Australia, Kate Palmer, make this year’s cultural list for their ability to reach way beyond the inner-city elite and influence behaviour and attitudes from the grassroots up.

“He’s the best player in rugby league without any shadow of a doubt ... and he’s a leader in the Indigenous community,” says former Labor minister Greg Combet of Thurston, captain of the North Queensland Cowboys.

Sandra Harding, vice-chancellor of the Townsville-based James Cook University and a Cowboys board member, tells a story of her university bestowing an honorary doctorate on Thurston, “not for his sporting prowess but for his community engagement”. She points out that his advocacy helped get Townsville its promised new sporting stadium, that his commitment to the well-being of Indigenous people, especially children, is palpable, and that his financial investment in embattled airline Skytrans helped ensure continued flights into Cape York Peninsula.

“He’d never been to a graduation ceremony before and he was so nervous and he told me so,” Harding says. “I felt like saying to him, ‘Paul Gallen runs at you and you’re fine but you’re nervous in this context?’ He’s the most humble, wonderful human being and a family man to boot, very proud of his daughters. When the Cowboys won last year’s NRL grand final the first thing he and co-captain Matt Scott did from the podium was thank their families. There needs to be more like them, more of that sort of role modelling.”

The power of Pauline Hanson

At the other end of the role model spectrum is One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson, whose political comeback in the July federal election saw her voted onto this year’s Overt power list. There was plenty of consternation among the Power panel about whether she also holds cultural power but former Coalition MP Ian Macfarlane made a strong argument that she does.

Harking back to the time of the 1998 Queensland state election, when Macfarlane as federal member for Groom was helping the Coalition in Toowoomba, he recalls talking to a couple who ran a tobacconist there. “Every time Pauline comes on television my husband sits up straight and listens,” the wife told him. One Nation secured 22.7 per cent of the vote in that election. “Hanson has that effect on people,” Macfarlane says. “She is going to embolden people to say things they haven’t said for 15 years. She is going to change the culture of what’s acceptable.”

This is a trend that worries Aly, whose “Send Forgiveness Viral” speech was meant to “challenge the ethic we bring to our civil discourse”. He expands on his concern when talking to the AFR Magazine: “The problem I think we’re facing is that the more outrageous and outraged you are, the more you are rewarded. We’re in danger of entering a phase where the highest contribution you can make is to complain very well. I think we have to have other modes than that.”

Something for the powerful to think about.

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The AFR Magazine Power issue, out Friday September 30 inside The Australian Financial Review.