Kirra Pendergast
Founder of Safe on Social and Ctrl+Shft and Co-Founder of ReWildingAI
Kirra Pendergast is a global digital risk strategist, keynote speaker, advisor and writer, trusted by governments, schools, and businesses around the world to lead when digital risk becomes operational risk. She doesn’t deliver awareness. She designs readiness. Her work builds the capability of systems and the capacity of leaders, translating complex cyber frameworks into human-first safety, where people — not platforms — come first.
She’s spent more than three decades on the frontline of digital transformation, behavioural risk, and governance. Her career began in 1991, just before the internet went widespread. Shortly after, Kirra was designing the architecture of trust. She worked in national security, critical infrastructure, and cyber governance, holding director-level roles with global firms including Verisign, Capgemini, and the Microsoft–Accenture joint venture, Avanade. She led identity and access management programs that protected hundreds of thousands of public sector employees, helped design post-9/11 digital counter-terrorism reforms, and by 2008, was formally advising at Premier level in Queensland.
But she never lost sight of the humans inside the systems. She saw the cracks forming before the headlines did and the drift between policy and practice, the widening gap between legislative intent and digital reality.
Her frameworks are used across sectors and continents. Human Digital Risk Intelligence maps how power, pressure, shame, vulnerability and status show up online in real school cultures and organisations. Online Impact Economics reveals the true cost of digital decisions on wellbeing, learning, time, trust, legal exposure, and reputation. Together, they offer leaders something they’ve rarely had: a practical way to align technology, policy and leadership before harm escalates, not after.
Kirra’s expertise is called on at the highest levels in crisis briefings, Senate inquiries, leadership forums, and school assemblies. She has contributed to national legislation, advised on regulatory reform, helped rewrite educational frameworks, and worked with over 1,200 organisations across five continents. Her programs reach millions annually. Her voice is one of the clearest on the systems failure behind online harm. Her approach is hands-on, strategic, and deeply human.
She is based between her offices in Florence, Sydney, and London.
Madeleine West
Lead Student Educator at Safe on Social, Partner Ctrl+Shft and Co-Founder of ReWildingAI
Madeleine West is a Mother of seven (yes you read the right) a nationally recognised actor, author, advocate and predation specialist, trusted by schools, media, law enforcement, and government to speak when others cannot, and act when others won’t. She doesn’t raise awareness. She dismantles silence.
From childhood abuse to courtroom justice, from early fame to frontline advocacy, Madeleine has lived through the systems she now works to reform. Her work moves between stages and Senate inquiries, podcast studios and school halls, building the capacity of communities to understand how predatory behaviour begins, how it escalates online, and how it can be stopped.
She draws on twenty years of deep research, lived experience, and front-facing work with children and survivors to reframe online harm as a public health issue, not a private shame — and uses this lens to lead national conversations around prevention, policy reform, and survivor justice.
Through her podcast Predatory, her work as the Co-Founder of ReWildingAI and with Safe on Social and CTRL+SHFT, and her advisory roles across law enforcement and social services, she helps expose how modern technology enables ancient crimes, and how we can outpace them by building systems that centre children, not convenience.
Her frameworks around predation, grooming red flags, and digital access risk are used by teachers, therapists, journalists, police, and parents to safeguard children online and off. She has advised the Coalition and AFP on sex offender legislation, worked undercover to help secure predator convictions, and helped shape national policy on superannuation loopholes that allow abusers to hide assets from victims.
She is also a celebrated performer, known for more than sixty major screen roles over three decades, including Neighbours, Underbelly, The Wrong Girl, and Playing for Keeps. Her voice remains a powerful through line in Australian cultural life, not only for the characters she plays, but the truths she tells.
Whether in a rainforest, a women’s shelter, a courtroom, or a classroom, Madeleine’s work remains guided by one principle: we protect what we love, and we fight for what we believe we deserve.