Tory Shepherd
Tory Shepherd is a senior journalist at Guardian Australia whose reporting sits at the intersection of health, technology and social policy, with a consistent focus on how regulation and ideology affect people’s lives. She brings long experience in political and opinion journalism to coverage that links complex policy decisions to everyday consequences for patients, carers and communities. Her work combines reported features, explainers and analysis that track how institutions respond to emerging risks in health, technology and culture.
Health systems, ageing and care
Shepherd regularly examines how health systems cope with new pressures, from infectious disease outbreaks to demographic change. In coverage of bird flu in poultry operations, she looks beyond the outbreak itself to consider containment measures, economic disruption and biosecurity responsibilities.
Her reporting on AI, technology and robotics in aged care explores whether new tools actually improve the lives of older people and the staff who care for them, rather than treating technology as a simple fix. She has written about the lack of straightforward surrogacy options for families desperate to have children, highlighting legal, ethical and logistical barriers in cross-border reproductive care.
Across these pieces she treats health not just as clinical medicine but as a system shaped by policy, workforce realities and social expectations.
Technology, AI and critical infrastructure
A recurring strand in Shepherd’s work is the impact of artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure on safety, accountability and public services.
She has covered deepfake scams using the likeness of political leaders to trick people out of significant sums of money, tracing how fraudsters exploit trust in familiar figures and gaps in consumer protection. In reporting on AI agents that cause harm, she examines who is legally responsible when autonomous systems go wrong, bringing together expert views on liability, regulation and emerging legal theory. Her coverage of how emergency services would cope if satellites failed looks at practical contingency plans, from old-fashioned navigation to backup communication systems, and what that reveals about dependence on global infrastructure.
Even when the focus is not strictly clinical, these stories sit close to health and safety, asking how technical decisions and opaque systems expose people to new kinds of risk.
Religion, social media and antisemitism
Shepherd frequently reports on the collision of religion, identity politics and the regulation of online speech. In a piece on Barnaby Joyce’s claim that the country is a “Christian nation”, she unpacks how political actors use religious identity in contemporary debates, including the perspectives of First Nations people invoked in the argument. She has written on survey research suggesting that the country would no longer appear majority religious if the census question were phrased differently, using that finding to explore how official data collection shapes narratives about belief and secularisation.
Her coverage of antisemitism commissions and related hearings follows testimony from regulators, politicians and targets of abuse, including Georgie Purcell’s experience of antisemitic and misogynistic attacks linked to her partner’s background.
In articles on social media companies reducing certain types of “censorship” and the monetisation of “gore and fringe content”, she scrutinises platform decisions that can enable antisemitic and other harmful material to spread, connecting moderation policies to real-world harms. This strand of her work shows an interest in how belief, bigotry and corporate governance interact.
Politics, gender and inequality
Shepherd’s long track record in political reporting underpins her approach to health and social issues.
Professional biographies describe her as a senior journalist at the Guardian with prior roles including opinion writing, political editing and state editing at a major metropolitan newspaper. She has written for multiple outlets, including political and current affairs publications and lifestyle magazines, as well as hosting podcasts and appearing regularly on radio and television. In a widely cited article on the gender pay gap and Scott Morrison’s understanding of it, she uses political reporting tools to interrogate rhetoric about equality against economic data and workplace realities. She is also credited as a Walkley Awards judge and a Churchill Fellow, and as the author of a book on freedom and motherhood, signalling sustained engagement with questions of autonomy, policy and how personal choices are constrained or enabled by institutions.
These experiences inform a style of coverage that treats health, technology and social policy as inherently political, with close attention to power, ideology and inequality.
Across beats, Shepherd’s work is distinguished by its focus on systems and accountability rather than isolated events. Whether reporting on AI in aged care, reproductive options for families, deepfake scams or antisemitism fuelled by social media, she follows the chain from individual stories to the rules, companies and governments that shape those outcomes.
Her articles tend to foreground expert voices and affected individuals, combining policy detail with accessible explanations that make complex health and technology issues legible to a wide audience.
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