Sally Rugg
Theexecutive director of Change.org Australia
led the campaign for marriage equality at GetUp!
for five years, eventually leading to this year’s
historic Yes vote.“I knew of [playwright and Aboriginal activist] Nakkiah Lui
before I met her. I admired her work – and we became
Twitter friends. Sometimes there can be some awkwardness
when meeting someone offline but that didn’t happen with
us. When we met in person we just made a beeline for
each other and hit it off straight away.
Nakkiah is fearless. She’s not afraid of using her voice,
and she works so hard. I mean, I work hard, too, but I really
aspire to be as committed as Nakkiah is. She’s incredibly
brave; what I’ve learnt from her is that if everybody agrees
with everything you’re saying all the time, then you’re not
really saying anything at all, you’re just sticking to the status
quo. As an activist, you want to be challenging people, you
want to be calling on people to be better, to do more.
That’s what Nakkiah does.
Being a young woman with an opinion can be a really
exhausting identity to occupy. Nakkiah knows what it’s like.
When I was doing the marriage equality campaign,
which I worked on for five years, I would often have to
debate people in the ‘No’ camp on live television. It gets you
down and it’s overwhelming. It’s so important to have an ally
who understands those feelings. Nakkiah is always there for
me, even if we sometimes go weeks without seeing each
other. She’ll often just text me out of the blue and go, ‘What
are you doing right now?’ and I’m like, ‘I’m coming over.’”94
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