19/10/2026
Dr Jo Newton got her OAM shortly after turning 31, and her first reaction wasn't pride. It was discomfort.
On this episode of Purpose: Leading into the Future, Vicki O'Halloran talks with Dr Jo Newton OAM, an agricultural scientist and advocate for young people in agriculture who's spent her career pushing research out of journals and into farmers' hands.
Her real argument cuts against how most of us talk about young people at work. We call them "future leaders", a phrase that sounds encouraging but actually defers their contribution to some later date. Jo's question is sharper: what if they're already leading, and it's our institutions that aren't ready to recognise it?
Here's the test she uses, and it works for any leader managing across generations: are you treating experience as the only legitimate form of knowledge? And when someone younger contributes something genuinely new, a different tool, a different assumption, a different way of seeing an old problem; do you actually change course, or just say thank you and continue as planned?
→ Visibility isn't symbolic. Jo says a single guest lecture from a female geneticist changed her career path because you can't become what you've never seen someone else be.
→ Combining generations beats replacing one with another. Jo brought digital skills to committees with decades of accumulated judgement, neither side had a monopoly on insight.
→ Waiting until retirement to recognise contribution means missing the years it actually matters. Jo's own words: "We shouldn't wait till people are retired to celebrate those achievements."
From leadership as something young people grow into eventually → to leadership as something institutions make room for now.
Where has your organisation asked young people to "step up" without actually making room for what they bring?
🎧 Full reflection piece + the episode linked in the comments.
The Order of Australia Association
