Politics and Law

In Week 4, our Year 11 Politics and Law students were treated to a visit by Keegan Burke who is the Communications Officer for Matt Keogh, the federal Labor member for Burt and Minister for Veteran’s Affairs.

Keegan was educated at Lesmurdie Senior High School and completed a film degree before working as a social media manager for the City of Kalamunda.  In 2020, the local member for the state seat of Kalamunda proposed some funding for a particular project and as Keegan thought the project was a good idea, he decided to volunteer to help that member get elected. The member won the election and Keegan got a job, so he started doing media communications for Labor politicians such as Stephen Price, Tania Lawrence, Sam Lim and Matt Keogh.

In his present role, he describes himself as a 'gun for hire'. He will often go to Canberra when parliament is sitting and works for Matt Keogh, but not the ministerial portfolio. He helps when people are struggling, shores up safe seats and represents Matt Keogh on the ground, working with the community in the electorate of Burt, which includes the suburbs of Armadale and Gosnells.

Keegan emphasised how different Western Australia is to other states and WA experiences issues that are not experienced nationally.   He gave a number of examples with different bills and issues where WA’s perspective needed to be taken into account by federal ministers.

Keegan shared his experiences of working for a member whilst they were in Opposition and now in government. He stressed how much he enjoyed the job, and whilst it was hard work and competitive, it was also rewarding. There is a constant engagement with people and he found it energising. In just the last year, he’s spoken to over four and half thousand people and that only reflects a small portion of the electorate. He said he has learnt a lot about how people think, that people can be hyper-aggressive or very nice and he enjoys having interesting political debates with 'random punters'.

Keegan gave us an insight into the workings of parliament and some of the key politicians the present Labor government has to work with to enable their bills to pass. He also gave us an overview of some of the issues affecting past and present bills.

His role also includes designing policy, ensuring it’s targeted. He emphasised it’s not about buying votes, that it’s about serving the people that gets the votes. Keegan outlined that voters are complex people and generally vote for a myriad of reasons. He stressed it’s super important to have hard discussions with people on issues you care about and that people are more than happy to change their minds if spoken to nicely.

He certainly encouraged students to think about joining a political party if they want to enact change as it is the members who vote on policies. He emphasised that politics is an action, it’s 'an engagement in voter multiplication'.

We’d like to thank Keegan on highlighting to students how their knowledge and understandings learnt in Politics and Law has real-life application and can open up career opportunities that are completely unpredictable.

Melinda Davies
Politics and Law Teacher