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.

The past few years could be a Netflix show, Ilic jokes.

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.

“The left can be a little sad in the way it tells its story, and I think probably comedy is a better way to do that,” he says.

“I believe in creating something called ‘info-bombs’, where you can pair facts with a joke, which can explode in the audience’s brain in a way that they might not think of an issue in the same way.”

Satire has been the through-line for much of Ilic’s career. He was an executive producer on ABC comedy show Tonightly with Tom Ballard, to hosting the award-winning podcast A Rational Fear. He will step back from being a regular contributor on the ABC and filmed his last appearance on Insiders on Sunday.

“My resume is pretty deep. I’ve managed teams of up to 40 or 50 people. TV shows are not cheap, you know, burning through a million-and-a-half a week … easily. We need to have outcomes for that,” he says.

Ilic also has a long history with GetUp. He filmed his first sketch for the group in 2006, posing as David Hicks on MTV’s Cribs to raise money for the Australian imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay after he was caught at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 2001.

He went after John Howard’s Climate Clever ads and Kevin Rudd’s FuelWatch initiative, and was the group’s creative director in 2014.

He says the key to a successful election campaign – apart from more banners, at scale – will be an engaged membership base.