From ABC talking head to activist campaigner: Dan Ilic to become GetUp’s next boss

GetUp’s banner stunt at Pauline Hanson’s inaugural National Press Club address was derided by those in Canberra, but comedian and regular ABC talking head Dan Ilic saw it as a call to arms.

“I was like: ‘Wow, where has GetUp been for a few years?’” he says. “Finally, GetUp is back in the game, baby.”

Ilic says the press club incident, which is subject to an ongoing police investigation , made becoming GetUp’s next chief executive a much more interesting prospect. The satirist, who has appeared on ABC programs such as Hungry Beast and Insiders , will be taking the reins of the progressive campaign group after the Victorian election in November, hoping to reinvigorate it after years of waning influence.

GetUp has had its challenges after its anti-Adani campaign in 2019 fell flat, and the group failed in its bid to oust high-profile Liberals such as future leader Peter Dutton. Donations plummeted following Scott Morrison’s reelection, chief executive Larissa Baldwin-Roberts quietly departed, and the organisation faced mass redundancies .

According to GetUp’s latest corporate filings, reported by The Australian last month, donations dropped to $4.1 million in 2024-25, down from almost $6 million the previous year and well below the $12.4 million raised before the 2019 election.

He commends interim chief executive Paul Ferris for re-energising members and staff. Since GetUp planted the banner that unfurled behind Hanson on the National Press Club stage, the organisation has received more than a million dollars in donations and membership has grown rapidly.

MPs across the political spectrum, including the prime minister , condemned the stunt, but Ilic says GetUp’s membership wants the group to push the needle. Australian politics moves too slowly, he argues.

While the activist group targeted Hanson at the press club, and spent $600,000 trying to prevent David Farley from winning the Farrer byelection, Ilic insists One Nation isn’t the only party he will be targeting.

“[The government] do a lot of f----- stuff, and I think it’s really important that pressure be applied on Labor,” he says.

Barnaby Joyce, for one, was delighted the activist group involved itself in the byelection won convincingly by One Nation.

“No one takes GetUp seriously as being, sort of, a discerning, balanced view,” Joyce said at the time. “When they hear GetUp, they go ‘here goes a whole heap of bile’.”

Despite this, Ilic says GetUp already knows how to campaign; what he wants to focus on is expanding the group’s communications.

“It’s really fertile territory … and very low-hanging fruit to create a GetUp podcast, or many GetUp podcasts, and broadcast those out through vertical video-clipping, and really engage in the new media space in a fun and entertaining way,” he says.

Comedy, Ilic says, has a unique ability to change the way people think.