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July 28, 2026 — 4:15pm
I was minding my own old lady business in 2012. Mostly. Sure, things around me pissed me off, but mainly I just complained to friends. I was perpetually grumpy with no real way of clapping back at relentless attacks on women. Then, sometime in 2012, I met someone who really knew how to deal with dickheads. Not only did I meet her; I somehow turned her into my boss, at least in my mind. Best boss ever.
That woman, Sally McManus, is stepping down from her role as secretary of the ACTU, Australia’s peak union body. She’s a fearless leader. Her video responding to hideous Pauline Hanson is one of the smartest moves I’ve seen. And more importantly than that, she’s worked to improve the lives of workers in this country.
Here’s what she did for me.
Sally McManus is a grassroots campaign brain. She is the kind of person who could build a grassroots movement – and build the faith of everyone in that moment.
For decades in media and elsewhere, men wielded power as if it belonged to them. One bloke said women were “destroying the joint”. That phrase became a defining category of rage for women. Women were, indeed, wanting to destroy the joint – the joint which pushed women into backrooms, behind mediocre white men. Social commentator Jane Caro used the expression on that social media platform no-one should mention any more. Plastic surgeon Jill Tomlinson turned it into a hashtag.
But one woman focused all of that into a campaign. Sally McManus. Long-time unionist and then branch secretary of the Australian Services Union in NSW and the ACT, she wanted to show women they could indeed clap back. And we did.
It would be hard to emulate her, at least for me. First, she’s a martial arts whizz and a black belt of various kinds. I have no idea whether she’s a kickboxer but I feel like she could be. She’s also – and forgive me for repeating myself, but she’s like a nun. She’s married to the movement. Her whole life is dedicated to unions, unionism and solidarity. When Herald columnist Peter FitzSimons asked her a couple of years ago if she had a partner, she replied yep – the two million members of the union movement.
Until I met her, I had no serious experience of campaigning. Yes, I’d encouraged parents at various schools to participate in their P&Cs (and even guilted some blokes into getting on the tools at the fete barbecue). I’d written polite letters to organisations about god knows what. Even my kids were better campaigners than me (mainly about school canteens and bins in toilets but still, campaigning works).
Next minute, we were ringing advertisers across the nation asking them to take a good long look at themselves. And mainly, to have a good long look at their customer base. Ah, turns out women have power, spending power.
Dee Madigan, creative director of creative agency Campaign Edge, describes McManus as the best grassroots campaigner in the country. “She’s about what’s right, not what’s expedient – an outstanding, upstanding person.”
That quality makes people want to work with her. I seriously considered tossing in years of working as a journalist and a decade in academia to work alongside her. Not that she was offering me a job. I think I might lack a little of the necessary discipline.
She does that work seven days a week, 48 weeks a year, and has done it for years and years and years. Like any sensible person, she takes holidays, mainly to be in nature and to take photos of birds. I didn’t get the bird thing until Sally insisted I go to a nature reserve in Tasmania and realised that one thing that really rests your brain is looking at a bird on a branch. A bird sitting on a branch. Sitting.
McManus showed a bunch of disparate women (and some men) how campaigning was done. She showed us how to work in union with each other. She had rosters and lists, worked Messenger like nobody’s business, soothed most wounded egos, brought us together each day to recount the campaign’s victories.
McManus is stepping down from nearly a decade leading Australia’s peak union body. In that time, she and ACTU president Michele O’Neil, also retiring, had huge success – five major bills and 47 new rights legislated for unions and workers.
I can’t even imagine who could possibly replace that team. But I have some ideas about what I’d like McManus to do next. She’s only 54 – that’s nine years younger than the prime minister. I’m not sure she’s all that keen on party politics. But she’d make a great next member for Grayndler when she moves back to NSW. Or maybe the Senate?
If she wanted something low key, maybe she could run boot camp for campaigners. God knows we need it. People, a good campaign requires more than just a facility with TikTok and Insta. She’s also a queen of discipline. Argue with each other all you like until you make a plan. Then stick to the bloody plan.
McManus taught so many of us how to campaign against the rich and the powerful, how to campaign against greed and hate and fear. It was the beginning of the end for the reign of mediocre white men.
But McManus’s show should – and must – go on.
Jenna Price is a regular columnist.
