Soft questions, angry comments: Albanese and Dutton hit the podcast campaign

Abbie Chatfield wasn’t hiding her political allegiance. “My primary goal in this is to get the Labor government back into government,” the influencer declared at the start of her interview with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last month.

The treatment shows why political parties are so eager to court influencers such as Chatfield, who became a star on The Bachelor and is now a broadcaster. They have big audiences, loyal followers, and reach people who aren’t a “political girlie pop” in Chatfield’s phrasing. It’s little wonder Albanese stayed with Chatfield’s It’s A Lot podcast for 90 minutes, half an hour longer than planned.

Anthony Albanese recently appeared on Abbie Chatfield’s podcast, while Peter Dutton sat down with Sam Fricker.

But the connection people feel with influencers such as Chatfield, who has made avowedly left-wing politics core to her brand, comes with a risk for the stars.

“I’m raging that she’s platformed a genocide complicit fkwit [sic] of a PM,” one commenter wrote after Chatfield’s Albanese interview. “He used you, you idiot.”

This podcast was the highest-profile Australian example so far of a political strategy that helped return Donald Trump to the White House: tacking away from established media that aspires to ask hard questions and towards influencers who do not.

The amount of time Albanese and Dutton are spending with podcasters and influencers has ramped up before the election is even called. Already in 2025, the prime minister has spoken to former radio host Neil Mitchell, Sylvia Jeffreys, Mark Bouris and Chatfield among others while Dutton had a long conversation with Bouris, a businessman and influencer.

Unlike in America, where the podcasters who got time with Trump tapped into a younger, disengaged, male demographic, Australian politicians have played it safe with their podcast appearances.

The strategy has been in the works for months. At an August gathering in Sydney, senior Labor ministers including Katy Gallagher, Tanya Plibersek and Anika Wells hosted a group of influential women in media. That would once have meant only the likes of Lisa Wilkinson or Laura Tingle. Not any more.

Vivian Wei, a co-host of the Level Asian podcast (72,000 Instagram followers) was there. So too was charity influencer Milly Rose Bannister (137,000 followers on Instagram) and Nat Alise (2.5 million followers on TikTok), a Sunshine Coast woman who mostly posts lighthearted content about life as a single parent. In the months since, Alise, who declined to comment, has made several political posts, often with an educational tone but an anti-Coalition slant, such as one in November suggesting Dutton is a hypocrite on housing affordability.

Younger MPs are making a particular effort to connect to these new media stars. Jerome Laxale, a 41-year-old Labor MP from the ultra-marginal Sydney seat of Bennelong, appeared in a video with Nathan Stafford, who has racked up 1.9 million followers by mowing lawns for vulnerable people. His August 2024 video with Laxale, in which they help a disabled man who had been knocked back by the NDIS register with the scheme, was “liked” 14,000 times.

Independents such as Sophie Scamps have also got in on podcasts, with the MP representing Mackellar on Sydney’s northern beaches speaking to Konrad Benjamin, who has a popular YouTube channel called Punter’s Politics, last year.

Nationals senator Matt Canavan, 44, has seen an uptick in engagement with right-wing content on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. Anger around the bipartisan push to ban people under 16 from social media has been a flashpoint. “Definitely since Musk your content [on X] often outperforms Facebook, which wasn’t always the case previously,” Canavan says. One Nation, mining magnate Clive Palmer’s political parties and other figures on the right-wing fringe of politics have been cultivating followings among the same online demographic.

The play worked for Trump, who spent hours with some of America’s biggest-name podcasters. Rather than speaking with progressive women, the once and future president spent time with gaming, comedy and technology figures with young male audiences.

Trump spent an hour and 17 minutes with gaming streamer Adin Ross, 53 minutes with influencer and boxer Jake Paul, 57 minutes with comedian Theo Von, and an hour and four minutes with computer scientist Lex Fridman. Then there was the big one: three hours with the world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, which 54 million people watched on YouTube alone.

On election day, the core listeners of these podcasts came out in force for Trump. Men aged between 18 and 29 favoured Trump by 14 percentage points, a remarkable result when young people have tended to lean left and younger American men have proven hard to get to the polls.

Josh Szeps, a former ABC broadcaster who has appeared on Rogan’s show seven times and now has his own podcast called Uncomfortable Conversations, says the medium is meeting a demand.

“The weird thing about our situation at the moment, our media environment, is people want to watch things that are 15 seconds or three hours long,” Szeps says. Most podcasts, though, straddle both sides of the divide. A three-hour show like Rogan’s is cut up and shared as TikToks.

That means measuring the success of a podcast can be challenging. Former Olympic diver Sam Fricker, who spoke to Dutton late last year, issued a video last month disputing this masthead’s reporting that his interview was a “ratings dud”. The main podcast video had received about 4000 views on YouTube at the time, even though Fricker counts almost 6 million followers on the platform.

But Fricker argued that figure was unfair. Clips from the podcast reached more than half a million people on TikTok and over 660,000 on Instagram, Fricker said in his social media post. He did not respond to a request for further comment.

Those clips don’t deliver the signature strength of a podcast: length, which Szeps says allows voters to absorb a candidate’s views. “Wherever you stand on [Rogan’s] politics or his influence on misinformation or his social justice stances, before this podcast explosion that he led, it was very hard to hear a candidate just riff for a couple of hours,” he says.

Lucy Hunt, head of podcasts for the company that makes Shameless, a pop culture show that targets a similar listener to Chatfield, says listeners turn to its shows for companionship. “This friendship with the audience is essential – guests often know they’re entering a trusted environment of like-minded people when they come onto a podcast,” says Hunt, who spoke to this masthead before Chatfield’s interview with the prime minister. “Never say never,” says Hunt, when asked if the company would have a politician on, though its shows have largely avoided politics until now.

Chatfield has built her connection with listeners by taking the opposite approach. That has advantages. The influencer told Albanese that her listeners were “predominantly Greens voters” but made the case to her audience that they should vote for Labor to stop the Coalition from winning office.

One listener, business coach Tash Corbin, agreed on Instagram.

“Abbie I am a ride or die for you, and this is why,” Corbin said. “The full extended interview was brilliant, and I think you did such a great job of specifically speaking about preferential voting, key policies, and being up front that you don’t vote Labor.”

Chatfield’s pitch to her followers to preference Labor second would have thrilled the party, given her more than 600,000 followers on TikTok and over 500,000 on Instagram.

But her pragmatic endorsement of Labor and softball questions infuriated others. The host’s pre-emptive apology for not telling Albanese that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, which the country has denied, was not enough to quell their anger.

Abbie Chatfield has parlayed social media fame into a political platform.Credit: Getty Images

The star did not back down. “This isn’t me saying Labor is perfect, but it is different from Liberal and I wanted to showcase exactly how,” she posted on Instagram last month. “No one is telling you how to vote, so before you come to the comment section with anger, listen to the episode.”

Marketing strategist Jack Campbell said the backlash against Chatfield, who declined an interview request, could damage her credibility. But he said there were risks for Albanese too, whose rehearsed delivery did not gel with Chatfield’s buoyant style.

“Rather than making him seem approachable, his appearance on Chatfield’s podcast came across as forced, inauthentic, and off-brand for some voters,” Campbell says.

But avoiding popular podcasters can be worse. Former vice president Kamala Harris never appeared on Rogan’s podcast during the campaign, infuriating Democrats baffled by the call to avoid speaking to his enormous audience.

Labor and Liberal media strategists, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss campaign tactics, said appearing on new media platforms was important but not decisive during campaigns. Most Australians get their news from mainstream sources, the Australian Communication and Media Authority found in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available.

But social media was the only news source that grew in popularity, up three points to 20 per cent between 2022 and 2023. All others went backwards. Still, campaign strategists insist TV, radio and newspapers still set the agenda.

That’s reflected in the numbers. From the 2022 election until late last year, Albanese had recorded about a dozen podcasts, many with mainstream news identities, compared with hundreds of radio and television interviews. He is known as the FM PM for a reason.

John Macgowan, a former Liberal staffer who closely watches the state of conservative populist online media, says Australia’s alternative media scene is still undercooked.

“Australia is nowhere near where the US or even UK are,” Macgowan says. “Australia’s answer to Tucker Carlson [the former Fox News host turned successful right-wing YouTuber and podcaster] probably isn’t even on screens right now, he probably hasn’t graduated from university yet.”

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