I recently built a project called the “Canberra Gas Debate Explorer” an interactive media-analysis dashboard based on the May 2026 debate between Senator Susan McDonald and Konrad Benjamin from Punter’s Politics.
What interested me most was not just the political argument itself, but how political narratives are constructed, defended, and communicated in modern media.
The platform transforms the debate into interactive systems:
argument visualizations
transcript playback analysis
lobbying and funding flow maps
rhetorical framing breakdowns
fairness and royalty comparison tools
One of the biggest realizations during development was this:
Modern political conflict is often less about raw facts and more about framing.
Who gets called “responsible”?
Who gets called “extreme”?
Who is expected to sacrifice?
Who is protected from change?
I wanted to build something that allowed users to slow down political messaging and inspect the mechanics underneath it.
Not just what was said
but how persuasion itself operates.
The project combines:
• interactive journalism
• civic-tech design
• media theory
• economic communication
• narrative systems analysis
What fascinated me most was seeing how analogies, emotional framing, and institutional language shape public understanding far more effectively than raw statistics alone.
Increasingly, media literacy is becoming systems literacy.
And I think future civic platforms will need to help people understand not only information
but the structures influencing how information is presented.
