Young women target Liberal with meme
If you’ve been looking at any of Peter Dutton’s social media accounts over the past week, or at the replies to news articles and social posts about him, you might have noticed one phrase popping up again and again: Peggy Sue.
Dear reader, I am going to explain the Peggy Sue story to you, and while it might seem trivial or cheap at first, stick with me because there is a bigger point to be made about the political mood of the moment.
The voter demographic is shifting — by May 2025, millennial and gen Z Australians will make up almost 50% of all voters — forcing politicians to adapt. Dutton was the first of the two current major party leaders to join TikTok, courting social media as his Coalition predecessor Scott Morrison did. But he’s quickly learning that the platform is a wild beast and doesn’t simply amplify a message as you intend.
As I’ve written before, memes matter and digital communication is becoming an increasingly important part of campaigning. It’s why the Liberals hired controversial digital agency Topham Guerin to help Dutton win the 2025 election. Which brings us the latest, organic meme that Dutton might be asking the digital firm to help him wrangle. Or, in this case, scrub from the internet.
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Kayla Jade is an Australia TikTok creator with almost two million followers, who is popular on the app for sharing stories about her job as a sex worker. Stories about some of Kayla’s regular clients often go viral, including a “man of power in the workplace” who prefers a certain sexual act. To protect his anonymity, Kayla has given him the alias Peggy Sue. Look, we’re not spelling it out for you — it’s related to the alias, and if you still don’t get it I can only advise you take great care if you choose to Google. The four videos relating to her most recent booking with him in late January amassed a cumulative 10.6 million views.
Around the time of this booking, someone left a joking comment on the video of another creator, Holly MacAlpine, who makes political videos predominantly against the politics of Dutton and the Coalition. The comment read: “PETER DUTTON IS PEGGY SUE”. MacAlpine ran with it.
“Look, I mean obviously it’s very tongue and cheek, [but] it snowballed in a matter of about two or three days after I did my first video on it,” she tells Crikey. One video in the style of a Daily Mail headline is approaching one million views.
MacAlpine has, so far, made 12 Peggy Sue-related videos, including ones rallying her audience of young women to “spam his comments”. Even the teaser of Dutton’s recent 60 Minutes interview posted to the show’s account was initially flooded with Peggy Sue mentions, although these have since been filtered or deleted. “People think I’m getting paid to do what I’m doing but no, it’s just the sheer fun, the love of the sport.”
MacAlpine says she’s been careful to tag each video with #joke to make it clear this is purely satire and not intended to suggest any actual link between Peggy Sue and Dutton.
Political meme folklore
Doing a little meme misinformation for a laugh is not a new concept for young voters. Who can forget the urban myth that Scott Morrison shat his pants at Engadine McDonald’s after the Cronulla Sharks lost the 1997 Super League grand final? It circulated for years before reaching peak potency during the 2022 election, only to be officially debunked in 2023 by the man who started the rumour, musician Joyride (real name Rowan Dix).
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The Engadine Maccas incident is not the reason Morrison lost the 2022 election. But, on top of everything else, having young voters entertain the idea that he was someone who could accidentally soil themselves in a McDonald’s certainly didn’t help.
Dix told the Hello Sports podcast in 2023 that he never intended for Engadine Maccas to be a rumour, he “just tweeted it”. But there’s a different energy behind the Peggy Sue campaign — MacAlpine believes it’s channeling the “frustration and fear” young women have of the politics Dutton’s Coalition is trying to import.
One of MacAlpine’s videos states it plainly: “If you’re feeling down about the current state of Aussie politics, go comment Peggy Sue on [Dutton’s] last post. I promise it will help.”
“You’ve probably seen online everyone referring to Dutton as ‘Temu Trump’, and [Dutton] has literally been quoted as saying that Trump’s got a lot of good ideas,” she tells Crikey. “That’s very scary for the women in our country. We can see where America is going and it’s scary to see someone trying to idealise that in Australia as well.”
Young women are quietly organising
For some reason no- one is paying much attention to young women in this election, instead focusing on young men. The media seems to have decided that gen Z and millennial men will determine the election outcome, anticipating Dutton’s relationship with this cohort.
An example of how this is playing out: in late January, while Peggy Sue was going viral, the reporting of an AFR/Freshwater poll hyped up Dutton’s supposed appeal with young men while ignoring the telling responses from young women. Women gave both major party leaders very negative approval ratings, and indicated they were equally as likely to vote for the Greens as for Labor. Given the major parties’ primary vote is rapidly declining, you’d think these insights would command more attention.
Wreaking a bit of meme-based havoc is just one way to demonstrate you have influence and can shift opinion. Other young women are organising with their peers in more traditional ways, intent on leveraging their influence for change in representation.
Lizzie Hedding is the co-founder of climate action non-profit Project Planet, and is working on two key election projects. The first, created in the aftermath of the US election result, is a series of free webinars about how to get involved in political campaigning and volunteering. “I was getting messages from friends personally like, ‘God, this is bad. What can I actually do?’ We see a lot of what I’d call sort of ‘political hobbyism’ where people do know a lot about what’s going on, but in their own lives they’re in no way connected to any kind of action on that,” Hedding tells Crikey.
“I don’t think we get very far from everyone just reading news on their phone and feeling sad about it. I wanted to help people make that step.”
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More than 1,000 people have signed up for the webinars, which won’t advocate for any particular party or candidate but instead inform attendees on what it’s like to volunteer for an election or with a non-profit group, encouraging them to get involved in whatever way matches their own values. “If you had [another] thousand people out there volunteering a few hours each, that’s a huge impact. It was sort of a small thing we could do that has the potential to have some really significant effects.”
The second project, Build a Ballot, is a website that will let a voter create their own preference sheet with the candidates running in their electorate, based on the issues that voter believes are most important. It’s aimed at the opposite group to the webinar series — people who won’t engage until a week or even a few days before election day. It will be a helpful tool for voters of all demographics and political leanings, built quietly by young women.
These projects are still currently works-in-progress. An election date is yet to be announced, but the clock is ticking. In the meantime, there’s at least one group of young voters taking great satisfaction at presumably having forced someone in Dutton’s office to explain the references to Ms Sue. It’s sending a message, Game of Thrones-style: young women want Dutton to know it was them.
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