About

Hello, I'm Emi.

I'm an experienced operational leader who bridges grassroots community impact and parliamentary influence, focused on driving better outcomes that are responsive to our community's needs.

I founded the Carnelian Foundation because when I was younger I needed something that didn't exist yet. I sit on the National Council for Women Queensland because women's economic independence isn't an abstract policy goal to me, it's personal. I give my time to Lions and Rotary because community is built in backyards, through working bees, sausage sizzles, one small act of showing up at a time, of genuinely caring for each other. Through Foundations for Tomorrow I am leading a new way for everyday Australians to have their say. And through the Children's Council, I get to help our littlest people find their own voice, long before anyone tells them they're allowed to have one.

I'm a mum, a wife, a friend and a community member to my core. I care deeply about what works and try to fix what doesn't.

Whether I'm in Parliament or sitting with a family the system has already failed, the work is the same: staying close enough to a community to know what it actually needs, and staying serious enough about policy to go and change it.

Emi

In my words

How I think about my work

Every child who struggles does so inside a system. Family is part of that system. So is school, community, institution, policy, and governance. Each layer shapes what is possible for the people inside it, and each carries responsibility for its part.

When one layer fails, the cost rarely stays there.

I have spent my career trying to understand where those failures begin, and what it takes to interrupt them. What I keep finding is that the roots run further back, and further up, than most interventions are designed to reach. The child in front of you is real and urgent. So is the policy that shaped the conditions she was born into. Both deserve a serious response.

This is how I think about my work.

Fairness is not only the absence of harm. It is the active maintenance of the conditions in which people can flourish: the institutions, relationships, and social infrastructure that make a decent life possible. And those conditions are not self-sustaining. They are built by one generation and handed to the next. That handover is not automatic. It requires intention, investment, and governance that takes the long view.

Each generation carries that responsibility. I take mine seriously.

In practice, this means working across two fronts that most people treat as separate. One is direct: being present with children and families when the system has already failed and someone needs to be in their corner. The other is structural: being in the rooms where policy is written and governance is designed, asking whether the decisions made today will still be serving people in twenty years.

These are not different problems. They are the same problem, seen from different distances.

Designing civic processes that actually include people, supporting women's economic independence, building scholarship programs for young people who were never meant to need them, teaching civic skills, reforming governance to account for future generations. These are different entry points into one interconnected challenge.

The work I do sits at that nexus. Not because it is the tidiest place to stand, but because it is the only place from which the whole picture stays visible.

What I believe