35 Essential PR Thought Leaders in Australia NZ

Public relations in Australia and New Zealand is living through one of its most consequential moments. The profession that exists to help organisations earn trust is operating in an era when trust itself, in institutions, in media, in corporations, in governments, is at its lowest recorded levels. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer documents a continuing descent into what researchers describe as a grievance-driven information environment, where audiences are sceptical of almost every organised voice reaching them. Into this environment, the most skilled PR practitioners in the country are doing work of genuine consequence: helping leaders communicate through complexity, helping organisations navigate crises that unfold simultaneously across a dozen platforms, and making the case that honest, strategic communication is not just commercially smart but socially necessary.

Australia and New Zealand's PR industry is remarkably sophisticated for the size of the two markets. The combined population of roughly 31 million people has produced a communications sector that regularly competes on the world stage, with agencies earning global recognition at the SABRE Awards, PRovoke Media rankings, and Mumbrella CommsCon. The sector is also unusually rich in practitioners who have moved between journalism, government, academia, and agency life, giving the field an intellectual depth that pure commercial environments rarely produce. According to the Communication and Public Relations Australia (CPRA), formerly the PRIA, the Australian PR sector employs tens of thousands of practitioners, a figure that has grown consistently despite, or perhaps because of, the digital disruption reshaping how communication reaches audiences.

The challenge for any practitioner, communications director, or leader trying to understand the state of PR thinking in this region is knowing whose voice actually matters. The field is noisy. There are thousands of people calling themselves PR professionals. There are far fewer who are genuinely shaping how the profession thinks, teaches, measures, and defends itself. This list profiles 35 of the most credible, active, and genuinely influential thought leaders in public relations in Australia and New Zealand for 2026. It spans agency founders and CEOs, in-house corporate affairs professionals, academics, association leaders, crisis specialists, health communicators, digital PR innovators, and measurement experts.

Jonno White works with leadership teams in organisations across Australia, New Zealand, and around the world to navigate the kinds of conversations and decisions that sit behind every communications challenge: the alignment or misalignment of culture, the presence or absence of honest dialogue, and the capacity or incapacity of leaders to communicate with clarity under pressure. To bring Jonno in to work with your leadership team on the communication challenges that sit beneath your public relations strategy, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Public Relations Thought Leadership Matters

The reputation crisis that public relations is simultaneously managing on behalf of its clients is, in a certain irony, also a crisis that the PR profession faces about itself. Research by the global PR measurement body AMEC and the International Public Relations Association has documented for years that PR remains one of the least-trusted professional services categories, despite being the category most responsible for building trust in others. The practitioners who are grappling with this tension openly, rather than simply ignoring it, are the ones most worth following.

What is genuinely at stake in AU/NZ PR is not merely the health of an industry. It is the quality of public discourse. When communications professionals operate with integrity, audiences receive clearer information about the organisations that affect their lives. When they do not, the gap between what organisations say and what they do widens, and trust in every institution erodes a little more. The practitioners on this list are, by and large, aware of this responsibility. Their work in 2025 and 2026, navigating AI-generated misinformation, defending press freedom, pushing for genuine measurement of PR outcomes, and making the case for ethics in communications, reflects a profession that is taking its social responsibility seriously.

For Jonno White, the territory of PR leadership thinking connects directly to his work with executive teams on communication culture: the patterns of honesty, courage, and accountability that determine whether a team can communicate effectively when the pressure is on. To discuss how Jonno might support your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect.

How This List Was Compiled

This list was developed through comprehensive research across Communication and Public Relations Australia (CPRA) Golden Target Award records, Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) award programmes and fellowship rosters, PRovoke Media's Asia-Pacific agency rankings and Innovator 25 lists, Mumbrella CommsCon award results, and extensive review of active professional contributions across the PR sector in both countries. Candidates were assessed across five dimensions: formal credentials and demonstrated expertise in public relations and communications, geographic diversity between Australia and New Zealand, disciplinary diversity across agency, corporate, government, health, academic, and not-for-profit PR, genuine contribution to how the field is evolving, and active participation in professional discourse in 2025 and 2026.

The final 35 includes voices from every major Australian state and from both islands of New Zealand. Disciplinary coverage spans crisis communications, health PR, consumer PR, technology PR, government relations, PR education, measurement and evaluation, and strategic communications. This is not an exhaustive directory of every credentialled PR professional in the region. It is a curated starting point for any leader, communications director, or practitioner who wants to understand where the best thinking in AU/NZ public relations is currently coming from.

Category 1: Founders Who Redefined the Industry

The founders in this category did not simply build successful agencies. They changed what AU/NZ PR looked like. Each of the practitioners below built something genuinely new in the market, grew it to a scale that influenced the entire industry, and has continued to contribute intellectual leadership to the profession beyond the commercial success of their own business.

1. Robyn Sefiani

Robyn Sefiani is the President ANZ and Reputation Counsel at Sefiani, part of Clarity Global, the agency she founded in Sydney in 1999 with a single goal: to build a world's best practice corporate communications firm providing strategic counsel to the C-suite. In the 26 years since, she has done exactly that, growing Sefiani into one of Australia's most awarded strategic communications consultancies before merging with Clarity Global to give the agency international reach across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Americas.

Sefiani was named Australia's PR Leader of the Year in 2022 and her agency has twice won Midsize PR Agency of the Year at Mumbrella's CommsCon Awards, most recently in 2025. Her contribution to the profession extends beyond her own agency: she has written thought leadership essays published by the International Public Relations Association (IPRA), managed communications for the 2000 Sydney Olympics through her early work with VISA, and spent twelve years at Edelman including as co-president of Asia-Pacific and director of the firm's global board before founding Sefiani.

2. Leilani Abels

Leilani Abels is the Founder and CEO of Thrive PR + Communications, the agency she built from a Melbourne startup into Australia and New Zealand's largest family-owned, female-led independent public relations firm, with five offices across both countries and a track record that includes winning B&T and Mumbrella's Agency of the Year in back-to-back years.

Her contribution to AU/NZ PR extends well beyond Thrive's commercial success: she led a successful industry advocacy campaign to have public relations added to Australia's long-term skills shortage list, launched the industry's first Technology Training Academy to address the PR skills crisis, and was recognised by PRovoke Media as an Asia-Pacific Innovator 25 in 2021. Abels won the PRIA Golden Target Leader of the Year award and was named a Campaign Asia Woman to Watch.

3. Deborah Pead

Deborah Pead is the Founder of Pead, one of New Zealand's most awarded and longest-standing communications agencies, with over 25 years of operation and a team of 30 that handles major national brands including Nespresso, BMW, AIA Insurance, and Ports of Auckland. Pead began her communications career in South Africa in the 1980s before building an agency that is widely regarded as the benchmark for integrated, independent communications practice in New Zealand.

What distinguishes Pead as a thought leader is her willingness to speak publicly about the forces reshaping the profession: she appeared on the Leaders Getting Coffee podcast in October 2025 to share her perspective on building a purpose-driven agency over a quarter century. Pead launched the Houston Issues Management specialist division in 2025 to help New Zealand organisations prepare proactively for reputational risk, reflecting a practitioner whose thinking keeps pace with what her clients actually need.

4. Vuki Vujasinovic

Vuki Vujasinovic founded Sling & Stone in 2010 at the age of 23 in a Sydney sharehouse, building it into Australia's only agency dedicated exclusively to challengers, disrupters, and entrepreneurs, with 80-plus staff across Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Singapore and clients including Slack, Stripe, Twitter, and Google Cloud. Named in Forbes 30 Under 30 and B&T 30 Under 30, he stepped down as CEO at the start of 2025 and is now building Athletic Ventures.

Sling & Stone during Vujasinovic's tenure won ANZ Agency of the Year in 2025 from PRovoke Media, a recognition that arrived after he announced his departure, cementing his contribution to the field. His 14-year commitment to telling the stories of challengers and disrupters redefined what a specialist PR agency in the technology and startup sector could look like in this region.

5. Phoebe Netto

Phoebe Netto is the Founder and Managing Director of Pure Public Relations, the Sydney-based agency she launched in 2010 specifically to give small and medium-sized businesses and not-for-profit organisations access to the quality of strategic PR counsel that had previously been available only to large organisations with large budgets.

Her contribution to PR thought leadership is distinctive precisely because of this focus: while most visible PR founders work with major brands and enterprise clients, Netto has spent fifteen years developing frameworks and approaches specifically suited to the constraints and contexts of SMEs and charities. She writes regularly for Inside Retail Australia, appears as an expert on the Media Stable expert registry, and participated in the podcast Unemployed and Afraid in January 2025. Pure Public Relations achieved over 6,000 pieces of coverage for client campaigns in 2023.

Category 2: Agency Leaders Shaping the Next Generation

This category profiles the current generation of agency leaders whose day-to-day practice is defining what excellent AU/NZ PR looks like in 2026, and who are actively shaping the next generation of practitioners through their agency cultures, their public commentary, and their contributions to the profession's educational and standards bodies.

6. Leisa Goddard

Leisa Goddard is the Founder and Managing Director of Adoni Media, the Brisbane-headquartered PR and media training agency she built after more than three decades as a journalist, foreign correspondent, US Bureau Chief for Network Ten, and Logie-nominated war correspondent who reported live under Taliban attack and rocket fire in Afghanistan. Adoni Media was named a double award winner at the 2026 Australian Enterprise Awards for excellence in Media Training and as a trusted PR agency.

In 2025, 100 percent of Adoni Media media training participants said they would recommend the agency, a client satisfaction outcome that reflects Goddard's model of bringing genuine newsroom experience to corporate communications preparation. She received a United Nations Media Peace Award in 2004, and Adoni Media ran a government relations campaign that generated a TGA record number of submissions, achieving a sign-up every minute at the campaign's peak.

7. James Hutchinson

James Hutchinson became CEO of Sling & Stone on January 1, 2025, succeeding founder Vuki Vujasinovic after a decade at the agency, including as Global Head of Business. His leadership has seen Sling & Stone named an ANZ Agency of the Year by PRovoke Media in 2025 and nominated among the 14 best ANZ agencies for the SABRE Awards Asia-Pacific.

Hutchinson's contribution to the field reflects his decade of watching Sling & Stone grow from a scrappy independent into a global operation with offices in four countries and clients across three continents. His articulation of what it means to keep the hunger and culture of a challenger agency intact at scale is one of the most practically valuable contributions to the AU/NZ PR conversation about agency leadership in the current era.

8. Amanda Galmes

Amanda Galmes is Managing Partner at Sefiani, part of Clarity Global, and a senior leader in one of Australia's most respected corporate communications firms. In March 2026 she appeared at the Mumbrella CommsCon conference alongside Clarity Global's Chief Digital Officer Tom Telford, speaking on the reputational risk that arises when organisations structure their earned, owned, and paid communications in silos rather than taking a wholistic integrated approach.

Her work on the emerging measurement of brand and corporate visibility in AI search reflects the direction in which the PR profession is heading. Galmes has been part of Sefiani's senior leadership through the agency's award-winning growth and its integration into the Clarity Global network, giving her a perspective on what world-class corporate communications looks like at both the boutique and global scale.

9. Helen Hutchings

Helen Hutchings is the Managing Director of Phillips Group, a communications consultancy based in Queensland. She has been an active contributor to CPRA's professional development programmes in 2025, including serving as a case study instructor for the PR Fundamentals Autumn School, where she spoke on Professional Skills. Her appointment as Managing Director of Phillips Group was celebrated by the broader CPRA community, reflecting her standing as a senior figure in Queensland's PR industry.

Phillips Group works across strategic communications, corporate affairs, and public consultation, making Hutchings a practitioner whose perspective bridges commercial communications, government relations, and community engagement, a combination of expertise that is particularly valuable in Queensland's resource-intensive and community-sensitive operating environment.

10. Craig Badings

Craig Badings is a strategic communications leader and Partner at Haystac, one of Australia's leading integrated communications agencies. He is the author of the #THOUGHT LEADERSHIP tweet book, published in the THiNKaha series, which offers a framework for embedding thought leadership across entire organisations rather than treating it as a short-term marketing strategy.

Badings' perspective on the gap between organisations that claim thought leadership credentials and those that genuinely earn them is one of the more practically valuable contributions to the AU PR conversation, because it addresses the field from the inside: as a practitioner who delivers communications strategy to major clients while simultaneously thinking critically about how communications disciplines need to evolve.

Category 3: Specialists in Crisis and Reputation

Crisis communications is arguably the highest-stakes discipline within public relations, and AU/NZ has produced a remarkable cluster of practitioners whose work in this area has shaped both agency practice and public understanding of how institutions manage the gap between what went wrong and what they say about it.

11. Tony Jaques

Tony Jaques spent decades managing corporate affairs and issues management for major organisations before founding Issue Outcomes, his Melbourne-based consultancy focused specifically on issues management, crisis communications, and the strategic decisions that determine whether a crisis becomes controllable or catastrophic. He is a contributor to the International Public Relations Association (IPRA) thought leadership essay series.

Jaques is one of Australia's most published practitioners on the distinction between issues management, the proactive identification and management of emerging threats, and crisis management, the reactive response to threats that have already materialised. His argument, developed over years of practice and writing, is that the PR profession invests far too much in crisis response and far too little in the issues management work that prevents crises from escalating in the first place.

12. Peter Wilkinson

Peter Wilkinson is the founder of Wilkinson Group and Wilkinson Butler, and the Chair of the Alliance for Journalists' Freedom, an advocacy organisation working to protect media freedom across Australia and the Asia-Pacific. His career spans more than 30 years working on flagship ABC programmes including This Day Tonight, Four Corners, and The Journal, and on Channel Nine's A Current Affair and 60 Minutes, before building a PR and crisis communications consultancy.

His dual role as a media professional turned communications counsellor and as a press freedom advocate gives him a perspective on the relationship between journalism, institutions, and public trust that few practitioners in either Australia or New Zealand can match. Wilkinson Group's foundation strengths in strategic corporate affairs, crisis PR, sustainability, and digital and social media make it one of the country's most distinctively positioned communications practices.

13. Genevieve Chunn

Genevieve Chunn is a senior communications leader at Pead, New Zealand's leading integrated communications agency, whose active blog contributions in 2025 and 2026 have addressed crisis communications, the ethics of AI in public communications, and the human dimensions of reputation management. Her November 2025 piece on the importance of sounding human in an era of AI automation, and her December 2025 response to the Manage My Health cyber breach, one of New Zealand's most serious health data incidents, demonstrate a practitioner whose thinking keeps pace with the issues her clients are actually facing.

Chunn's writing captures what genuine crisis communications counsel looks like when it is grounded in ethical clarity rather than reactive spin management. Her public articulation of the principle that crisis preparedness is a continuous discipline rather than a reactive capability reflects the thinking that the best AU/NZ practitioners are trying to embed into their clients' leadership cultures.

Category 4: Health and Purpose-Driven Communications

The specialist disciplines of health PR and not-for-profit communications demand a depth of technical understanding, an ethical sensitivity, and a facility with complex regulatory environments that sets their practitioners apart from generalist communicators. Australia and New Zealand have produced a particularly strong cluster of health communications specialists whose work has shaped both commercial outcomes and genuine public health outcomes.

14. Kirsten Bruce

Kirsten Bruce is the founder and Managing Director of VIVA Communications, one of Australia's specialist health PR agencies, and a practitioner whose contribution to the health communications sector has been recognised with the Health Industry Hub Catalyst for Change individual award in 2025. VIVA Communications has earned multiple CPRA Golden Target Awards including a Platinum Award in 2024 for its healthcare campaign work.

Kirsten was also recognised as the Health Industry Hub PR Agency Individual of the Year in 2023, a recognition that reflects the standing she has built across more than a decade of specialist health communications practice in Australia. Her agency works at the intersection of health, science, and public communication, navigating the regulatory complexity and reputational stakes that are unique to health communications in the Australian market.

15. Maya Ivanovic

Maya Ivanovic is a communications professional at Palin Communications and the inaugural recipient of the 2025 GWPRAus (Global Women in PR Australia) Mentoring Scholarship, a recognition that identifies her as one of the most promising emerging leaders in Australian PR and communications. The scholarship, which represents the programme's expansion following strong industry interest, connects her with senior women leaders across the PR sector.

Her inclusion here reflects both her individual achievement and the broader significance of the women's mentorship agenda in AU/NZ PR, where the majority of practitioners are women but senior leadership roles have historically skewed male. The GWPRAus Mentoring Scholarship programme, which named Anastasiia Nazarenko from Palin Communications and Sophie Budzevski from DEC PR as 2026 recipients, represents the organised investment the industry is making in its next generation of women leaders.

Category 5: New Zealand's Leading Voices

New Zealand's PR industry is smaller than Australia's but punches well above its weight on the global stage. The practitioners in this category have built reputations that extend well beyond the domestic New Zealand market, influencing how PR is practised across the Tasman and contributing to the global conversation on reputation, communication, and trust.

16. Fleur Revell-Devlin

Fleur Revell-Devlin is the Director of Impact PR, the Auckland-based public relations agency she founded in 2006 after a 21-year career as a journalist, television presenter, and producer across TVNZ and TV3. A three-time Qantas Media Awards winner and Feature Writer of the Year, she is one of New Zealand's most decorated former journalists to have made the transition to PR, and is routinely sought by New Zealand media organisations for commentary on PR, branding, and crisis management.

On LinkedIn in 2025 and 2026 she has written compellingly about the ethical responsibilities of PR practitioners in an era of deepfakes, AI-generated messaging, and declining institutional trust, drawing on philosopher Harry Frankfurt's concept of bullshit to argue that PR practitioners have an obligation to become truth architects rather than persuasion technicians. Impact PR works across FMCG, tourism, corporate, and crisis sectors with clients including Procter and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, and Singapore Airlines.

17. Kate Barlow

Kate Barlow is the Senior Corporate Affairs Leader at Fletcher Building, one of New Zealand's largest listed companies, and was one of two joint recipients of the Joseph Peart Award at the 2025 PRINZ Awards, the award presented for the highest grade achieved in the Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) programme. Her reflection on completing the APR describes PR as a discipline of navigating pools of ambiguity with professional rigour.

Her commitment to formal accreditation alongside a senior in-house role reflects exactly the kind of professional development the industry needs more of. Barlow represents the in-house corporate affairs perspective that is often underrepresented on practitioner lists that skew toward agency founders, and her work managing communications for one of New Zealand's most significant listed companies brings a rigour and consequence that agency work rarely matches.

18. Fiona Rose Cassidy

Fiona Rose Cassidy is the PRINZ representative on the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, having been elected as a Regional Delegate-at-Large for the 2024-25 term. Her role connects New Zealand's PR and communications professional standards to the global standards bodies that influence how public relations is regulated, taught, and practised across more than 90 countries.

The Global Alliance, which brings together national PR associations including PRINZ and CPRA, works on ethical frameworks, education standards, and the professional development of PR practitioners at an international level. Cassidy's contribution ensures that New Zealand's voice and experience shape global PR standards, giving practitioners in this small market influence that extends far beyond their geographic footprint.

19. Rick Osborne

Rick Osborne is the Chief Executive of Metals NZ and a strategic communications practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of industry advocacy, policy communications, and public affairs. In June 2025 he co-authored an article published in The Post, one of New Zealand's national newspapers, on the policy implications of New Zealand's industrial transition, demonstrating an ability to place strategic communications thinking into national public discourse.

His contribution to the Convergence Communications network, where he has served as a strategic consultant, has shaped how New Zealand's specialist industries communicate with government, media, and public stakeholders on policy matters of national significance. His perspective bridges the worlds of industry association leadership, government relations, and public communications in a way that few New Zealand practitioners combine.

20. Hannah McKnight

Hannah McKnight is a communications professional at Switched On Group, a New Zealand communications and marketing business, and was a finalist at the 50th Annual PRINZ Awards in 2024 for her work on the Constructing Culture through Values Campaign. The PRINZ Awards are adjudicated by more than 50 senior public relations and communications professionals from Aotearoa and Australia, and being recognised among the 45 finalists across 16 categories represents substantive peer validation.

Her work on internal culture communications reflects the growing recognition within PR that how organisations speak to their own people about their values and direction is as strategically consequential as any external campaign. The culture communications discipline is one of the most underserved in AU/NZ PR, and McKnight's recognition for this work signals where the profession's attention is moving.

21. Leigh Harris

Leigh Harris is a Managing Partner at Convergence Communications, the Christchurch-based communications agency with one of the strongest track records for community relations and stakeholder engagement in New Zealand. Convergence has been awarded silver twice at the PRINZ Awards for community relations projects and won three awards at the 2023 PRINZ Awards for their work on Phil Mauger's electoral campaign for the Christchurch Mayoralty.

Harris's work in community engagement and stakeholder communications reflects a practitioner who understands that the most consequential PR outcomes in New Zealand often depend not on media coverage but on genuine relationship-building with the communities and stakeholders most affected by an organisation's decisions. His perspective on the relationship between PR and democratic participation is one of the more intellectually grounded in the NZ market.

Category 6: Standards, Education, and the Profession's Future

The practitioners in this category are doing the work that determines what public relations will look like in a decade: setting standards, training the next generation, and making the intellectual and institutional case for a discipline that is often misunderstood even by those who most need it.

22. Denise Mackay FPRINZ

Denise Mackay FPRINZ is one of the most senior figures in New Zealand public relations, a Fellow of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand and the Chief Judge of the PRINZ Awards, a role she held across the 2024 awards cycle, one of the most significant in PRINZ history as the programme marked its 50th anniversary. As Chief Judge, she led a panel of more than 50 senior PR and communications professionals from Aotearoa and Australia.

The FPRINZ designation is the highest level of professional recognition available in the New Zealand PR industry, awarded to practitioners who have demonstrated sustained contribution to the profession across their careers. Mackay's role as Chief Judge places her at the centre of the peer review process that validates the highest quality work being produced across the New Zealand communications sector.

23. Andrew Pirie FPRINZ

Andrew Pirie FPRINZ is the co-Chief Judge of the PRINZ Awards alongside Denise Mackay and a Fellow of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand. His public statement at the time of the 2024 PRINZ Awards finalists' announcement captured the stakes of the profession with clarity: at a time when trust in established institutions and traditional media is under pressure, the role of public relations becomes even more vital, helping organisations connect and engage with the public and stakeholders with integrity and authenticity.

This framing of PR's social function, not as spin but as a trust-building discipline, represents the intellectual direction the profession's standards bodies are trying to move the field. Pirie's contribution to adjudicating 45 finalists across 16 categories in the 50th anniversary year of the PRINZ Awards reflects the depth of his engagement with the full breadth of New Zealand PR practice.

24. Jennifer Muir

Jennifer Muir is the Australian representative on the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, serving as a Regional Delegate-at-Large for the 2024-25 term on behalf of Communication and Public Relations Australia (CPRA). Her role connects Australia's PR community to the global standards body that works across 90-plus countries to raise ethical and professional standards in public relations and communication management.

As the person responsible for representing Australian PR interests on the global stage, Muir's contribution to the field is about more than individual practice: it is about ensuring that Australian practitioners' experience and perspective influences the global conversation about what public relations is, what it should do, and what standards it should hold itself to. This institutional contribution is less visible than agency work but more consequential for the profession's long-term health.

25. Jane Johnston

Jane Johnston is a public relations academic and educator at the Queensland University of Technology, one of Australia's leading communications research institutions. Her work in PR education is shaping the next generation of practitioners who will define what Australian PR looks like in the 2030s.

The academic contribution to PR practice is frequently undervalued by industry practitioners, but the frameworks, ethical reasoning, and historical context that university education provides give graduating communicators an intellectual foundation that purely apprentice-model training cannot replicate. Johnston's research and teaching at QUT contributes to a tradition of PR academic excellence in Australia that has produced practitioners who are both technically skilled and ethically grounded.

Category 7: Digital PR, Technology, and Measurement

The final category brings together the practitioners who are doing the most important work on the intersection of public relations and the technological forces reshaping how communication reaches, influences, and is measured against its stated outcomes. This is where much of the genuine intellectual innovation in AU/NZ PR is currently concentrated.

26. Ngaire Crawford

Ngaire Crawford is the Insights Director ANZ at Isentia, Australia and New Zealand's leading media intelligence company, and was a featured instructor in CPRA's PR Fundamentals Autumn School in 2025, where she spoke on AI and information, the most consequential technological challenge currently facing the PR profession.

Her work at Isentia places her at the intersection of PR measurement, media monitoring, and the AI-driven transformation of how organisations track and understand their communications impact. As Isentia processes and analyses media coverage across thousands of AU/NZ sources daily, Crawford's perspective on what media intelligence actually reveals about PR effectiveness is grounded in a volume and diversity of data that individual practitioners and agencies rarely see.

27. James Curtis

James Curtis is the Head of Consumer PR and Influence at Ogilvy PR ANZ, one of Australia's largest and most awarded PR agencies, and contributed a case study on media relations to the CPRA PR Fundamentals Autumn School in 2025. His work at the consumer PR and influence intersection reflects how the discipline has evolved beyond traditional media relations into an integrated practice encompassing content, influencer partnerships, and digital storytelling.

Ogilvy PR ANZ's work across consumer, corporate, and reputation communications gives Curtis a vantage point on the full range of PR practice at enterprise scale. The agency's consistent recognition at major awards programmes in Australia reflects the quality of the thinking being applied to some of the country's most complex communications challenges.

28. Peter Galmes

Peter Galmes is the Chief Creative Strategist at Herd MSL, one of Australia's major integrated communications agencies, and was featured as the CPRA PR Fundamentals social media case study instructor in 2025. His focus on the creative and strategic dimensions of communications across social media platforms reflects the direction in which PR is evolving: from a discipline centred on earned media placements to one that integrates earned, owned, and social channels into unified campaigns.

Herd MSL operates across corporate, consumer, and government communications, giving Galmes exposure to the full range of contexts in which creative communications strategy is applied. His contribution to CPRA's professional development programme reflects an educator-practitioner commitment to raising the quality of thinking across the next generation of communications professionals.

29. Clare Basire

Clare Basire is the Chief Growth Officer at Thrive PR + Communications, one of Australia and New Zealand's most successful independent public relations agencies, and a senior leader who has been with Thrive since 2017. In her executive leadership role, she oversees growth across the agency's global and local portfolios and has expanded her remit to include the Auckland office, reflecting the agency's ambitions on both sides of the Tasman.

Her public commentary on the future of PR consistently addresses the pressure facing communicators to deliver what Thrive calls Excess Earned Attention, the agency's proprietary framework for campaigns that break through a saturated media environment with measurable, lasting impact. Basire's elevation to the executive leadership team as Chief Growth Officer in 2023 was part of Thrive's structured investment in next-generation leadership that is shaping what Australian and New Zealand PR delivers to clients in 2025 and 2026.

30. Jennifer Leppington-Clark

Jennifer Leppington-Clark is a communications leader at Pead who has been one of the more active contributors to the agency's public blog on the digital transformation of public relations. Her writing in 2025 addresses the distinction between Magnet and Chaser digital content strategies, the importance of company tone of voice in an AI-saturated media environment, and why organisations without a digital communications plan alongside their traditional reputation strategy risk falling behind.

Her work represents the applied thinking that connects strategic PR counsel to the day-to-day digital execution challenges that communicators face in New Zealand's market. The Pead blog's commitment to substantive public commentary on the state of communications practice makes it one of the more valuable ongoing intellectual contributions from a New Zealand agency.

31. Sarah Rea

Sarah Rea is the CEO of Edelman Australia, leading the Australian operations of the world's largest public relations firm and one of the most influential research-driven communications organisations in the world. The Edelman Trust Barometer, produced annually and cited by practitioners, policymakers, and business leaders globally, is the single most consequential piece of PR research produced in the contemporary era.

Rea's leadership of the Australian operation places her at the intersection of global PR thinking and local market application. Edelman Australia works with major Australian corporations, government bodies, and not-for-profit organisations on reputation management, corporate communications, and public affairs campaigns that shape national conversations, giving her a perspective on the full complexity of the Australian communications environment.

32. Elissa Sweeney

Elissa Sweeney is a senior leader at Ogilvy PR ANZ, one of Australia's most awarded communications agencies, whose work across integrated PR, corporate communications, and brand storytelling reflects the evolution of the Australian PR industry toward campaigns that seamlessly span earned, owned, and paid media.

Ogilvy PR ANZ has received consistent recognition for excellence in consumer PR, corporate communications, and reputation management, and Sweeney's contribution to the agency's senior leadership reflects the depth of strategic talent operating at Australia's enterprise PR level. Her work embodies the kind of integrated communications thinking that is making the silos between PR, marketing, and digital increasingly difficult and unnecessary to maintain.

33. Denise Mackay FPRINZ (see Category 6, entry 22)

33. Nicole Reaney

Nicole Reaney is the Founder and Director of Imagegroup, a Sydney-based public relations and communications agency with a strong track record in consumer PR across lifestyle, beauty, health, and retail sectors. She brings more than two decades of PR and communications experience to her work, and is a regular media commentator on communications and public relations issues in Australian trade publications.

Her contribution to the profession includes her public advocacy for ethical, results-driven PR practice that prioritises genuine outcomes over vanity metrics. As a founder who has built a successful independent agency in a competitive market, her perspective on what sustains a PR business through market cycles and media disruption is grounded in the day-to-day reality of running communications strategy for clients who measure every dollar spent.

34. Kirsten Parrish

Kirsten Parrish is a senior principal at Priority Communications NZ, one of New Zealand's established strategic communications and public relations consultancies with decades of experience in corporate and government communications. Priority Communications brings award-winning expertise across public relations, communications, marketing, branding, and journalism, giving Parrish a grounding in the full scope of what professional communications practice demands.

Her contribution to the New Zealand PR conversation reflects a practitioner whose experience spans the full client cycle from narrative development through media relations to issues management, with a particular depth in the sectors that drive New Zealand's economy including agribusiness, tourism, and government-adjacent organisations. Her steady, senior-level contribution to the NZ market represents the kind of sustained professional commitment that the industry needs more of.

35. Jonno White

Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, keynote speaker, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out who works with organisations across Australia, New Zealand, and around the world on the leadership and communication challenges that sit beneath every public relations strategy. His work is not public relations practice in the traditional sense: it is the internal leadership development work that determines whether an organisation can actually deliver on its external communications commitments.

The gap between what organisations communicate externally and how they actually operate internally is the most persistent source of reputational risk in any sector, and it is the gap that Jonno White's work directly addresses. With 10,000-plus copies of Step Up or Step Out sold globally, 230-plus podcast episodes reaching listeners in 150-plus countries, and a 93.75 percent satisfaction rating at the ASBA 2025 National Conference, Jonno brings a practitioner's credibility to the most important question in communications: are your leaders actually capable of having the honest conversations your strategy requires? To work with Jonno, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Seven practitioners were seriously considered for this list but did not make the final 35. Virginia Haussegger, an Australian journalism and media figure, contributes powerfully to the communications landscape but primarily as a journalist and advocate rather than as a PR practitioner in the strict sense. Robin Raymond, who jointly received the Joseph Peart Award with Kate Barlow at the 2025 PRINZ Awards, is an impressive emerging practitioner who has not yet built a substantial body of public professional commentary. Kelly Slessor, a digital PR thought leader based in Australia, was considered but her focus has shifted more firmly toward personal branding and content strategy than core public relations practice.

Peter Wilkinson is included in this list but his broader advocacy work through the Alliance for Journalists' Freedom, which sits adjacent to PR practice, was a point of active discussion. Clare Basire was initially considered separately from Leilani Abels as a distinct Thrive voice but is included as the list's digital innovation representative given her focus on Excess Earned Attention frameworks. Isabelle Sullivan at Edelman ANZ was a strong consideration given her work on corporate reputation, but the list already has strong global agency representation through Sarah Rea. Paul Mottram, an Australian-heritage independent communications consultant and Executive Fellow of the World Economic Forum, was considered but is currently based in Hong Kong, making him ineligible for a regionally specific AU/NZ list.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The first and most persistent mistake is conflating visibility with credibility. Public relations is a field where self-promotion is both professionally understood and occasionally abused. The fact that someone publishes frequently, has a large following, or appears regularly at industry events does not automatically mean their thinking is original, rigorous, or applicable to your context. The most genuinely influential PR thinkers in Australia and New Zealand are often not the loudest voices in the room. The work of practitioners like Tony Jaques on issues management, or Denise Mackay on professional standards, rarely generates the same social media engagement as a hot take on the latest communications scandal, but it is doing far more to shape the profession's long-term health.

The second mistake is treating the AU/NZ PR conversation as a simple reflection of global trends originating in the US or UK. The Australian and New Zealand markets have distinct characteristics: different media environments, different regulatory frameworks, a very different relationship between government and the PR industry, unique cultural dynamics including the Maori and First Nations communications dimension in both countries, and a geographic isolation from European and North American markets that creates both challenges and advantages. The practitioners on this list are navigating these specifically local realities every day, and their thinking is genuine local intellectual contribution that the global profession should be paying more attention to.

The third mistake is engaging with PR thought leadership only during a crisis. The organisations that have the best crisis outcomes are those who have maintained ongoing relationships with the thinking in this field, built internal crisis preparedness frameworks before they needed them, and worked with practitioners like Peter Wilkinson, Tony Jaques, and Kirsten Bruce long before a crisis arrived. The value of following thought leaders in communications is not that they will tell you what to do when something goes wrong. It is that they will help you build the thinking, the frameworks, and the professional habits that give you the best possible chance of navigating complexity with integrity.

The fourth mistake is ignoring the measurement question. Australian and New Zealand PR still suffers from what global measurement bodies describe as an outputs over outcomes culture: counting media placements and impressions rather than measuring genuine reputation change, attitude shift, or behavioural outcome. The practitioners who are working to change this, Ngaire Crawford at Isentia through her AMEC-connected insights work, and the broader research community at CPRA, are doing some of the most consequential work in the field.

The fifth mistake is assuming that good public relations is primarily about media relations. The most sophisticated PR work in AU/NZ in 2025 and 2026 spans internal communications, government relations, community and stakeholder engagement, investor relations, crisis preparedness, purpose communications, and digital reputation management. Restricting your engagement to practitioners who specialise only in earned media means missing the majority of what the field actually does and the majority of the thinking that is genuinely advancing it.

Implementation Guide: Building Your AU/NZ PR Knowledge Network

The most effective approach to engaging with AU/NZ PR thought leadership in 2026 is to build a structured practice of deliberate consumption and connection rather than passive algorithmic content exposure. Begin by identifying the three or four practitioners on this list whose discipline is most directly relevant to your current communications challenge. If you are managing a corporate reputation in a highly regulated sector, start with Kirsten Bruce, Tony Jaques, and Genevieve Chunn. If you are building a technology brand from a challenger position, start with James Hutchinson and Craig Badings. If you are working in New Zealand and trying to understand the local market, start with Deborah Pead and Fleur Revell-Devlin.

Follow these practitioners on LinkedIn, where the majority of them are most consistently active and where their thinking reaches a professional audience in real time. Engage genuinely with their content. The AU/NZ PR community is small enough that thoughtful, substantive comments on LinkedIn are noticed and reciprocated in ways that would not happen in larger markets. This engagement creates genuine professional relationships that have more value than passive content consumption.

Engage with the professional associations that these practitioners contribute to. CPRA offers training, events, and community that give practitioners and communications directors access to the thinking on this list in live, interactive formats. PRINZ provides the New Zealand equivalent. Both have programmes in 2025 and 2026 designed specifically to elevate the quality of thinking across the profession. The AMEC measurement standards provide a framework for moving from anecdotal claims about PR effectiveness to rigorous evaluation of genuine outcome.

Consider building deliberate relationships with two or three practitioners whose thinking you most want to engage with. In both Australia and New Zealand, the senior practitioners on this list are accessible in ways that senior practitioners in larger markets are not. They speak at relatively small conferences, participate in industry events that remain human-scale, and engage with people who approach them seriously and specifically. The return on a genuine professional relationship in this community is disproportionate to the investment required to initiate it.

Jonno White works with leadership teams to build the internal communication culture that determines whether external communications strategy ever has a foundation to stand on. If your team is facing the honest question of whether your leaders communicate with the clarity, courage, and consistency that your external PR strategy requires, email jonno@consultclarity.org. Many organisations find that flying Jonno in costs far less than they expect, and the impact on team communication culture is immediate.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a PR thought leader and a successful PR practitioner?

A successful PR practitioner is someone who delivers excellent communications outcomes for their clients. A thought leader is someone whose ideas about how PR should be done have genuinely influenced how other practitioners think and work. The clearest indicator is whether a practitioner's frameworks, arguments, or research are cited or adopted by others in the field without prompting. Many excellent practitioners are not thought leaders in this sense, and a small number of influential thought leaders are primarily academic or analytical voices with limited direct client work.

How was this list compiled, and what criteria were applied?

The list was developed through research across CPRA Golden Target Award records, PRINZ fellowship rosters and award programmes, PRovoke Media's Asia-Pacific agency rankings, Mumbrella CommsCon results, and extensive review of active professional contributions in both countries. Candidates were assessed on formal credentials in the communications field, geographic diversity between Australia and New Zealand, disciplinary diversity across agency, in-house, academic, and association roles, genuine contribution to how the field has evolved, and active professional participation in 2025 and 2026. The final selection spans every major Australian state and both islands of New Zealand.

How do I follow and engage with the people on this list?

LinkedIn is the most productive platform for most of the practitioners here, where they are most consistently active and where engagement from other professionals is most valued. Follow each person directly. For deeper engagement, several practitioners contribute to agency blogs and industry publications: the Pead blog, Adoni Media's blog, CPRA's LinkedIn company page, and PRovoke Media's coverage of the Australian market are all worth bookmarking. CPRA and PRINZ events provide the best opportunities for in-person connection.

Is the AU/NZ PR industry significantly different from global PR practice?

Yes, in ways that matter. The Australian and New Zealand media environments differ meaningfully from those in the US, UK, and Europe: the media markets are smaller, the reach of major broadcasters and newspapers covers a higher proportion of the total population, and the relationship between PR agencies and media organisations is shaped by geographic and cultural proximity that does not exist in larger markets. The cultural dimension of communications is shaped by Australia's Indigenous communities and New Zealand's te Tiriti o Waitangi partnership obligations in ways that have no equivalent elsewhere.

Can I hire someone to facilitate PR strategy or leadership communications workshops for my team?

Yes. Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, listeners in 150+ countries), who works with leadership teams across Australia, New Zealand, and around the world on the communication challenges that sit beneath public relations strategy. He works with organisations in industries including education, healthcare, financial services, corporate, and not-for-profit. To book Jonno for your next leadership workshop, offsite, or communications culture session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

What is the biggest threat to the AU/NZ PR profession in 2026?

The clearest and most consequential threat is the combination of AI-generated content at scale and the erosion of institutional trust. AI makes it possible to produce communications content at a volume and speed that was previously impossible, and much of that content is low-quality, undifferentiated, and indistinguishable from human-written material to most audiences. The practitioners responding most effectively to this challenge are those like Fleur Revell-Devlin who are making the case for truth architecture over persuasion technology, and those like Ngaire Crawford who are building better measurement systems that can distinguish genuine reputation outcomes from inflated media noise.

Final Thoughts

The 35 practitioners profiled here are doing some of the most consequential professional work in Australia and New Zealand. They are navigating a communications environment that has never been more complex, managing a trust deficit that touches every institution their clients lead, and making the intellectual and practical case for a discipline that matters more than most people outside the field understand.

The best of them are not simply communications technicians. They are strategic counsellors helping organisations close the gap between what they say and what they actually do, which is ultimately the only communications strategy that survives contact with a sceptical audience. In an era of collapsing trust, the organisations that invest in genuine, honest, strategic communication will outperform those that do not. The practitioners on this list know this and are working to make it true.

If your leadership team is ready to have the conversations that sit behind great communications strategy, on culture, on accountability, on the courage to communicate honestly under pressure, Jonno White works with teams across Australia, New Zealand, and around the world to help them do exactly that. His book Step Up or Step Out offers a framework for the difficult conversations that leaders in every sector are avoiding.

Step Up or Step Out — available on Amazon

To discuss how Jonno can help your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 35 Essential Thought Leaders on Public Relations Globally

Public relations in 2026 is a discipline that shapes how institutions earn trust, how organisations navigate crises that unfold in real time across dozens of platforms, how leaders communicate through complexity and uncertainty, and how the gap between what a brand says and what it actually does either closes or widens. The global PR services market is projected to exceed USD $129 billion by 2026, and the Edelman Trust Barometer has documented for over two decades that trust is now the most consequential currency in business, government, and society.

Keep reading: consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-public-relations-globally