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Lucy Hamilton is Melbourne born and based. She studied humanities at Melbourne and Monash universities, until family duties killed her PhD project. She is immersed in studying the global democratic recession.

Illiberalism: the Dunkley by-election and the cost of doing business

The liberal international order has been responsible for a great many deaths. If the “anti-liberal internationale” becomes ascendant, however, we will see those numbers multiplied exponentially. It is not a stretch to say that the Liberal Party’s campaign in the Dunkley by-election places them firmly in the illiberal category. This is hardly surprising since several Liberal Party grandees and other strategists are firmly ensconced in the Hungarian President Viktor Orbán’s propaganda network, and he is the leader of that illiberal faction.

In December 2023, Donald Trump said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” It echoes similar sentiments from the illiberal leader of the aspiring autocrats, Viktor Orbán: “We [Hungarians] are not a mixed race … and we do not want to become a mixed race.” The eugenicist messaging is reminiscent of the Third Reich, and Hitler used the metaphor of outsiders poisoning the nation’s blood in Mein Kampf. Orban has visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago this week as though the latter was running a parallel illiberal state.

The ideology that links the anti-liberal internationale can be defined as “traditionalism.” There is a philosophical version that inspires many of the leading actors and the White supremacist militants. The populist version creates a mythical past where a virtuous ethnostate functioned in unity and purpose. It is patriarchal: women knew their subordinate place, submissively breeding for the family and the nation. There is no room for Queer people in a world where the superior ethnic group must reproduce for national strength. There is little room for aberrant women who won’t be domesticated. And there must be no room for women breeding with men who aren’t of the privileged race.

The messaging deployed in Dunkley falls into this category. The Liberal Party’s leaders had chosen to dwell on borders and the dormant story of the High Court’s release of people indefinitely detained. Advance, an Atlas Networkconnected body, that exists to foster community discord thus helping the Coalition return to government on the wave of grievance voting had paid to have lurid advertisements published on the issue (relishing its cashed up status including payments for “working” for its charity-statusaffiliate).

Surprisingly, two days before the by-election, Victoria Police made a mistake by publicising the arrest on sexual assault charges of one of that category of detainee before, some hours later, admitting that they had mistaken his identity.

The Liberal leadership pounced on this timely error by Victoria Police and spent the hours and days following sensationalising the mistaken arrest and the threat to women in the electorate. Some of the wording demands the label fascistic politicking.

The Liberal Party and Advance did not succeed this time, even with the convenient mistake made by Victoria Police. The goal of the Atlas Network and philosophical Traditionalists has been the slow destruction of the modern, diverse, democratic project. The goal of the more extreme traditionalists has been Accelerationist. This demands shoving crowbars into the cracks in the democratic project and propelling it towards immediate destruction. The damage done in any one campaign must not be assessed on its own merits but in the steps taken to imminent or longterm collapse.

The Atlas Network’s goal has been to damage civil society around the world to make welcome ground for (American) corporations. Some of the donors and strategists see deploying anti-immigrant and anti-refugee messaging as a useful distraction from the ultra-free market goals. Promoting the hatred of Queer people, ensuring they are bashed or murdered or driven to suicide, is a small price to pay for people who think pay-outs to the families of the dead are cheaper than maintenance work on expensive infrastructure, the “cost of doing business.”

Other donors and strategists are firmly in the traditionalism sphere where they despise “woke.” For them this denotes societies that are inclusive of “race” and race-mixing, sexuality and gender diversity. The “unity” of their nostalgic imagined past is fractured by liberal tolerance of difference. This is central to Vladimir Putin and his ally Orban. It is Trump MAGA and, apparently, the Coalition’s Australia.

For these traditionalists, there is a “visceral disgust” felt at bodies that defy their straitjacketed definitions of acceptable. Queer and Brown people or non-feminine women, even the fat, are disgusting. And their bigotry-infused morality allows them to confuse that feeling of disgust for a “moral abhorrence” of the target.

The Liberal Party and Atlas-connected Advance both needed the imaginary crime of the refugee to be sexual in nature because the safety and purity of White women is one of their primary weapons against the rest of us.

Traditionalism is also entrenched in an early 2000s clash of civilisations where the “Muslim world” replaced the “Iron Curtain” as the implacable foe. Any implied Muslim (which includes Christian Palestinians as well as refugees) is utterly disposable in the existential battle they wage in their crusade.

Thus Israel’s “Jewish Nationalists” and India’s Hindutva are allies against the selected “Muslim enemy.” China is characterised as a global threat, so sometimes these figures care for the Uighur population suffering ethnic cleansing by China, but they are just as likely to share China’s characterisation of (Muslim) resistance to oppression as “terror.”

Benjamin Netanyahu and Putin are both eagerly awaiting Trump’s reinstatement, indeed probably shaping their own military goals to help him win in November. If Trump wins, these ethnic cleansers will be even freer to kill the inconvenient populations on the land they want for their empires.

Meanwhile, for free market devotees, the chaos will elicit plentiful disaster capitalism windfalls. And traditionalism’s disdain for empirical knowledge has been their friend in fighting climate science. Trump will roll back Biden’s crucial transition bill and free the illiberal petrostates from the despised limping towards some kind of international consensus on climate action.

When Liberal Party figures play Orbanist games to win by-elections, they further their last decade’s efforts to push Australia’s democratic project towards illiberalism.

All the people harmed – or killed – in the process are just the cost of doing business.

 

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations as Illiberalism ascendant: the Dunkley by-election and the cost of doing business

 

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Traditionalism: the belief that could doom us all

It can be difficult to understand what connects free market devotees, white ethnostate militants, Christian Nationalists, tech bros and mere conservatives in the West. One concept that can help understand their rough alliance is traditionalism. In fact it draws together an international contingent that shares goals and enemies, shaping domestic and foreign policy against the interests of the majority.

The international rise of traditionalism became a quantum leap more obvious over recent weeks. Between calls for televised executions sponsored by Coke, the welcoming of the end of democracy, the beginning of the doom of American IVF and rampant Islamophobia in Britain, the eruptions are becoming louder. This week prospective US President Trump is welcoming the leader of Europe’s traditionalist illiberal movement, Viktor Orbán, at Mar-a-Lago.

Adherents of the esoteric heights of philosophical Traditionalism believe that we live in the depraved Age of Slaves – democracy – that must reach its destruction. Our current Kali Yuga, dark age, will be followed by a rebirth into the golden age, the theocratic Age of Priests, in this cyclical rhythm. It is a spiritual belief that demands hierarchy, order and an end to every poison that comes from the Modern age: reason, freedom, equality, progress. These ideas are inspired by the writings of René Guénon and Julius Evola.

Two of the most influential adherents are Steve Bannon, formerly Donald Trump’s first Chief Strategist, and Vladimir Putin’s alleged intellectual inspiration, Aleksandr Dugin. Benjamin Teitelbaum’s hours of interviews with Bannon, and other key figures in the global Right, on the subject are fascinating.

They are radicalising figures. West-loathing Dugin, for example, earned a number of travel bans by calling for genocide in Ukraine in 2014, to rid that valuable land of the “race of bastards.” He helped create in Russia “an atmosphere in which violent internal repression and armed foreign aggression seem natural.” For Dugin, and Putin, a Russian empire will lead this new age. Bannon proclaimed in 2013 that he wanted to destroy the American state and “bring everything crashing down.” Now Bannon runs his media campaign, which is understood to be a significant force on the MAGA+ Right, and plots to reignite his dream to unite Europe into a Traditionalist force. Bannon boasted of his time spent planning with Dugin.

Julius Evola, who shaped the key tenets of Guénon’s writing into its current form, is a pivotal figure feeding into libertarian apocalypticism amongst the tech bros and neo fascists of the internet, disseminated outwards from being the guide of self-styled intellectual fascists. Manosphere podcaster Joe Rogan and former-Murdoch darling Tucker Carlson have both amplified his ideas. These concepts infuse the ideology promoted by the neoreactionary inspiration of the tech magnates, and “leading intellectual figure on the New Right,” Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin shares the fascists’ goal to speed up the destruction of the Kali Yuga in Accelerationism. He schemes for the destruction of the government (and other liberal institutions such as academia, known collectively as the Cathedral) to be replaced by a monarchy. His essays were mainstreamed to the New Right by the Claremont Institute, an Atlas Network partner. Yarvin’s plan to unmake the government is now set out in clear steps by the Atlas-partner Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership. It is hardly surprising that the billionaire owners of the platforms of civil discourse are investing in potential boltholes in New Zealand, Hawaii and are shooting for Mars.

The popular version of traditionalism, by contrast with this “philosophical” version, appears a nostalgia for a past that never existed. Instead its proponents create a past whitened of sin and pain which narrative they mandate as the only truth. This traditionalism is a site of rampant hypocrisy: a cavalcade of adulterers pontificate about the sacredness of the family and the sinfulness of the diverse modern world. It is a mechanism for control, deployed by people who resent the power they’ve been forced to share with communities they despise. While some only wish to recreate that past, with no care for how differently others experienced the White men’s better days, for others the intentions are extreme.

Populist traditionalism ties together the bigotries against shared enemies of the international Right. Unlike the spiritual racism of the esoterics (handily borrowing Aryan ideals that lighter skin means higher caste and more priestly), this version is overtly biologically and essentially racist. While China is a primary international target of the movement, the most violent bigotry is directed at Muslims, denoted as Brown, and whose lives, according to the Right, are clearly worthless. This aspect of traditionalism unites the currently acceptable Hindu nationalists with the currently acceptable Israeli Jewish nationalists.

Thus in Britain, the Conservative Party Whip lost his role over vile Islamophobic comments. Much of the longterm Tory Islamophobia is spelt out by politicians of ministerial seniority, often from immigrant origins themselves. India and Israel have deep political connections, to a substantial extent united by Islamophobia. Former Secretary of State for the Home Department Suella Braverman depicted ceasefire rallies, calling for an end to the slaughter of innocents in Palestine, as “hate marches.” Any support for human rights by a multicultural array of Britons – White and Black, Jewish bloc, and Muslim Brits – is thus depicted as a violent Muslim insurgency and a sign that they are not fit to live in Britain.

This fits with recent investigations into Paul Marshall, the hedge-fund multi-millionaire, and the beliefs implied by his Twitter (X) activity. Marshall has retweeted calls for a range of Islamophobic arguments including the mass deportation of immigrants. Marshall is a major funder of GB News (Britain’s equivalent to US Fox News or Sky Australia), UnHerd, and has put in a bid to buy The Telegraph, the preeminent “conservative” paper in Britain. He is also one of the founding supporters of the Atlas-linked Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, funding its global anti-climate action agenda and its mission to impose traditionalist values.

In America, Donald Trump is also calling for mass deportation of immigrants. Steve Bannon predicted that these would encompass at least 14 million people. Logistics suggest this scale would be impossible, but the targeting of Brown Americans and residents will be ghastly. Trump’s “top immigration adviser,” Stephen Miller authored the plan to take children – even babies from their mothers’ arms – because crossing the border to apply for asylum made their parents “criminals,” based on his White supremacist beliefs. He is now strategising to assemble an ad hoc army for a military operation that will seize people in mass raids across the country, place them in concentration camps, then apparently deport them in multiple flights each day, overriding all their rights. He intends Republican state armies to invade resistant Democrat states. This sounds like civil war.

Esoteric Traditionalism demands patriarchy. Populist traditionalism unites American Christian Nationalists with the range of MAGA Trumpists in their determination to enforce the nuclear family as the central unit of order. They intend to control people’s sexuality. LGBTQIA+ sexuality and identities are to be eliminated; people who won’t be “cured” will be killed. Women are to be constrained to the home and subordination to a husband. The demarcation of IVF as a current target denotes both that there will be no reproduction without God, and also that birth control is the next target. Already figures are arguing that birth control harms women physically and socially. Life beginning at conception eliminates several key methods of contraception as the start of the new battle that will join abortion-elimination in the battle to deny all reproductive rights. The Right also has begun fighting no-fault divorce (despite the fact that there was as much as a 16% reduction in female suicide after states introduced no-fault divorce). It is not just the belief that women must be returned to their place that drives these measures: this Western Right also promotes natalism – the idea that White women must breed to prevent “race suicide.”

The recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland was a hotbed of traditionalist radicalisation of the Trumpist base. Trump also declared himself ready to claim “ultimate and absolute revenge” on his opponents. Jack Posobiec is a conspiracist and Lincoln Fellow at the formerly prestigious Atlas Network-partner, the Claremont Institute. He claimed, in typical trolling rightwing spirit that his comments were satirical, but this is the way the movement has long mainstreamed ideas. He said: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely.” Typical of a number of speakers at the event, he promoted the attempt to overturn the last election: “We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.” It is hardly surprising that this iteration of the event allowed open Neo Nazis to spruik antisemitic propaganda: there is considerable overlap in the projects now.

Another key Trump-supporter, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, has illustrated how biological racism is core to the new Right with even the Republican Party’s bowdlerised vision of Martin Luther King Jr to be abandoned. This deployment of MLK to appeal to Black voters has been superseded by the depiction of Black people as essentially inferior and a threat. Kirk also argued, in a dog-whistling display that his listeners know refers to Black people, that executions should be shown on television and children made to watch. He joked that Coke should sponsor that exhibition.

Steve Bannon spoke with Tucker Carlson late in 2023 promoting the Great Replacement conspiracy. Both men evoked a White-race-hating “elite” replacing uncontrollable White populations with manageable non-White immigrants. Bannon praised Viktor Orban as the “political and … public intellectual leader of this.” Carlson has interviewed and praised both Orbán and Putin for his radicalised audience, displaying both electoral authoritarian regimes as models. Putin has been described as a neo-Stalinist dictator, so supporting his more violent measures can inflict costs on the less ostentatious Right. Orbán, leaning towards subtle authoritarianism is a lower-cost role model. Orbán has much to gain from Republicans’ strategic support of Putin’s military goals, and a longterm observer of the authoritarian-admiring Right believes Republicans aim to leave eastern and maybe central Europe for Putin to take. It is debatable whether racism or “family values” bigotry is a stronger driving force in the Putin and Orban traditionalist sphere. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat argued in her study of authoritarians that the “big continuity and constant is homophobia…even more than race.” Viktor Orbán’s prioritising of the “traditional family” and targeting of LGBTQIA people certainly makes him a hero on this Right. Traditionalism ultimately embraces both forms of prejudice as required.

Several Australian Liberal Party grandees and apparatchiks are integrated into the Orbán traditionalist propaganda campaign. Tony Abbott decried “immigrants swarming across the borders in Europe.” Alexander Downer disdained immigrant “bantustans.” Both seem fixed in the “Clash of Civilisations” mentality that characterised the 9/11 aftermath. Kevin Andrews complained that “[p]opular ideas and current lifestyle choices militate against the acceptance of appropriate policy responses” to a purported birthrate crisis. This natalist position allows no scope for lives that don’t promote breeding within sacred marriage. Last year Downer spoke at another Orbán event, criticising the Left’s “divisiveness” caused by “identity politics.” Thus the traditionalists delegitimise voices that experience life differently: we would be united if the rest would only accept straight, White, “Christian” men’s experience as the only reality. News Corp’s Greg Sheridan criticised the “green madness” which is the “new religion” taught in schools, signalling the fossil fuel agenda entwined with this ideology. It’s likely these Australians’ traditionalism is populist (as one imagines is the traditionalism of Orbán and Putin); it remains to be seen whether any esoteric Traditionalists number amongst them. Regardless, they too despise the democratic project that allows freedom to their “woke” enemies.

Opinion-writers are trying to suggest that democracy is more resilient than our worst fears have portended. As Protect Democracy senior lawyers pointed out recently, however, the USA played its Get out of Jail card when Biden was finally named Trump’s replacement on the night of the 6th. It is valuable to understand this illiberal movement as a process of “competitive authoritarianism,” where the democratic project is hollowed out until the incumbent can no longer be ousted, as appears to be the achievement for Orban. The election itself remains but it is increasingly meaningless. Where our democratic projects worked for so many years to extend the franchise to men without property, to women, to non-White people, now the efforts work to reverse the goals as these traditionalists aim to entrench themselves as the new aristocrats. In Australia, Tony Abbott tried to resuscitate knights and dames. In Britain, departing Prime Ministers install Atlas Network figures into the House of Lords to shape the country more directly. In the US, notable figures have begun to echo radical Right talking points that women should not have the vote; working people have long struggled to vote there with elections held on weekdays, and fewer booths in poorer districts. Anti-majoritarian mechanisms pervade their system. Republicans now speciously boast that the USA was never a democracy as part of the efforts to kill such flawed representation as they allow.

Nostalgia for a mythic past pervades internationally-connected, far-right movements and it is closely allied to the neoliberal project. The Atlas Network is the primary driver of the neoliberal alliance globally. Its forces have been integrated into the populist-nativist Right in Europe, and they are now driving the American democratic project further towards authoritarianism. The forces allied around the Atlas Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 for a new Republican president are formidable and far more organised than Trump’s team was in 2017 when they carried out two-thirds of Heritage’s previous Mandate for Leadership. Project 2025’s Advisory Board combines many Atlas partner bodies with a range of the Christian Nationalist organisations that make up the Council for National Policy (CNP). The new Mandate lists many oppressive social policies intended to be carried out by a President functioning mostly by executive action, overriding a devastated federal workforce where 50,000 are to be sacked. (Ron DeSantis’s vow to start “slitting throats” of federal workers in August was echoed by a Trump supporter beheading his federal-employee father and broadcasting the head on social media in a “Call to arms for American Patriots.”) The often-traditionalist libertarian donor class and the Christofascists are now more closely aligned in goals than they have ever been.

The 2025 Mandate provides again the evidence that these traditionalists know their goals are minoritarian, but they will impose them on the majority using any authoritarian mechanism they can devise.

If they succeed in winning a Trump victory, it will also mean a rolling back of Biden’s impressive program promoting the transition to renewables. It will mean a crumbling of any nascent global effort to combat the climate catastrophe. This is hardly surprising since many of the plutocrats who fund the junktanks in the Atlas Network and the CNP stem from the fossil fuel sector. The support for Russian imperial goals, alongside other petrostates, will hasten the climate catastrophe.

Australians might believe a Trump victory’s social implications remain distant for us, but our rightwing parties seem determined to impose their minoritarian will like their American role models. Liberal politicians, Atlas-connected Advance – unfortunately aided by an awkwardly-timed police mistake – worked to inflame nativist-populist grievance in a by-election last weekend. Policy is abandoned; divisive propaganda is the replacement. These politicians continue to support nuclear reactors primarily as a further delay on climate action and, when we experience the climate catastrophe as a worse permacrisis than we might have, will do the bare minimum to support affected communities.

The traditionalism that is being promoted by the Radical Right around the world will doom us all, but not before stripping our freedoms.

 

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New Zealand is under siege by the Atlas Network

Just as the Atlas Network-connected Advance body intervened in the Voice referendum in Australia and, in recent weeks, a by-election, similar organisations spawned from the American model are distorting New Zealand’s politics from within as well as from without.

One of the key researchers into the Atlas Network, Lee Fang, observed that it has “reshaped political power in country after country.” In America, every Republican president since Ronald Reagan has begun office with a Roadmap provided by the Heritage Foundation, primary Atlas Network partner. The “Mandate” for 2025 puts America on a hard path to fascism should a Republican win in November. Britain’s economy and standing have been savaged by Atlas partners’ impacts on the Tories. In New Zealand, the recently-elected rightwing coalition government is aping the new “Atlas president” of Argentina, aiming to privatise national assets, but is increasingly also imitating Atlas strategies recently seen in Australia, inflaming racial tensions and harming the wellbeing of Māori people.

Dr Jeremy Walker called Australia’s attention to the local Atlas partner organisations’ impact on the Voice to Parliament referendum and is now helping draw together the focus on the New Zealand partners’ very similar distortion of their national debate. There is a deep racism at the heart of this ultra-free market ideology that has licensed the international right to exploit resources and people around the globe untrammelled, largely in American corporate interest, but more broadly for any corporation or allied sector big enough to be a contender. (They do not, by contrast, fight for the renewable energy sector’s interests, as a competitor to their dominant fossil fuel donors; this shapes their climate crisis denial and delay, and colours their loathing of First People’s capacity to interfere with their profits by environment-driven protest. A sense of Western Civilisation as the apex of human existence and deep disdain for non-Western cultures also pervade the network.)

The Atlas model is to connect and foster talent in the neoliberal sphere. Young men (mostly) are funded or trained to replicate the talking points that Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI) and lobbyists have built into a global network of over 500 bodies in 100 nations. The fact that neoliberal orthodoxies are more religious ideology that fact-based theories explains why their impact has been so utterly disastrous everywhere they have reshaped societies. The goal is to spawn replicating bodies with benign-sounding names that promote the UHNWI and corporate talking points – but with a veil hiding the self-interest that is obvious when those groups speak for themselves. Some of the bodies feign being thinktanks, which George Monbiot recently renamed junktanks to clarify their disingenuousness. Others are “astroturf” organisations that pretend to be grass roots bodies representing popular opinion. Another model is the beach-head in universities, an independent organisation within those institutions intended to dignify the neoliberal religion and the chosen strategies, including climate denial. All these produce material to fill civic debate and train more acolytes to enter politics, strategy companies and junktanks. Mainstream media elevates their standing by hosting their operatives as experts without explaining that the benign-sounding organisation to which they belong is a foreign-influence operation’s local outlet.

These groups damage local conditions to favour international corporations. They lobby for the removal of the “regulations” that are actually protections for the public – as workers, as consumers, as residents. They push for the privatisation of national treasures so that (often foreign) corporations can exploit the profits at the expense of the public. The greater the damage to the local democracy, the easier it is for them to act unimpeded. The stronger their infiltration of the media, the harder it is for the local electorate to understand the stakes. The politicians and strategists that emerge from the sphere (or are its allies) know that none of this wins votes, so they fill the space with culture war division to distract the voter from paying attention. Race and sexuality are their most obvious targets, as reactionary nostalgia for a mythical past of white picket fences pervades their ideology: a valorisation of “Christianity” and “family” and the “sacredness of marriage” (preached by adulterous politicians) is equally apparent in their propaganda.

The coalition that took power in NZ late in 2023, after a campaign centred on attacking the country’s founding Waitangi Treaty, has considerable Atlas infiltration. There is concern about Atlas fossil fuel and associated tobacco interests perverting policy in parliament, as well as senior ministerial aides who might be compromised. The government has promised to repeal Jacinda Ardern’s ban on offshore gas and fuel exploration, plans to sell water to private interests, not to mention planning to enable the selling off of “sensitive” NZ land and assets to foreign corporations, just as Argentinian Milei is intending.

One of the government members, the Act Party, began its existence as an Atlas partner thinktank and continues that close connection. It was founded by former parliamentarian Denis Quigley with two members of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), the Atlas Network’s inner sanctum. One, Roger Douglas, was responsible for Rogernomics in NZ which has been described as a “right wing coup” that worked to “dismantle the welfare state.” The other, Alan Gibbs, who has been characterised as the godfather of the party, and a major funder, argued Act ought to campaign for government to privatise “all the schools, all the hospitals and all the roads.” This may not be surprising since he made much of his fortune out of the privatisation of NZ’s telecommunications.

The Act Party is currently led by David Seymour who functions as a co-deputy prime minister in the government. He has worked almost his entire adult life within Atlas partner bodies in Canada and boasts a (micro) MBA dispensed by the Network. In Seymour’s 2021 Waitangi Day speech, he acknowledged his “old friends at the Atlas Network.” In light of that, his recent disdainful and absolute dismissal of the party’s connection to Atlas in an interview was telling: he clearly felt the association was damaging enough to lie outright.

Seymour is also deeply antagonistic to policies dedicated to repairing the disadvantage suffered by Māori people, disingenuously describing provisions that work cooperatively with Māori people as the “dismantling of democracy.” He appears antagonistic to Māori culture.

Another Atlas partner that has been key to distorting debate in NZ is the Taxpayer Union (TPU) which is emblematic of the production of metastasising bodies central to the Atlas strategy. Its co-founder and executive director is another graduate of the Atlas (micro) MBA program. Jordan Williams (currently “capo di tutti capi” of the Atlas global alliance of anti-tax junktanks) laughably depicts Atlas as a benign “club of like-minded think tanks.” He created, however, a body called the Campaign Company which helped radicalise the established farmer power base in NZ politics, planting sponsored material in the media. Williams claimed to grant the farmers “world-class campaign tools and digital strategies.” He also co-founded the Free Speech Union (FSU), which is unsurprisingly fighting regulation of the damaging impact of internet disinformation as well as fostering culture war battles.

A further spin-off of the bodies illustrates the increasing ugliness of the populist strategies. A former Act Party MP has founded the New Zealand Centre for Political Research which is fomenting civic division against Māori interests, including placing hate-mongering advertisements in the media.

The Act Party (alongside the populist New Zealand First party) is at the heart of the coalition government’s intention to destroy NZ’s admirable efforts to promote Māori interests for the betterment of the commonwealth, including the co-governance innovation. Efforts to undo disadvantage and programs that have promoted the distinctive NZ democratic experiment are set to be dismantled. A “massive unravelling” of Māori rights is at stake.

It is not only Māori people who will suffer. The NZ coalition government is also attempting a kind of “shock therapy” that did so much to tip first Chile and then other “developing” nations into brutal pain in pursuit of market “freedom.” The MPS was at the heart of Pinochet’s neoliberal brutality, resulting from Nixon’s injunction to make the Chilean economy scream.[1] New Zealand now faces cuts to a range of services, welfare and disability payments, even while the new PM, one of NZ’s wealthiest ever holders of the role, charged the taxpayer NZD 52,000 to live in his own property. It’s important to remember that this kind of entitlement is the sort that the neoliberals like, alongside subsidies to industry and corporations.

Lord Hannan (one of Boris Johnson’s elevations to the peerage, and a junktank creature) recently spoke in NZ, welcoming “all the coalition partners around this table” to hear his oration. There he celebrated the small percentage of GDP that NZ’s government spends on its people, cheering on the TPU’s power. He also disdained the “tribalism” that has dictated recognition of First Peoples’ suffering. There is grand (but unsurprising) irony in a graduate of three of Britain’s preeminent educational institutions dictating that humanity’s essential equality is all that can be considered when devising policy, particularly in settler-colonial nations.

Amusingly the weightier debunking of the Atlas connections has come from: Chris Trotter, formerly centre left, now a council member of Williams’ FSU; Eric Crampton, chief economist of the New Zealand Initiative, NZ’s leading Atlas partner and Sean Plunkett whose “anti-woke” vanity media platform, Platform, is plutocrat funded and regularly platforms the NZI talking heads.

While Atlas’s system largely functions to connect and train operatives, as well as acting as an extension of American foreign policy, this modest-seeming program must not be ignored. We have a handful of years to achieve a monumental shift from fossil fuel towards renewable energy: Atlas partners aim to ensure this does not take place.

And Atlas partners will push us at each other’s throats while we procrastinate.

[1] That MPS intervention resulted in massive unemployment, extraordinary inequality, and fire-sale prices of national assets to cronies. Much of Chile’s later success is as likely to be attributable to the trade requirements of (statist) China whose demand for copper has done so much to enrich Chile.

 

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Lessons from the USA about patriotic beat-ups

As Australia approaches that time in January again, we see the unedifying picture of Peter Dutton’s team driving his post-referendum Base into a flag-waving orgy of aggrieved patriotism. He has decided to conduct an attack on Woolworths over a commercial decision that Australia Day merchandise was not popular. Dutton is whipping up the contingent which believes that a No victory meant First People must become invisible, hoping a bigot vote will be enough to win the next election.

Similarly in the USA, compulsory patriotism is part of the Atlas Network’s plan to control the future of America through directing the next administration.

One of the flagship junktanks of the Atlas Network is the Heritage Foundation. It is an influence machine for the radical Right in America. It was co-founded by Paul Weyrich in 1971. The religious right-wing political space lost momentum when fighting school desegregation became untenable: racism could no longer be the (overt) driving force of Evangelical Christians’ political mission. Weyrich was the figure who steered a selected group of right-wing men in the late 70s to select abortion instead of prayer in school to be the issue to galvanise the Christian Right into a political force. The Moral Majority was the result. The Trump Republican Party is its offspring.

Heritage has helped “staff and set the agenda for every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan.” And in the new project, it has brought together what it describes as a “massive coalition of conservative organisations” from both within the Atlas Network and the Christian Nationalist architectures of influence.

Heritage is now led by Dr Kevin Roberts, a Rad Trad Catholic – the sort that despises the current Pope as a socialist and infiltrator. He came to Heritage from the Atlas-partner Texas Public Policy Foundation whose “donors are a Who’s Who of Texas polluters, giant utilities and big insurance companies.” Roberts has been celebrated as the man who would turn Heritage away from adherence solely to ultra-free market goals regardless of cost, towards the National Conservative (Nat Con) project of returning values to the Republican project. These values are Christian Nationalist – frightening for anyone who is not a straight, white, “Christian” man.

Heritage’s Project 2025 or “roadmap” for the first months of the next Republican President’s action has been described thus: “At the heart of this particular document is the installation of a machinery of absolute executive and capitalist power which systematically dismantles democracy and any government protections of the people and the environment all under the guise of reclaiming religious virtue from amoral Marxist wokeism.”

The roadmap is not just a document. It plans to fire 50,000 federal public servants. It has begun recruiting 20,000 people for the new government. It intends to train these recruits in the Nat Con goals of their mission. Applicants are required to give access to their social media and fill out a questionnaire to guarantee their ideological purity. The eliminatory questions (some of which are traps) include, “We should be proud of our American heritage and history, even as we acknowledge our flaws” as a compulsory point. Apparently patriotism is mandatory for employment in this worldview.

This is, however, amongst the less disturbing elements of Roberts’s expression of the project. Roberts’ enemy in his preface, “A promise to America,” is “The Great Awokening,” depicting social justice, secularism and empirical evidence-based policy as a blasphemous trap. He is determined to rescue “the very moral foundations of our society,” imperilled by centralised government. The words “woke” and “elites” throb like drumbeats throughout his preface, signalling the populist distraction that his plutocrat donors demand – to steer focus away from them.

His four goals are to restore the “family as the centrepiece of American life and protect our children”; to dismantle the administrative state; to defend borders; to secure “our God-given individual rights to live freely.”

Placing the family at the core has various ramifications. It is partly a battle cry to eliminate Queerness and return women to home and breeding, submissive to husband. It is partly racist. It is inherently connected to the dismantling of all safety nets, replaced by family and community charity. It is also connected to the radical right goal to dismantle the public education system, with the preliminary step of allowing a minority of radical parents to control what all students are allowed to be taught in schools.

Roberts insists that Project 2025 drives “policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.” He demands all words related to diversity or inclusiveness must be deleted from every federal document. Anyone producing or distributing material that acknowledges Queer existence – which he depicts as pornography – should be imprisoned and “Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

He declares that the Dobbs decision removing protections for reproductive rights is “just the beginning.” The next President must make removing reproductive rights a national commitment. The Mandate also promotes greater pregnancy surveillance.

Roberts portrays environmental protection including climate action as “extremism” and “anti human.” It is “not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.”

Australians watching our government’s subservience to the American war machine should take note: “The next conservative President must end the Left’s social experimentation with the military, restore warfighting as its sole mission, and set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its highest priority” as well as promoting the building of new nuclear weapons.

The current US government he depicts as the monolithic left, “socialism—Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses,” which must be defeated to return whatever he defines as “liberty” to the American people.

The Roadmap is written by hundreds of “conservative” thinkers, but far more concerning is how many of the contributors were senior in Trump’s last administration. Whether it is Trump or some other candidate, these activists intend rapid, concerted action to destroy the administrative state, with the lavish use of executive action from the White House to sideline any congressional constraints.

Heritage has released such a Mandate for the last 40 years but it crowed with delight about the way that Trump embraced their guide when he took power, implementing 2/3 of their recommendations in his first year. Australians could see this as an echo of the (Atlas-partner) Institute of Public Affair’s (IPA) notorious “wishlist” that did so much to shape Tony Abbott’s government in contravention of its election promises.

With the election of Javier Milei in Argentina, Atlas has won their man a pivotal role in that nation’s future, as Dr Jeremy Walker indicated. He plans to sell off Argentina’s assets to predatory global capitalists, and Argentinians are already feeling the pain of price hikes. George Monbiot has recently acknowledged the Tufton St junktanks that have driven Britain into misery belong to the Atlas Network. At the same time, Australia’s prospective future leader appeared in pink hi-vis to pay obeisance to Gina Rinehart, primary funder of the IPA.

Little in Roberts’s preface to the Mandate will surprise Sky News Australia viewers. This kind of rhetoric is at the heart of the world Atlas aims to create: no restraints for fossil fuel but many restraints for the irritating (and immoral) masses.

Fostering aggrieved patriotism is a core right-wing gambit, and we should recognise it when Dutton applies his lighter to that fire in the next fortnight: it is part of a grim package.

 

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Atlas Network strategies: how fossil fuel is using “think” tanks to delay action

Australians should be wondering why the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), one of the country’s proudest think tanks, has just established a body promoting nuclear energy that appears to have little to justify it. If the CIS truly believes in the project, surely it would have sought a leader with a stellar resumé?

Earlier this year, environmental journalist George Monbiot warned that the chance of simultaneous harvest failures in the world’s major breadbaskets was “much worse than we thought.” He poured his fury onto the old industries deploying as many Atlas Network-style “junktanks (‘thinktanks’), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to drag our eyes away from what counts, and leave us talking about trivia and concocted bullshit instead.”

The 500+ global “partner” bodies of the Atlas Network have, for decades, been forming metastasising entities such as “think” tanks to create the sense of a chorus of academic or public support for the junk science and junk political economies that serve their funders. The primary goals have been to liberate plutocrats from any tax or regulation, and fossil fuel bodies have been amongst their most prolific donors.

By contrast with the billions spent to “stop collapse from being prevented,” the effort to prevent Earth systems collapse is led by people “working mostly in their own time with a fraction of the capacity.”

The Atlas strategy involves networking promising ultra-free market spruikers with the astonishing sums of money that fossil fuel and similar industries spend to promote their goals. The spruikers can be trained and cross-connected. Some are helped to create benign-named bodies that describe themselves as think tanks or academic institutes (beachheads) in universities. They found fake grass roots bodies (astroturfing) to pressure politicians into believing that there is public support for a policy. Youthful scholars or strategists co-opted and funded by the machine go on to export the work into politics and the media.

One Australian example is the founder of the Australian Taxpayer Alliance, Tim Andrews. He was a graduate of the Koch Associate Program, a year-long training program at the Charles Koch institute, and worked at the Atlas-partner Americans for Tax Reform for two years. Koch is one of the most significant figures in the Atlas Network’s spread. Andrews is now a member of the UK Atlas Partner, the Taxpayer Alliance Advisory Council.

High profile mining figures in particular unite many of these bodies. In Australia, Hugh Morgan’s name, for example, is present in many of their histories. He assisted Greg Lindsay in turning the CIS from a “part-time hobby” into the more serious institution that it became. Morgan was described in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1985 as “the most important conservative figure in Australia. He is not merely an outspoken captain of industry, he is at the centre of a large and growing network of activists who are seeking to reshape the political agenda in this country.”

In America there is an extensive web of such networks and bodies that interact together. The Atlas Network is important for its international forays into 100 countries, working to infect debate with this American ideology that overwhelmingly promotes the right of corporations to extract resources at any cost to the nation exploited.

The CIS claims to encourage “debate among leading academics, politicians, media and the public.” It announces itself to be “proud to be associated with some of the greatest leaders in business and academia as visiting lecturers or as CIS members, staff or Directors.”

The CIS tended to maintain the dignity that mission statement conveys. It has traditionally acted in the background by contrast with the blowsy, brawling Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). The contrast is even starker with the farcical LibertyWorks Inc which created the local Trumpist circus, the Australian Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). These two Atlas partners are best known for devising “low” strategy campaigns identifiable as a “war on woke.”

The HR Nicholls Society, like the CIS, pitched its campaigning as “high” strategy: intellectually framed and directed at the upper echelons of civic debate. West Australia’s Mannkal Economic Education Foundation is tightly connected with the Mont Pelerin Society. Queensland’s Australian Institute for Progress, the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Australian Libertarian Society are all amongst the benign-sounding bodies that have been recorded as partners to Atlas.

The Bert Kelly Research Centre, which was linked to the Family First ultraconservative movement, and the Bennelong Society, which acted to fight any First People policy apart from assimilation, are defunct Atlas-connected operations.

Bennelong (denying First People’s self-determination) and HR Nicholls’ (shackling workers) shared a post box and phone number with the Lavoisier Group which continues to post climate denial material. The websites for Lavoisier and Bennelong were designed by a functionary at the IPA.

GetUp! was founded to give the electorate a voice against Dark Money in 2005. This challenge to state capture could not be allowed to stand: to counteract the progressive electorate’s voice, figures associated with the CIS established Advance Australia. As Advance, it led the No campaign for the Voice referendum, reflecting fossil fuel money’s fear of First Peoples’ rights working in cooperation with environmental goals. Dr Jeremy Walker highlighted the Atlas connections and strategies involved while investigative journalist Anthony Klan tracked the people and money that connect the various shadowy bodies that spawned from the parent.

It is not CIS’s fault that this tawdry astroturf collective shared founders, funders and “researchers” with the more dignified CIS.

The CIS Communications Director Karla Pincott recently informed that the CIS was not founded nor funded by Atlas, neither of which has been asserted. Amongst the body’s proudly “public record” and “peer-reviewed” research, she claimed that the CIS’s only “carbon research to date has recommended a carbon tax.”

In the light of this comment it is interesting that the CIS has just announced the creation of its new “CIS Energy Program” which “will offer tangible energy solutions to address concerns about climate change, focusing on nuclear power and the clean energy transition.”

With CIS’s proud tradition of proclaimed reputable research, one would imagine that such a program would be led by a notable figure in the energy field, perhaps a leading academic or professional.

The figure selected to head up this project describes himself as “not a professional with any sort of industry inside experience” nor does he have any “particular credentials.” Instead he is a “kind of interested, enthusiastic layperson.” He says he “sort of stumbled across” the Twitter (X) debate and “threw my two cents in.” While he has a physics degree, he sums himself up thus: “I follow things on Twitter a little bit. I’m interested in economics. I’m interested in energy. I’m interested in physical systems. I’m interested in military technology.” When discussing his climb to relevance as a Twitter debater this year, Morrison said, “I barely even know…I know a couple of the energy debaters.” One would imagine that a person selected to head up a CIS research project would know the thought leaders in the field.(1)

Morrison’s latest video production is much more sophisticated than earlier efforts.

Incidentally, a 16 year-old who is another leading voice via “Nuclear for Australia” has been harnessed by Sky News for the Coalition.

Tom Switzer, departing presenter of the ABC’s “Between the Lines” gave the youth the full 55 minutes of his show. Switzer is also executive director of the CIS where he announced his thinktank’s new “Energy Program” as an opportunity to use the “market” to drive clean energy goals instead of “pitting economic growth against climate goals.” He did not speak to how Morrison himself was selected.

The Liberal Party is promoting the “small modular reactor” as an alternative to renewables. It has long been established that this is a distraction rather than an affordable change. It is believed that the LNP and associates’ support for nuclear power is another in the long list of distractions that the fossil fuel industry has funded to delay and prevent change.

Figures from “think” tanks are platformed on current affairs programs and quoted as though they have expertise. Their important or benign-sounding body’s names give gravitas to their declarations. Their donors are generally concealed and thus their intent can be treated with some suspicion.

On the 18th December, Chris Kenny on Sky hosted “CIS Energy Program Director Aidan Morrison” as a “data scientist” who has conducted an “expert review” of the grid planning. Morrison’s study, in Kenny’s summary, “has concluded these documents play all sorts of tricks to try to ensure that renewables look like the cheapest option, when in fact they’re not.” (2) Kenny stated Morrison’s data science “work has been so impressive he’s just been appointed to head up the Energy Research Program for the Centre of Independent Studies.” Kenny incorrectly accuses that the renewable energy push has “already caused huge supply problems and cost increases in our electricity grid” and is “now set to make problems even worse.” The pair both criticise the exclusion of nuclear as a solution, portraying it as an ideological decision rather than a pragmatic one. Kenny uses Morrison’s work to conclude: “we have expert confirmation that it might not even work. We might not have enough energy available when we need it. An energy rich country without enough energy…What a shambles.”(3)

Australia must legislate to ensure that such bodies are transparent about funding. Charity status should only be granted to bodies that work with integrity. Figures who represent these bodies ought to be labelled at every appearance as representing vested interests if they cannot meet the required standard for integrity.

Fossil fuel has delayed the global community acting in a calm and relatively painless way last century, in order to ensure it extracts profit as long as possible. Far North Queensland is right now experiencing unprecedented floods, another in a concatenation of “unprecedented” catastrophes. It will soon be too late. We are long past tolerating delaying strategies.

If “think” tanks want to be treated as having credibility, then this new “CIS Energy Program” is a troubling signal.

And we truly hope their mission statement remains: “The Centre for Independent Studies promotes free choice and individual liberty, and defends cultural freedom and the open exchange of ideas.”

Postscript: The Leader made an incorrect assertion about the new Gencost report on a 2GB interview on the 21st December criticising it for examining costs through an investment lens. That incorrect assertion was later repeated by a senior Liberal figure.

———————-

(1) This is Morrison’s full introduction to himself when asked to provide his relevant background to be a guest on a podcast about baseload energy. I have cleaned it up for clarity by removing repetition and most linguistic fillers. The sound was quite distorted at some points but I listened to it repeatedly to achieve the fairest representation of Morrison’s words. “I’m not a professional with any sort of industry inside experience or anything like yourself. I’m a data scientist at the moment. I work writing computer code to trade in futures and other assets. So I don’t have any special technical insight other than [physics degree?] which I suppose helps in deciphering some of these things. So I’m an …kind of interested, enthusiastic layperson. People can hold that against me if they want but I hope they do their best to focus on the arguments and engage with them as opposed to just writing off [people and credentials?] on me. I do have a physics degree. I studied [at ANU…?] I’ve always been a bit of a fan of nuclear power since I studied nuclear physics. I found that it was a really compelling thing. All the solutions to make the problems, which it has, well managed, just seem extremely elegant, extremely satisfying. And I think when you engage with those from a physics perspective, it’s easy to get quite excited by it. But so I follow things on Twitter a little bit. I’m interested in economics. I’m interested in energy. I’m interested in physical systems. I’m interested in military technology. I have a little nascent, fledgling YouTube channel called Miltechntac that I’m working on getting some more videos out for. But yeah, that’s me. I just sort of stumbled across this and threw my two cents in.”

(2) Morrison’s review of renewable’s arguments in the same podcast sounds like this: “Their whole model and what they’ve done there to me is totally opaque and it could be a complete and utter mess. I don’t think I can fix it by just adding in one thing. Maybe it’s right though, and I can’t see exactly other ways in which it’s clearly wrong. I’ve got a few ideas actually. But they need to come back and produce a credible and transparent model that does incorporate all the costs we actually incur for those later stages of renewables, not riding on sunk cost. And there could be other problems still maybe, but they can start with this that they have definitely not included the cost of building the infrastructure up to 2030…”

(3) Threats to the power grid remain rare. The warning in NSW last week was the result of two units at the Mr Piper coal power station being offline, one unexpectedly. The blackout did not eventuate. Power prices have largely resulted in massive windfall profits for the gas sector. The other talking points spread by nuclear boosters are addressed in the latest Gencost report just released.

It is important to remember Brandolini’s Law.

 

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The Americanisation of Australian politics: watching the Atlas Network

It is no accident that the Australian “conservative” movement has transformed into an echo of the toxic American Right. Fossil fuel money and a giant international network of junktanks bear much of the blame.

Dr Jeremy Walker’s research into the Atlas Network’s Australian partners brought that American body to prominence over the referendum campaign. The media coverage of his academic study into the influence of “think” tanks such as the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) carrying Atlas strategies into the Australian civic discourse raised Atlas’s profile.

The latest attack by Atlas partner organisations, including (unofficially) News Corp, is a strategic campaign against offshore wind farms.

The model, as Walker reports, for the supposedly grassroots campaign against offshore wind farms on coastal NSW is derived from a related campaign in the United States. Researchers into climate disinformation at Brown University’s IBES first noticed local groups springing up with high production value visual material and matching talking points. While some figures acting in local Facebook groups seem to be authentic (if misled), others seem suspiciously strategic in their interaction.

Sydney University of Technology hosted an international webinar last week that brought together some of the best research voices challenging the climate disinformation industry which is in large part coordinated by Atlas. This sector continues to block any real action to prevent climate catastrophe – indeed is responsible for causing this crisis – as well as escalating the destruction of democratic projects around the world. There is to be no scope for any nation’s public to obstruct their ultra-free market goals.

Walker led the program hosted by former senator Scott Ludlum. Duke’s Professor Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains expanded on her investigative history of this movement. Professor Timmons Roberts from Brown University’s Climate and Development Lab and environmental journalist Brendan DeMille, executive director of the crucial DeSmog blog, detailed their work and resources. (Unfortunately Amy Westervelt of the outstanding Drilled site and podcast was called away.)

The two hours of the webinar was filled with densely conveyed information and access to resources such as the collection of fossil fuel industry documents illustrating that they knew carbon would create a climate disaster from the 1950s but decided from the 1980s to destroy the civic debate instead of changing business model to avert the catastrophe. Desmog provides extensive information about the Atlas Network’s functions and its partners around the globe. Roberts gave a link to the CDL site to contradict fossil fuel-funded disinformation about offshore wind energy. (The latest series from Drilled focuses on the criminalisation of climate and environmental protesters, and its crushing of free speech.)

Walker outlined the history of the Atlas phenomenon, pointing out that international oil industry manoeuvring began in the earliest years of the 20th century, even before widespread universal suffrage in democracies. Their goal to override national sentiments and constraints in supranational treaties and trade deals is central to their power and profit.

Walker pointed out that the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) acts as the inner sanctum of the Atlas Network. It was founded in 1947 with oil connections from the outset, and neoliberalism can be dated from its inaugural conference. Atlas founder Anthony Fisher’s daughter Linda Whetstone was a director of his prototype “think” tank the British Institute of Economic Affairs, president of the MPS in 2020 and chairman of the Atlas Network from 2016.

As of the last leaked membership list of the secretive MPS in 2013, former Prime Minister John Howard was a member. John Roskam (Executive Director until 2022, now Senior Fellow, at the IPA) and News Corp’s Janet Albrechtsen were listed. Director and Founder of the CIS, Greg Lindsay, was a former president of the MPS. Ron Manners, founder of Atlas connected “think” tank the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation is a current director of the MPS. Maurice Newman, around the time he was chair of the ABC, was also listed. He helped found the CIS and was a seminal backer of Advance Australia which led the campaign against the Voice to Parliament.

The notorious Charles Koch took over orchestrating Atlas’s success after Fisher’s 1987 death, not to mention being a member of the MPS. Koch Industries was identified to be a “kingpin of climate science denial.” Without the Kochs and Rupert Murdoch, the Tea Party which morphed into Trump’s MAGA movement would have been stillborn. In 1980, when his brother and partner David ran as a Libertarian Party candidate, father of American conservatism William F Buckley described their politics as “Anarcho Totalitarianism.”

MacLean’s presentation highlighted the fact that the figures who held these “public choice” theories, devised by James Buchanan and largely funded by Koch (and peers), knew their ultra free market ideas would not win majority votes and so set out secretly to cripple democracy by any “technology” they could devise. MacLean drew attention to global attacks on democracy and surging autocracy, featuring the Atlas-connected money and “think” tanks that drove the Brexit vote as well as promoting far-right and neofascist politics in Europe. Both movements are tied to climate denial.

The Atlas Network’s main goal, as Demille summarised it, has been to spot and train global talent in the ultra free-market libertarian field and connect it to the free-flowing money that the alliance functions to assist. They now have at least 515 partner organisations in over 100 nations. The contributions of donors and even the fact of bodies functioning as Atlas partners, have been hidden as part of making any account such as this look like a conspiracy theory. They know that the impacts of complete deregulation – tainted water, air, dangerous workplaces – will be unpalatable even to the people inculcated to believe deregulation is desirable. The secession of the rich from civil society, particularly in paying tax, has meant ever fewer services and deteriorating infrastructure for the electorate. Secrecy is key for the corporations and plutocrats funding this model, structuring replicating “think” tanks and funding academics and spin doctors to sell what the backers can’t say.

George Monbiot, environmental and political journalist, describes these “think” tanks as “junktanks.” Included are those like the CIS that prefer to remain in the background targeting “high” strategies at politicians, CEOs and journalists. Also included are bodies such as the IPA which play to the “low” strategies at least in their public facade. The IPA fosters every idiot ball distraction that fuels the grievances and resentment in the culture war ignition of an enraged base. Those idiot balls are framed by their colleagues in America and imported lightly tinkered for the Australian market. Much of this is channelled through News Corp mastheads and Sky News, now funnelled free-to-air into the regions. Many idiot balls, such as the tantrums about EVs ruining the weekend or the threat to gas stoves, serve fossil fuel interests.

We must work out how to demarcate junktanks from think tanks doing genuine research. We must remove tax free status and ensure that their donor lists are made public. Every journalist or politician that emerges from or remains allied to such a junktank, every interviewee representing them, should be identified as such whenever they make a pronouncement. These disingenuous actors will, of course, feign outrage, pretending that bodies with integrity such as The Australia Institute are their mirror image “on the left.”

We must draw attention, constantly, to the asymmetric warfare at work. While one part of our civic space functions according to old (flawed) rules, the new Right respects no rules, traditions or norms. One of their strategies is projection: every political actor, researcher or “enemy” media body is as belligerent as they are. They also act to nobble the referees. Pretending that factcheckers, media bodies or public servants are as politically-driven as themselves is one of their weapons.

Our politicians and independent media figures need to speak about this architecture of influence and its anti-majoritarian goals.

This is no minor skirmish. The divisions in society that they are working to create can lead to authoritarian regulation and civic violence.

For some of the oligarchs behind and strategists working for the Atlas Network and interrelated bodies there is a genuine reactionary yearning for an older white society governed by strict “biblical morality.” Christian Libertarianism is a description of America’s perverted libertarianism that desires statist control of bodies. For other cynics in the network, religious Right factions provide a voter bloc and cover for the free market and climate-denial activities. For these reasons, the forces work in concert with and fund Christian Nationalists.

The autocracies promoted by these forces around the globe promote fossil fuel production and consumption. Ultra free-market concepts are matched with repression of individuals and the end of rights and freedom of conscience. Citizens who are content to earn and consume may not notice the difference until climate disasters make their food unaffordable or unavailable. Those who aim to protest the breakdown of our societies under the manifold pressures of the climate catastrophe and economic injustice, combined with the brutal treatment of climate refugees, will be branded extremists or terrorists and will suffer.

The irony is that the people targeted by the strategists into becoming part of the climate denial and delay movement – such as the conspiracists who join the NIMBYs to fight renewables like offshore wind farms – are almost right. But this conspiracy is tracked and piled high with peer-reviewed academic study.

Atlas’s credo is: “We believe that all individuals have the right to pursue opportunities, enjoy success, and live a life of freedom without coercion or persecution. And so we tirelessly aid in the unshackling of individual liberty, free enterprise, and voluntary cooperation to prevent future poverty.” This pablum is actually intended to disguise the impoverishment of the vast majority of humanity, indeed its destruction in the climate catastrophe, while the 0.1% enjoy the liberty that statement celebrates.

Atlas and partners like the CIS hate attention. We must not let them hide.

A shorter version of this essay was published at Pearls and Irritations as Secrecy and the climate disinformation industry

 

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Resisting Christian Nationalism: Secularism Australia’s inaugural conference

Spiritual and cultural Christians – indeed such people of all faiths – need to consider allying together with those who identify as belonging to “no religion.” It is the fundamentalist authoritarians who would divide and constrain us all that need exposing as the small minority they truly are. We must make them as powerless as their numbers, goals and hypocrisies merit.

At the first Secular Australia conference in Sydney on the 2nd of December, people gathered to hear presentations on maintaining the line between church and state in Australia. Jane Caro ably ran proceedings, opening by explaining that the conference’s goal was to build a stronger voice for secularists in the way the nation operates. We can no longer passively expect our interests to be represented when our parliaments are becoming more not less religious. The organisations and individuals maintaining our line between church and state must coordinate action. Some freedoms, Caro reminded, are only possible in a secular society.

Michael Kirby launched the conference, drawing attention to the fact that as of the 2021 census, 39% of Australians declared themselves to be of “no religion.” Professor Luke Beck outlined how Australia’s constitution dictates that we are a country where the separation between church and state is established, illustrating the historical battles between denominations that ended up shaping the structures we function within.

David Shoebridge of the federal Greens spoke about the work in federal parliament, noting in particular the “Basic Religious Charity Exemption” robs Australians of considerable wealth from businesses associated with charities and churches such as Sanitarium, as well as removing supervision of how almost $25 billion of public money is spent in these bodies performing outsourced government services. NSW Green Abigail Boyd described the struggle against entrenched and unaccountable religious conservatism in that state parliament. Both spoke of the way so many Australians are made second class citizens in the privileging of Christian prayer in our parliaments.

Rationalist’s Fiona Patten outlined the important achievements her party has helped achieve in Victoria, presenting an optimistic impression of our trajectory. Secularism, as she pointed out, means equality and freedom of conscience. South Australian Labor’s Chris Schacht illustrated the statistical support that secular government has in Australia, urging the bodies assembled to campaign more strategically in counterpoint to our well-organised religious lobbyists. Our politicians do not understand, he asserted, the census results proving the size of the secular vote, instead continuing to prioritise the activated religious vote. Victor Franco described his efforts at Boroondara Council to prove that privileging Christian prayer in such bodies is likely illegal, within Victoria at least.

Our public schools are established to be “free, secular and compulsory.” As Shoebridge had reminded us earlier, a fair and just society is embedded in that injunction. Alison Courtice and Ron Williams spoke about the secularists’ efforts in Queensland and NSW to constrain the controversial chaplaincy and religious instruction programs in their state schools. Federal governments of both stripes have spent almost $1.5 billion to place inappropriate figures in schools. Not only is this a profit stream for Pentecostal movements, but also a mission field. The ALP’s “secular” option is being embraced by these groups with new “wellbeing” companies set up to place more Pentecostal figures in primary schools.

The Australia Institute’s Bill Browne introduced the think tank’s survey results proving that the school chaplaincy program has only minority support in the community.

Former Director-General of the Navy’s Chaplaincy Collin Acton spoke about his brave stand to make sure secular “chaplains” serve in our navy as first resort pastoral care providers (as well as or instead of the old system where chaplains bring a theology degree and a minimum of two years work in a civilian community). The Religious Advisory Committee to the Services, some of whom also treat the ADF as a mission field, ought to be replaced with a secular expert panel to ensure our service people are best protected from psychological distress. The army and airforce have still not embraced the new balance that Acton’s team persuaded the navy to trial.

Acton, Beck, Shoebridge and Kirby all drew attention to the substantial financial ramifications for the nation’s budget in the strong lobbying powers of the religious sector. Money is spent in huge proportions there, much of it unscrutinised for the manner and effectiveness of its use. This, as Caro pointed out, leads to religious healthcare providers becoming the sole service for a region but robbing the population of crucial medical procedures that don’t meet the provider’s moral code.

Part of the substantial injustice of the excess funding of private schools is attributable to this power imbalance. We will continue to become a more unjust society if the public education system is starved of funds in both function and infrastructure, by contrast with taxpayer funds being spent in abundance on church-linked schools. Former president of the NSW Teachers Federation Maurie Mulheron spoke with great passion on that injustice. The chasm between education systems both segregates and polarises our society.

Some of the money, such as that spent on chaplains, may also be unconstitutional.

One of the most important aspects of the day’s discussion, however, was affirming respect for people of private and virtuous faith. We must stand against the mere 12% who belong to fundamentalist movements that see the rest of us as an impediment to their goals.

Chys Stevenson delivered the day’s most striking speech explaining the risk to our democratic project posed by the Christian Nationalist Right (or Christian Dominionism). She described this Americanisation of Australian politics as part of a “cancerous political ideology.” We have the protection from a soft coup by Christian authoritarians of a much stronger electoral system than the USA, but complacency, Stevenson warned, could nullify that advantage.

The Pentecostal movement is working to infiltrate government and public institutions; the intent is “gaining complete control.” And while the style of religion is foreign, it is growing. The New Apostolic Reformation group alone has 1,000 churches around Australia.

This “imposter Christianity,” quoting Professor Samuel Perry, is often antithetical to Christ’s teaching. It is radicalised to the point that, Stevenson explained, in many churches pastors can no longer preach the Sermon on the Mount without being attacked for being the rotten “woke.”

The Christian Nationalists that Stevenson depicted believe that End Times are close. This requires the purification of every person and nation on the planet to allow Christ’s return to rule. Purification entails constraining all lives: no reproductive rights and no sex outside sacred, heterosexual marriage. This allows no LGBTQIA+ existence at all. Women should be returned to the domestic space.

Stevenson described the Seven Mountains Mandate which intends all aspects of human society to be controlled by Pentecostal figures: education, religion, family, business, government/military, arts/entertainment and media. There is no obligation to be honest with the secular world about this intent or the methods used to achieve it. Everything is literal spiritual warfare. The secular world, including Christians who are not of their movement but most particularly Catholics, is often depicted as demonic. The movement is deeply antagonistic to First People’s cultures, and often segregationist in race terms.

Stevenson used UTS academic Jeremy Walker’s research into the Atlas Network and its affiliate “think” tanks in Australia where anti-climate action work is accompanied by culture war battles that amplify splits in society. The Atlas model of division was at work in the Voice referendum campaign, not least because the fossil fuel sector that funds so much of these junktanks’ work fears the alliance of First People with environmental campaigns.

Neither the paleolibertarians nor the Christian Nationalists have any interest in democracy. The former see it as an obstacle to the free market, while the latter sees it as an obstacle to imposing Biblical law. Stevenson recommended Clare Heath-McIvor’s insider revelations about the threat to the democratic project posed by this movement.

Stevenson’s speech built on Leslie Cannold’s depiction, in the preceding presentation, of how polarised Australian society is becoming. We are following the American route towards hyperpolarisation which cannot sustain the democratic experiment.

Dr Anna Halahoff from Deakin illustrated the degree to which far right lobbyists have pushed the Western Chauvinist cultural deployment of Christianity into our new school curriculum. Then education minister Alan Tudge’s revision to the proposed Australian history curriculum ended up reducing content covering First People by one third, replaced by greater emphasis on our “Christian heritage.” Tudge has no record of being on the Orban speaking tour like too many Liberal Party alumni, but he was apparently filtering the fascistic politics through from the network.

Van Badham spoke with passion, and some trepidation, about her adult embrace of Catholicism. She depicted her faith as integral to her commitment to social justice and her wellbeing. Badham described secularism as a vital bulwark against the authoritarian Christians who pervert her faith, damaging believers as much as people of no religion.

The scandal emerging from Florida in recent days is indicative of the forces at work in the Christofascist right. Christian Ziegler is the state party chair of the Republican Party and a staunch ally in Governor Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke,” with constant assaults on both straight women’s and LGBTQIA+ safety within the state. His wife Bridget Ziegler was a co-founder of the hate group Moms for Liberty that has bedevilled American schools and libraries with anti-LGBTQIA+ aggression.

The fact that the Zieglers have been in an open marriage with another woman, including allegedly lesbian activity by Bridget, followed by an accusation of rape and physical harm of that third party by Christian, exposes the rot at the heart of this kind of politics. Families and individuals are leaving Florida and similar states for their own safety. People have been driven to suicide. Others are living with the mental distress of being targeted for outsider status by this neofascist crusade. The hypocrisy, however, is standard.

True Christians and people of other faiths who live inspired by their belief and its moral code are utterly different from these neofascists.

We must work together for mutual protection.

 

This essay appeared in an abbreviated form in Pearls and Irritations as Christian Nationalists versus the rest.

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Tony Abbott and the Australian right: a grim political trajectory

Tony Abbott added two new posts to his resume this month, debuting as Fox director and announced to be “joining the Danube Institute team as a guest lecturer.” Add these to the October news that Abbott is now an Advisory Board member of the far-right Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). Australians should be watching.

Hungarian Conservative celebrated the growing closeness of former Prime Minister and Orban’s Danube Institute. Abbott in turn commended the English-speaking intellectual network attracted by Hungary’s history and culture but also the “success” of the Orban government.

That “success” is distinctly illiberal. In fact Orban boasts that Hungary has an “illiberal democracy.” The term democracy there is more decorative than functional; the European Parliament terms Hungary an “electoral autocracy.” When mass youth voter turnout defeated Poland’s illiberal government recently, experts commented that an equivalent opposition victory has been made impossible in Hungary. Orban’s base is driven by nationalism and bigotry: “traditional” identity and values make non-White people unwelcome. They target LGBTQIA+ people and Roma as well as deploying coded antisemitism.

As noted before (and in the Hungarian Conservative), Abbott has a history of appearing on the Orban speaking circuit. Joining him there are several other Liberal Party grandees and apparatchiks. It is important to observe that the infiltration into News Corp is present too with Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan as the most prominent connection.

Orbanism offers a unifying image of the success possible for a rightwing politics based on a conception of “natural law.” In this “natural law” there is an inherent power structure that places men over women, and white, “Christian” men over everyone. Strict barriers are maintained between life’s unalterable binaries and divisions, including race, sex and gender. A fascistic nostalgia for a mythologised past drives the mission. This “natural law” pervades the bigoted political movements of the West. It is infused into the ARC and the overlapping National Conservative movement.

For this network, the enemy is the liberal “elites” – like teachers – or the “woke.” Expressing respect for expertise, compassion or an open-mind is not only inconvenient but a threat to those who rule by “natural law.” Voices from the disempowered are exaggerated to be depicted as an existential threat. Thus the “natural” rulers can become the new victim.

Last weekend’s The Australian (25-26) could have emerged wholesale from an Orban event. Natasha Bita, the masthead’s Education Editor had two substantial pieces on boys’ education. One celebrated single sex boys’ education as dealing with the crisis of them “falling through the cracks” where she editorialised the question “Has the gender-equality push gone too far?”

In the second, “Boys feel blamed for toxic culture,” she conveyed the opinions of King’s School headmaster Tony George that “neo-sexism” is at work in society’s “genderism” experiment. George asserted that boys don’t need girls in classrooms to learn to “kowtow to a female boss.” Throughout both pieces, a straw man of leftist education theory is despised as trying to break boisterous boys. Apparently overworked teachers trying to force rowdy students to meet mandatory benchmarks isn’t to blame.

Perhaps Bita or George are fans of education administrator Matthew Freeman in The American Conservative who declared this May: “The task of classical Christian education is to train a noble class within our own institutions, so that they can supplant the class currently turning America into a dump.” Like Freeman, Bita targets “woke” as the enemy. On 22 November, she channelled the Institute of Public Affairs’ Bella D’Abrera (director of the IPA’s Foundations of Western Civilisation program) onto the front page, advertising D’Abrera’s attack on “woke” teacher education.

The same edition grants a column to Virginia Tapscott to challenge the idea that mental health isn’t a factor in men’s violence as if the imagined progressive opponents would not accept this fact. Neighbouring articles to Tapscott’s however feature a society where “submitting” to “a woman in authority” is “kowtowing,” and male “boisterousness” and boys being boys is celebrated without acknowledgement that this has long been coded cover for something much worse.

Then Janet Albrechtsen builds a farcical picture of feminist oppression of good men in her defence of patriarchy titled, “At 99 not out, Brian smashes wicked myth of patriarchy.” “Regressive anti-male myths” damage us, whereas this patriarchy (defined by her as “good bloke” individuals not an oppressive system created over millennia) is one we ought to embrace.

These sentiments draw on the natalism illustrated by Greg Sheridan on the 21 November, when he asserted that “Fertility strife demands more babies, not migrants.” Instead of blaming the cost of living (or climate fears) for low birth rates, he blames them on an illiberal “ideological and sexist denial of women’s choice.” “Natural law” demands (white) women embrace their reproductive duty. He sets up a paradigm of good and bad immigration where Indian, Chinese and South-East Asian immigrants are depicted as the good migrants because they are, ostensibly, more religious and “traditional” as well as better educated than Australian youth. He depicts migrants as encapsulated in an extreme antithesis: Einstein or Hitler.

Bad migration in The Australian is currently focussed on freed refugees and possible boat arrivals, but most particularly on the repercussions of the current violence in Israel.

Editor Paul Kelly depicts protests calling for peace for Gaza as part of surging antisemitism that poses “moral and civilisational” questions. The “antisemitism” he thus detects in the left is apparently “reinforced by the ideology of identity politics.” Identity politics is, of course, the disdainful label given by those with power according to “natural law” to any complaint from the “naturally” subject. The trajectory of the Australian right is indicated by Kelly’s imagined Australians not recognising their country in these mostly peaceful and solemn (and utterly inclusive) protests. These Australians think, Kelly guesses, “Nobody told us multiculturalism would end here.” Apparently the vast number of white Australians at the protests aren’t Paul Kelly’s Australians.

Throughout the pages of this edition and others in recent time, there is almost no acknowledgement that Israel’s government is no longer liberal but much closer to fascist, nor is there any suggestion that decades of Palestinian suffering are factual and relevant. On 22 November, Kelly echoed Peter Dutton’s call for “moral courage and moral clarity.” These are neoconservative buzzwords that recall the early 21st century’s civilisational battle against Islam where the West represents “good” against that faith’s “evil.” The Australian’s Editorial on 20-21 October underscored this by returning to the old bellicose thought-terminating cliches of a “fight for the free world,” with Israel our bulwark against the “anti-freedom, anti-democratic axis of evil.”

News Corp’s chief Australian columnists are reiterating these messages that protests in pursuit of peace are a sign of decay in Western Civilisation. Credlin said that on the 23 November in a column entitled “West slides into abyss of intellectual decay,” citing a paper written for the ARC’s recent conference. Awful chants at a Sydney protest she depicts as reflecting the “atavism of recent migrants from the Middle East, Australians of convenience more than conviction, conditioned from birth to regard Israel as existing on stolen land and to think of Jews as arch-exploiters.” She links this “moral relativism and self-loathing” to trans acceptance.

Chris Kenny, on the weekend of the 18-19, said the pro-Palestinian protests revealed our “hubris about multicultural success and new world tolerance.” He linked these calls to stop the collective punishment of citizens falsely to a support for “Islamic extremism” and asserts “The much derided ‘clash of civilisations’ remains a central challenge for Western countries.” This is Samuel Hungtington’s “utterly wrong” concept used to justify so much Western violence in the Middle East, creating millions of displaced people.

In this way the Murdoch Dog Line not only foments belligerence as a prelude to war, but also uses the same tribalism to echo John Howard’s recent ARC rejection of multiculturalism.

Tony Abbott’s colleagues at the Danube Institute and the ARC are largely pro Russia and anti-climate action. (The edition of The Australian explored above returns to the Murdoch message that renewables are a threat in a column by Chris Kenny.) For that reason it will be interesting to watch the Abbott link between Orban and Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox.

One of Lachlan Murdoch’s most striking acts on taking the helm at Fox was to stage a visit to Ukraine with reporters. He publicised his meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskiy and support for Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. This is a strong signal for the head of a media organisation belonging to the Putin-supporting right. Orban is, of course, the palatable deputy for Putin since that invasion.

The Daily Beast revealed recently that Fox News sending its flagship Tucker Carlson program to Budapest to celebrate Orban’s illiberalism for a week of programming was “unapproved.” The New York Times’ deep investigation into Carlson had said he reported directly to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Huge legal pay-outs over pandering to Donald Trump’s election lies were likely a factor in the Murdochs cutting Carlson loose.

Murdoch watcher Paddy Manning suggests that Lachlan’s visit to Ukraine is a sign of him moderating the extremism that had come to dominate Fox. Whether this is a business decision influenced by calmer heads or a true moderating of Lachlan’s more radical right politics remains to be seen.

Meanwhile this week, Tucker Carlson hosted Steve Bannon on his Twitter/X program for a 20-minute conversation. Their discussion about the Dublin riots railed against the self-loathing of our governments replacing their populations with compliant refugees, as if our governments are not embracing every means to exclude asylum seekers. They classed support for abortion and trans people as a dedicated attempt to stop citizens breeding in the interests of replacing them with this new non-white population. They forecast more violence like Dublin’s, as well as the deportation of between 14 and 40 million “illegals” from America if the GOP wins next year. The men described themselves as not feeling fascist, but just expressing common sense.

The only leader the pair judged to be succeeding was Orban.

There has been no condemnation or rejection from the Opposition of the many Coalition politicians joining the ARC or their grandees paying homage to Orban. There is clearly no moderating the “natural law” disgust at the disempowered asking to be heard in The Australian.

We must know the Australian right in those facts.

This essay was first published in Pearls and Irritations as Coalition politicians are embracing far right Orbanist ideology

 

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Elections demand transparency to halt schemes by Christofascists and conspiracists

West Australia’s council elections seem a strange place to pinpoint a warning about American radicalising political games infiltrating the Australian landscape. While it is strange, it is nonetheless important.

American conservative and commentator Andrew Breitbart declared a (contested) doctrine that “politics is downstream from culture.” According to his institutional heir, Steve Bannon, this means strategists must change culture to open up the possibilities in politics. From his time as Breitbart News editor to Chief Strategist of Trump’s White House, he fomented culture war. He continues the goal through hosting his War Room podcast and video.

It is crucial not to underestimate the importance of podcasting in the conveying of “news” and the creation of information bubbles. Bannon’s War Room podcast and video has become a major influencer in the international Right. It continues to chart in the top 10 political podcasts in the USA and the UK. In Australia, it is charting at No.11. Naomi Klein’s important book Doppelgänger describes how crucial the podcast is to the Mirror World inhabited by the radical and conspiratorial Right.

Bannon’s message is anti-democratic, ultraconservative religious and conspiracist, with his podcast performances pitching him substantially to the right of Fox News, playing to the Trumpist CPAC crowd. His production is described as the “top spreader of misinformation in the conservative media ecosystem.”

Bannon’s repeated advice to his audience is that every possible election must be controlled and contested by their faction. In America this means sowing chaos in school boards and library boards, fired by the energy of outrage against pandemic measures and infiltrated with QAnon talking points about “groomers” in schools and libraries.

It is not clear that Bannon’s approach will work. It has varied outcomes in America. What is true is that it is motivating coalitions on the Right to coalesce and contest the most minor of elections where they can have more impact, shaping decisions on culture war issues.

The group behind Perth’s council campaign is called Stand Up Now Australia which was established by Peter Harris. It runs Community Connect, where candidates who know to keep their “mouth shut when it was needed,” campaign on more mainstream issues, concealing their conspiracy agenda. The group claims to have achieved between 11 and 20 successful candidates, with potentially 3 or 4 of the 9-member Busselton council emerging from the program.

They represent conspiratorial positions opposing the 15-minute or smart city idea, as well as promoting sovereign citizen fantasies.

The other category of special interest targeting council elections, just as it targets state and federal contests, is the Pentecostal movement. West Australia’s experience illustrates the degree to which these two movements are intermingled. “Freedom” movement’s Harris was the founder of, and a key donor to, the federal “Family First” party and a member of the Assemblies of God church in South Australia. Harris claimed in 2005 that his political position was not aligned to the American Christian Right, but around the party’s founding in 2004, it was claimed that the many candidates around the country were “coy” about their religious beliefs “on advice.”

It is noteworthy that the Christian Right gives permission to “lie for Jesus.”

In Australian councils, winning elections means taking steps to gain influence over the “economic, social and cultural development” of the community. Instead of fringe figures bullying councils to the point that they have taken their meetings online, conspiracists would become part of shaping what groups and events the region chooses to fund.

A quorum of 3 councillors allows the setting of agenda as well as considerable sway. The role can also, as in Moira Deeming’s climb to state politics, help build profile.

Anything that could be defined as “woke,” such as events tied to First People or multicultural groups could be challenged. This includes libraries which have become a focal point for conspiratorial opposition to LGBTQIA+ celebrations.

Solving the problem of understanding what Australia must do to address the crisis of candidates contesting our elections with anti-democratic goals is not simple.

Much damage can be done in one term. Trusting democracy to remove problematic representatives at the next election allows harm to be done in the meantime.

A group that secretly plans to deceive the electorate about their intentions could be considered to commit the crime of conspiracy. It is very unlikely that an Attorney-General or Director of Public Prosecutions would act on this, not least because of freedom of speech (or silence) objections. States with an obligation to truth in political advertising might have more scope to pursue such a false impression, even produced by omission.

We need changes to the electoral laws to prevent people from lying or hiding their intentions.

Our media is clearly not capable of conducting the appropriate level of investigation and revelation so voters know what is at stake. The ABC does not have the funding to carry out its core mandate, let alone adding this task to the portfolio. It would, however, have the benefit of being a relatively trusted source by those who care enough to research their candidates’ views and intentions.

Nor are our commercial networks the trustworthy bodies to task with this project. Ninefax is compromised by its leadership, not to mention understaffed. Moves on Australian Regional Media (radio) and Australian Community Media (The Canberra Times etc) in recent weeks need monitoring for the impact on their integrity.

News Corp clearly is not a contender. Added to its integrity crisis is the fact that News Corp bought the body that published our suburban and regional mastheads. In 2020, it stopped printing them, putting 76 online and closing 36 permanently. It cut the number of journalists covering local news to a third of the former force. News that used to be delivered to most homes is now unwritten or locked behind paywalls. In Australia, 2.8 million people remain “highly excluded” from internet access. Online news can also limit access to reliable news for some older Australians. These actions by News Corp function as another of its major blows to Australia’s democratic project.

We require a database across the three levels of government so that voters can see what relevant commentary and affiliations our candidates are disguising. This is not something easily tackled by a civil society organisation. It constitutes a substantial workload. A crowdsourcing platform, for example, would require constant monitoring to prevent defamatory submissions remaining on display.

This is a debate Australians need to have urgently, so that voters can know the crucial facts about the candidates they must elect. Democracy demands transparency.

This essay first appeared in Pearls and Irritations as Deception: radicalised groups are infiltrating Australian democracy in your town

 

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Chaos and confusion are intentional weapons: Albanese must strengthen not weaken the misinformation bill

The Albanese government announced this week that it would weaken proposed disinformation-suppressing measures because the Coalition was implacably opposed to them. It is hardly surprising that Peter Dutton’s Opposition should fight the bill; it is disappointing that Labor should have so little commitment to protecting its own chances let alone the democratic project.

Dutton’s Coalition showed, over the referendum campaign, that engaging in culture war divorced from empirical truth is their chosen path to regaining power. Thus it is in Labor’s interest to enhance our democracy by reinforcing integrity in civic debate and politics with as much vigour as they possess.

There are many forces at work fostering chaos and confusion. Some of the problem is structural: social media monetisation driven by pandering to the id; old gatekeeper media organisations struggling to remain solvent in the face of the internet challenge; too much competition for our attention.

There are, however, forces determined to capitalise on that situation. There are many kinds of disinformation at work. Some of it is merely random trolling or malice at play. There is however much that stems from national actors, with such technology functioning as a military asset in hot or cold war situations. Cyber warfare forces are amongst the least expensive divisions and weapons at a government’s disposal, but we have seen repeatedly how powerful one facet, the digital versions of leaflet dropping over enemy lines, has become. Compared to traditional wartime propaganda, it is much harder to distinguish from reliable information.

The US has also used its giant tech firms to meddle in foreign countries’ politics: Google, for example, interfered in countries such as Syria, against Assad, for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Many nations have such divisions with China, Iran and Israel divisions making news. Israel also spawns a number of troubling private “security” companies that deploy military expertise for profit or patriotic goals. It can, of course, be challenging to measure the integrity and intent of the reports and complaints made about these nations’ forays into disinformation.

Russia has been notorious in the field using Facebook to shove crowbars into the civic divides that pervade America. It has also been most effectively muddying opinion about its neoimperialist and traditional imperialist actions regarding nations in its region. As well as allegedly strategising against Israel, it has been working since the invasion of Ukraine to hide the truth. A factor as basic as motive has become fodder for endless debate.

This derives from the same information campaign skills that Russia developed over the Syrian civil war where, for example, the moral reputation of the White Helmets remains starkly divided, depending on the individual’s information source. Some believe them to be heroes who rescue the injured; others see them as a propaganda operation that supports terrorist groups. The latter opinion appears to be the result of a sustained Russian and Syrian government disinformation campaign. Publications such as The Grayzone seem thoroughly integrated into Russian information networking.

The situation is not aided by the old anti-war left becoming susceptible to Russian propaganda about Ukraine driven by long and justified disgust with Western neoimperial foreign policy. To see figures like Noam Chomsky spreading the new imperialist aggressor’s talking points is odd: there is room for villains all around. This is one facet of the new diagonalist politics where leftish figures end up working for the Right.

The same information chaos surrounds understanding the sustained Israeli bombardment of Gaza after Hamas’s gruesome attack on the 7th of October. Cyber strategies, including disinformation, have been important tools. There are many actors involved, including minor third parties.

The power of lobby groups to suppress discussion of information arising from the violence has been stark. Jewish peak bodies have Australian government and media so dedicated to avoiding charges of antisemitism that they can barely challenge action that is “perilously close to meeting the threshold” of genocide. Penny Wong’s long-delayed and tepid request to halt attacks on hospitals is depicted as supporting “false and harmful narratives,” a call that has the peak bodies “highly concerned.” Moreover it’s important for journalists (and Kmart) to distinguish between real Jewish community peak bodies and a disgraceful imitation. Disinformation augments misinformation natural in the chaos of warfare so that knowing where to find factual accounts is fraught.

News Corp is certainly one source to avoid. Rupert Murdoch’s investment, with Dick Cheney, in Genie Energy has prevented his media organisation being a reliable source on Israel and Palestine. Genie has had exclusive rights to explore for oil and gas in the contested Golan Heights since 2013. (Did Rupert Murdoch request Scott Morrison send peacekeeping forces to the Golan Heights in 2019?) The investment is also argued to be a substantial factor in News Corp’s climate denial propaganda.

This illustrates that private sector efforts to manipulate opinion can be just as critical as national efforts to achieve military goals. Climate denial and culture wars promoting ultraconservative social positions have long been tied to muddying the civic information space. The primary goal was overtly crippling public ability to commit to fighting for industry regulation.

The model was honed in the campaign to stop certainty taking hold about the gold standard science linking tobacco smoking and cancer. The cigarette, in 2013 considered “the deadliest artefact in the history of human civilisation,” was not regulated for decades because of the long PR war fought by the tobacco lobby. Many of the same people and scientists used the same strategies to stop the transition from carbon-based energy to renewables. The number of deaths to be caused by this 50-year delay will dwarf tobacco deaths in the decades ahead.

The bodies fighting industry regulation and taxes merged with ultraconservatives fighting the growing diversity of 20th century societies. Networks like the Council for National Policy and the Atlas Network were developed with the goal of destroying civic discourse in order to achieve the ultimate liberty of business combined with statist control of public morality. Much of the money funding this project comes from fossil fuel billionaires.

The strategies used include owning media bodies. Religious radio networks in the US, for example, proved powerful. It involved founding schools or funding chairs in universities intended to produce intellectual material to support their goals. Representatives and delegates continue to write columns for the newspapers, bolstered by big advertorial and advertising spending. Metastasising clusters of civil society organisations are still being established: some were intended to present as thinktanks, others to present as grass roots organisations. The fakery involved in these is captured in the strategy’s label “astroturfing.”

These interests work with full-service influence companies to manipulate the debate. The company that developed the model, Black, Manafort and Stone, became known as the Torturers’ Lobby. It was not just murderous autocrats that they whitewashed for Washington dollars, however. They perverted the information space and democracy for corporate and political clients too.

Australia spawned Crosby Textor, and New Zealand Topham Guerin, as offspring of that innovative forebear.

The Murdoch family was involved, alongside some of Australia’s best known mining magnates, in the founding of such “think” tanks in Australia. The Institute of Public Affairs, the Centre for Independent Studies and the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance are several of the Australian bodies that belong to the insidious international Atlas Network.

The Voice referendum campaign become another tool in the array of targets selected by these bodies. Dr Jeremy Walker and Anthony Klan’s investigations into the ways that Advance and Fair Australia are connected to the Atlas Network’s Australian affiliates also highlighted how the No campaign used the typical strategies to muddy the debate until clarity was impossible. The connections to fossil fuel are clear and follow a long history of Atlas affiliates attacking First People’s efforts to protect their land.

The slogan used by the No campaign, “If you don’t know, vote no,” was an embarrassing celebration of Australian ignorance. It was also peak fossil fuel disinformation. This command to abandon the search for truth and understanding is precisely what tobacco and fossil fuel interests sought to create and manipulate. The study of agnotology is, in part, a study of the deliberate fostering of this ignorance. They want us all to vote no to regulating or taxing industry because we just don’t know.

China and Russia are both amongst powers alleged to have powered an attack on information about the Voice, including the deployment of bots. The AEC’s efforts to check lies have been described as “like a man standing with a backyard hose, waving it at an inferno.”

In celebrating the defeat of the Voice, Jacinta Nampijinpa price signalled that her next target would be Queer Australians. Andrew Bolt highlighted again the link between the Voice and fighting climate action: slamming renewable energy with “Now let’s do Labor’s other mad crusade” (23/10).

Fighting disinformation about fossil fuels and similar controversial sectors, as well as inhibiting destructive culture war battles used to disguise the primary goals, has become the field of independents and minor parties like the Greens. Monique Ryan has introduced a bill to limit the toxic impact of lobbyists with her Clean Up Politics proposal. Zali Steggall has introduced her Voter Protections in Political Advertising bill. Sophie Scamps has tabled a bill to provide safeguards for public appointments. They are collectively fighting alongside the Greens to pressure Labor to make the misinformation bill strong and also extend it to cover the mainstream media.

The Liberal Party has arguably become the political arm of the various interests represented by the Atlas Network’s Australian affiliates. Their direct and broader interest lie in the information space being chaotic. In this light, their criticism that the misinformation bill attacks “freedom of speech” must be seen as the disingenuous nonsense that it is.

Australia can’t be a functioning democracy unless voters understand policy platforms on offer and the stakes. Unless we properly control dis- and misinformation in the civic space, we have little chance to vote well. Albanese must find a backbone for his own sake as well as the nation’s.

 

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Judges fail to understand: people must pay a price for choosing to act as a Nazi

Victoria’s leading Neo Nazi left the County Court in Melbourne recently with the judge’s message, “Good luck with the future, Gentlemen” ringing in his ears, laughing at the judge’s assertion that he and his co-offender have good prospects for rehabilitation. They greeted reporters outside the court with the observation that they were innocent, followed by “homophobic and antisemitic slurs.” They departed with another Roman Salute and “Heil Hitler.”

The Judicial College of Victoria and similar bodies around the nation have some serious educating of judges to institute. It seems likely that judges give latitude to White young men who appear in a suit and with short hair that they would never give to young men of other ethnicities. It is also possible that judges do not understand the context of these cases before them.

The changes to Victorian laws to prevent the use of key Nazi symbols are a first step to address the threat of Neo Nazis to our community. Laws in place already address their violence and hate-speech.

These don’t work, however, if judges do not grasp the threat that violent White Supremacists pose to the country. Police are not the solution to Nazis in our midst, but they are one suppressive strategy, and their rare arrests (and the DPP’shigh bar” before taking action) make little difference if those on the bench do not treat the perpetrators with sufficient seriousness.

That same leading Neo Nazi was saved a jail term in January this year after a brutal bashing of a Black Channel 9 security guard in 2021. The co-offender was let off with a fine earlier in October after distributing white ethnostate stickers. The fact he was charged with a summary offense meant his stickers even had to be returned to him (Herald Sun 18/10). Every such failure by our judges emboldens these violent bigots, enabling them to recruit disaffected youth with the knowledge that society winks at their crimes.

In the wake of the attack on the US Capitol on the 6th of January 2021, the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and similar White Supremacist militias have been put under pressure by arrests, court cases and sentences of up to 22 years. They had been emboldened by President Trump’s command to “Stand back and stand by.” In 2023, the system that had begun to act after the horror of the Charlottesville White Supremacist rally is finally having an impact.

While these sentences have not solved the problem of America’s violent, hate-filled militia, they have damaged them and their ability to recruit.

It has taken violent acts emerging out of – apparently – nowhere to trigger this stronger action in America, where free speech and weapon possession are sacrosanct no matter the risk to fellow citizens. Antifascist researchers and domestic terrorism experts had long known what was brewing, but their voices were kept out of the discussion and the government system by Republicans who characterised focus on these bigoted groups as an attack on American conservatives.

In Australia, we are in that moment where Neo Nazi action seems to occur out of nowhere: there was shock to see the salute executed on Victoria’s Parliament steps in March in support of an anti-LGBTQIA+ gathering, for example. If we are coherent in our responses now, we have a better chance of preventing them from recruiting and terrorising minority communities in the destructive ways seen in America.

It is important for judges to understand the context. Neo Nazi groups are an international phenomenon communicating on social media but more often on apps like Telegram where their communications are hidden from the mainstream. Together they are working for the elimination of Jewish people from our societies, exiled to Israel. They are working for all non-White and non-Christian people to be excluded from our nation, whether by bloodshed or deportation. They are working for all feminists and LGBTQIA+ people to be beaten or killed. The goal is the breakdown of society, known as accelerationism. This is to be followed by a reconstruction of the perfect White patriarchy.

These goals abut the extremist Christian movements in mainstream “conservative” politics. They are an escalation of the Orbanism that some Liberal Party grandees and operatives have been networking into the Australian debate. Nazis integrated with the “freedom” movement that opposed health measures over the pandemic’s worst. Victorian Liberal Party figures appeared in Victoria with such protests where gallows were erected, intended for Premier Dan Andrews. News Corp and the Coalition government encouraged their protests for political aims.

The Coalition’s decision to fight the Voice to Parliament referendum shows they are determined to stoke culture war passions rather than devising electable policy platforms. Combined with the fear and challenges that the climate catastrophe is already causing, the scope for expanding radicalisation exists.

The failure of the system to recognise the real threat posed by such figures and groups, in five or twenty years, leaves antifascist groups in the community working to impose a price for Neo Nazi activity.

The White Rose Society surveils, publicises and coordinates reports to the police when necessary. It was White Rose that led the police to the Melbourne Neo Nazis responsible for the grotesque threats to Senator Lydia Thorpe. Andy Fleming, Tom Tanuki and AltMediaWatch amongst others report and explain domestic Nazi activities. These include reports on White Supremacists in Australia’s armed forces.

Local antifascist groups place posters around Neo Nazi individuals’ suburbs alerting their neighbourhood to their appearance and the threat posed. They spend hours monitoring Telegram channels for trouble and patterns.

Other groups decide to lift the cost to such figures by bashing them when the Neo Nazis emerge for public activity. If civil society doesn’t want the street violence of small groups acting to intimidate Nazis from our streets, we need to remove the necessity.

White supremacist groups have a tradition of falling apart in hilariously bathetic internecine tantrums. When that doesn’t happen, however, the risk to community can elevate, particularly in chaotic times.

Once these groups are large and strong, they are very difficult to end. The time to act is while they are small and weak.

We need our judges educated to see their role in protecting society from violent bigots whose goal is to break everything we value.

 

This essay was first published in Pearls and Irritations as Australian judges are failing to protect society from violent extremism

 

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Climate change deniers, theocrats and neoliberals meet in London for the scariest Halloween Party

It was helpful of Greg Sheridan to advertise in The Australian (27/10) the new ultraconservative conference that he is attending in London. While his column is no doubt intended to recruit, it is useful in shining a spotlight on a traditionally shadowy architecture of influence.

Apparently 1,500 citizens from around the world are gathering at the O2 venue over Halloween in London to talk about how to save the world from the “elites” at a cost of AUD2870 per head. The new body promoting conservative activism is the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). The body’s tagline is that the “The ARC of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” The “ark” wordplay to denote them as saviours of Western Civilisation is no doubt intentional.

One of the key figures organising this event is John Anderson, former National Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister. He recently appeared at Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Australia conference which was a Trumpist rallying cry against the Voice to Parliament and LGBTQIA+ rights. He also spoke at the reactionary Family First NZ conference. More significantly, Anderson, according to the ARC site, runs “Australia’s pre-eminent politico-cultural video podcast,” an “enterprise” that has 400,000 subscribers.

On his program, Anderson interviewed the unbearable Jordan Peterson; now they are at the helm of this nascent body. Peterson is one of the stars of the internet manosphere where he makes his money selling sexism, Western chauvinism and climate denial. Joining these two as founder is Baroness Philippa Stroud, formerly of the Legatum Institute, an influence body whose “lead sponsor” is the Legatum Group, representing a Dubai-based private hedge-fund billionaire. This is the “think” tank that fought for the strictest Brexit with no tariffs, and drones to cope with the Irish border issue. The economic conditions created by “think” tanks such as this have one million British children living in “destitution,” more than doubling the figure over the last five years.

The pretext for forging this alliance is that climate action is going to destroy the ability to provide food for humanity, pushing us into poverty. Recent scientific findings that point to evidence that all “life on Earth is imperilled” by the climate crisis are not accepted. Desmog has described the ARC conference as a key event in the “climate crisis denial movement.”

Of the international crowd, 150 are Australian. Anderson and Sheridan are to be joined by former Prime Ministers John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. Anti-abortion activist Amanda Stoker is on the advisory panel alongside Howard, Abbott and Andrew Hastie. Angus Taylor, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Ted O’Brien and James Paterson are attending, as is Barnaby Joyce. Mark Latham is too. The only political surprise is Julian Leeser who was a more moderate actor in the Voice debate.

Most delegates are coming from the UK and the US. Sheridan counts 300 as deriving from Europe. One of the most noteworthy American attendees is new House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is a fully-fledged theocrat. He has been described by a colleague as a “despicable bigot of the highest order.” The list of figures on the advisory board alone features notables representing climate denial, Western chauvinism and ultraconservative religious beliefs from around the world. It also has what Sheridan characterises as “serious business backers.”

Anderson explained to Sheridan that, “Citizens in the West feel marginalised, treated with contempt by the elites.” The Voice was apparently a project of the “expertocracy” that patronised the voter. We need elites, but “the right elites.” This reflects a trend in the National Conservative (Nat Con) movement that, while pitched at actual elites, demonises the intellectual “elites” as the crisis in society. It feigns populism while aiming to control all the behaviours and beliefs in the populace that are not “traditional.” It is simultaneously statist in its disdain for the individual’s choices and libertarian for the “conservative” business world.

This is an important moment to read prize winning journalist and historical researcher Anne Nelson’s “Shadow Network” book, recounting the history of the Council for National Policy in the US. It illustrates the strategies at work in this body as well as the global Atlas Network. The “think” tanks and organisations formulated in this model unite disparate actors in cutting edge strategies led by a multitude of misleadingly-named bodies to foster ultra-free market policy and ultraconservative social goals. Many of the plutocrat funders are fossil fuel billionaires.

The game-plan of the Atlas Network was rolled out for the Voice to Parliament referendum, as UTS lecturer Jeremy Walker examined. The 500 Atlas affiliates around the world have consistently worked to break the union of Indigenous populations and environmental action impeding resource extraction. Their ploys include depicting climate activists and environmentalists as terrorists or extremists. This has been the case for Indigenous environmental protectors around the world. They have also worked to co-opt some First People with mining profits to break unity and fight the resource extractors’ opponents for them. ARC Advisor Magatte Wade heads Atlas affiliate “Center for African Prosperity” where she argues climate activism is the new colonialism, intended to impoverish Africans.

The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), an Australian Atlas affiliate, has strong personnel connections to the Advance body that led the No campaign through its Fair Australia brand. Advance shares personnel and an address with sites that that promoted a range of disruptive and contradictory positions against the Voice, including a Christian one (not least because spiritual connections to country are a pagan threat). The cluster includes an anti-climate action offshoot called “Not Zero.” Advance has personnel and logistical connections with Whitestone Strategic consulting, a shadowy company that also has links with the Pentecostal movement’s peak body, the Australian Christian Lobby, and with Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party. It’s uncertain how much damage to the referendum was achieved by Advance and friends: they seem a clumsy attempt at the Atlas model.

Nelson illustrates how the possible American political collapse into fossil fuel-embracing, theocratic authoritarianism was created over 50 years with the kind of networking reflected in the ARC conference. The O2 event trumpets the spread of the fossil fuel-promoting, ultraconservative movement internationally, work that Atlas has been carrying out in secret.

This might be 2023’s scariest Halloween party.

 

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations as An ultraconservative shadow network is forming, designed to influence you

 

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Victorian government neuters its integrity body

By Stephen Charles and Lucy Hamilton

The Victorian government has just acted to ensure that the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) is neutered by a subtle gambit in the crafting of the advertisement seeking applicants for the position of Commissioner.

The first requirement in the ad was for a “leader with demonstrated experience and exceptional capability in: public sector leadership and management”. This can only have been intended to place that role not in the hands of someone independent and of judicial stature, but someone with experience in the public service, someone suitable for the role of chief executive officer, rather than the Commissioner of IBAC.

The advertisement that was released for Victoria’s new IBAC Commissioner was clearly crafted in defiance of the IBAC Act. The act specifies that to be eligible for appointment as a Commissioner, a person must be a judge of the High Court, the Federal Court, or a Supreme Court, or be qualified for such an appointment.

Within the Victorian Constitution, however, these requirements were expanded to include people “admitted to practice for not less than five years.”

The advertisement’s wording makes it clear that hardly any judges or barristers could qualify for the role. Judges and leading senior counsel almost invariably have little experience or known capability in public sector leadership and management, and therefore cannot have developed an understanding of the operation of the public sector, its governance or accountability framework. It is believed no judge or senior king’s counsel was on the short-list for consideration, and, if that is correct, the framing of the advertisement provides the explanation.

IBAC’s Commissioner must have the experience, knowledge and standing to challenge the most senior figures in politics, public service and police, and on the bench, if necessary, in the course of performing these duties. The Commissioner must be equipped to be able to decide matters such as whether to start an investigation, including whether there are reasonable grounds for suspecting a crime; whether to investigate a supreme court judge; whether to enter police premises to seize evidence; whether to authorise phone-tapping.

Victoria’s integrity system, consisting of the IBAC, Ombudsman and Auditor-General’s Office, performs a crucial role in ensuring Victorians can have full confidence in the state’s public sector and that it is free from corruption. Each of these bodies can be damaged in various ways to reduce their effectiveness.

Integrity commissions such as IBAC can be unduly limited by restrictive legislation, by funding cuts, by the quality of the staff appointed as Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, and by reducing their capacity to make public their investigations into corruption and misconduct.

In its first decade of operation, IBAC has suffered from time to time: inadequate funding, flawed legislation, and the inability to expose misbehaviour to the public by matters such as the requirement for “exceptional circumstances” to exist before a hearing can take place in public. Victoria’s IBAC Act limits the definition of corrupt conduct to criminal matters, which would exclude, for example, the pork-barrelling that so disgusted the nation in the 2022 federal election.

Notwithstanding these problems, IBAC has survived and thrived by virtue of the quality of senior staff, in particular its Commissioners, and produced admirable reports after lengthy investigations demonstrating repeatedly the misbehaviour of aspects of the Victorian government and public service.

Victoria is not alone in this battle between politicians and integrity bodies. Only NSW’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has the strength required, yet several NSW Premiers have repeatedly praised ICAC for its great work protecting the state from corruption, making them the rare exceptions to the rule.

In September 2021, South Australia’s legislature combined across party lines to attack the powers of investigation of their state’s anti-corruption commission. The Commissioner at the time, Ann Vanstone, described her powers as having been “decimated.”

The definition of what constitutes “corruption” was reduced and the ability to investigate maladministration and misconduct was removed.

No MP in either House, not even the Greens, voted against these attacks on the efficacy of the South Australian ICAC.

In 2020, the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) had its funding cut “in revenge” for its crucial findings about corruption of the sports grants program and carparks funds under the Morrison government.

Preventing public hearings is one of the most harmful of the restrictions besetting state bodies. These are a crucial resource to show that integrity is being pursued, to attract witnesses and to educate our politicians and public servants on what corruption might look like. They are regarded by most commissioners as a critical factor in demonstrating what is corruption to the public and in their principal function of exposing corruption.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC), finally legislated after long consultation by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’s department, is only able to stage hearings in public in “exceptional circumstances.” This is the result of a deal with the Coalition and is a significant blight on the most important development in the Albanese government’s integrity platform. It will certainly reduce severely the number of the NACC’s public hearings and the public’s trust that corruption is being pursued.

The block to transparency in the expression “exceptional circumstances” in the NACC Act was taken from the IBAC Act. No other state’s integrity body has a similar provision.

It is particularly important that the new Commissioner of IBAC is strong enough to steer the body towards the reforms that Victorians require for its anti-corruption remit to be carried out in a way that fosters confidence. The South Australian government too is looking to restrengthen their ICAC.

One of the principal functions of anti-corruption bodies is in exposing and preventing the corruption and misconduct in government that threatens in so many ways to undermine democracy.

The more subtle the attack on the integrity body, the harder it is for the public to perceive the effects brought about by the manipulation. The framing of this advertisement meant that some of the people best qualified to protect Victorian democracy were apparently not represented on the short-list.

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations as Only parliaments are able to set up integrity bodies, but politicians hate and fear them

Stephen Charles is a retired judge who served on the Supreme Court of Victoria Court of Appeal between 1995 and 2006. He is a member of the boards of the Centre for Public Integrity and the Accountability Round Table. He is the primary author of the 2022 book: Keeping them Honest: the case for a genuine national integrity commission and other vital democratic reforms.

 

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Reforming money in politics: crushing Dark Money without eliminating quality independents

One of the most crucial decisions about the shape of our democracy is about to be resolved. The Coalition and the ALP appear to have reached a decision to block any further challenge to their duopoly control. While it is crucial that we introduce strong reforms to stop third parties distorting our elections, we cannot do so in a way that prevents quality independents and minor parties from challenging hidebound incumbents.

The major parties’ falling primary vote has them unnerved and prepared to distort democracy to protect their manifold advantages. We saw over the referendum weekend that the tools of deception, fear and loathing have too much power to sway our elections. Protecting against the big parties’ gambits is crucial to a future where the public has some influence on the shape of the nation.

Alan Kohler has reported on a cynical deal apparently being forged by shadow special minister of state Jane Hume for the Liberals against the so-called teals and Special Minister of State Don Farrell for Labor against Clive Palmer. Their deal will involve “increased transparency, caps on donations and campaign spending, and increased public spending for elections.” These are all measures to be celebrated, unless they work to prevent Australian voters freeing the country from state capture by industry sector.

Ensuring integrity both in donation reform and election spending are critical reforms to ensure transparency in politics; we must have governments that build policy for the common good, not for the donors.

At the same time, it is crucial that we allow scope in our politics for transparent, integrity-run organisations to support quality candidates. Distinguishing this from insidious spending by vested interests and conspiracy cohorts takes fine reasoning and cautious designing of the reforms.

Dark money distorting the Voice debate

The Voice campaign has revealed how much Dark Money is distorting our political debates. Clive Palmer spent over 200 million to distort the 2019 and 2022 federal elections. He claimed to have swung the former to the Coalition with his preferences. Now the coal miner is reportedly spending $2 million on advertising in a last minute bid to swing two crucial states away from supporting the Voice referendum.

The low barriers of the social media era mean that the quantity of money spent cannot be the only metric used to assess disinformation. A Melbourne crypto trader has spent at least $16,000 spreading Voice fearmongering with paid advertising created on a $140 per-month app.

The 7.30 Report last week added to earlier reporting on Dark Money subsidising the Advance group and through it, its subsidiary Fair Australia, which led the No campaign. The ABC’s report focussed attention on Simon Fenwick, also using his Wall St money to fight climate action. Earlier reporting in Crikey listed Advance’s donors including a number of other wealthy Australians.

Mark Kenny described Advance as being founded in the wake of the Marriage Equality plebiscite to mobilise “a hitherto disparate conservative citizenry whose adherents blame “wokeism” for everything from the declining authority of the Christian church to gender fluidity, environmentalism, and the Voice to Parliament.”

We will need to design a strategy that accounts for money in all its forms, including the scope for small social media spending to manipulate democracy.

American strategies in Australia

American Dark Money manipulation is notorious for its longterm vision and its cunning.

Sydney University of Technology lecturer Jeremy Walker has drawn the connections and parallels between Advance and Fair’s No campaign to the insidious American Atlas Network that has worked to dismantle societies for plutocrat gains across the globe. Its ultra-free market machinations have particularly worked to protect fossil fuel interests. As Walker points out, the gas sector in Australia is particularly interested in stopping the union of Indigenous people and climate action.

The connections are rarely straightforward: money and influence have worked in labyrinthine ways over decades to distort the playing field for the interests of the wealthy, in particular for tobacco and fossil fuels.

Over the weekend, investigative reporter Anthony Klan revealed the shadowy status of Advance and its promoters. Precisely in the Atlas model, it has a network of fake “grass roots” seeming bodies – a strategy called astroturfing – that include entities dedicated to attacks on climate action.

One of the great concerns for figures in the fossil fuel sector at this moment when governments have been mainly neutralised is the possibility that court action will become an impediment to projects and profit. Cases brought over combined Indigenous and climate interests have proven themselves to be a merger that the Dark Money does not want to fight.

Jones Day, a law firm at the heart of the insidious “conservative” legal movement in America, with several Australian offices, has focused on the obstacle in the Australian market.

Advance denies connections to Atlas but there is personnel overlap with the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) which is part of the Atlas Network. Warren Mundine and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price both work with the CIS as well as Advance’s affiliate Fair organisation. Mundine chairs LibertyWorks, the Atlas affiliate with connections to fighting climate action and to promoting Trumpist politics in Australia through the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Mundine is also chairman of CPAC Australia.

In the USA, parallel spending is also funnelled through Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs). These are independent bodies that have unlimited spending ability to channel donors’ money into advertising campaigns in support of candidates and parties. This frees Dark Money to distort the political information space with minimal constraint. The Australian Coalition already has roughly 86 bodies able to function as a swarm of PACs.

Unless Australian caps on spending are accompanied by careful restraints on how parallel spending is executed, the money that has gone to parties – and much more – will continue to expand on their ability to distort our politics away from the national interest towards vested interests.

Determining good money and bad

It is uncertain how much power the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM) has, or whether it is following instructions from the parties’ strategists.

The challenge stands for the committee to work out how to distinguish between the money that distorts democracy and the money that enhances it. The Coalition and the ALP however have little interest in allowing greater democratic freedom which can disturb their hold on power.

Climate 200, for example, has supported a range of independent campaigns. Once a potential candidate establishes that they have community support in the electorate, and if they share values – a foundational concern for integrity and climate action, as well as supporting women in politics – Climate 200 helps provide the money, largely from 11,000 crowdfunded donors, that will enable the independent candidate to compete with the party politician not meeting their electorate’s concerns.

Climate 200 is unusually transparent about its funding and adamant that it holds no control over the candidates beyond that. Compared to Clive Palmer’s candidates, Climate 200 has backed intelligent, thoughtful people displaying integrity in their goals and responsiveness to their electorates. Most of the candidates elected with a Climate 200 start-up fund have shown themselves to be much more responsive to issues of economic inequity than their major party-affiliated peers.

Up to $3 million was spent on Josh Frydenberg’s federal seat in 2022 and a candidate has almost no chance without seed funding of between $250,000-$500,000 to open an office and hire one or two staff to begin to balance the inherent benefits of belonging to a major party. The Australia Institute estimates that federal politicians receive incumbency benefits approximating almost $3 million from the public purse each electoral cycle.

By enforcing public spending to fund elections across the board, however, the major parties are limiting the ability of the small players and quality independents to challenge the duopoly. Victoria’s state reforms, for example, mean that parties gain a much larger public pay-out from elections once they meet the 4% of primary votes benchmark. Parties can also receive this public funding in advance of a looming election. Independents and minor parties have no way to match that if dramatic caps are also instituted. That money is not taxable for party candidates but is taxable income for independents. All these factors undermine quality independents’ ability to challenge the incumbents.

Candidates representing the major parties also currently enjoy huge uncosted advantage in elections. Brand recognition, habit and national spending campaigns are a boost: if the JSCEM’s proposal to cap spending per seat is instituted, this will be a substantial further advantage for the duopoly.

Victoria’s state transition to public money spending dominating election campaigns has been shaped in such a way as to stop quality independents from being electable.

The interim report of the JSCEM has shown the intention to control money spent on garnering an electoral impact by “associated entities and third parties.” It appears not to have been well designed: Kohler, for example, believes Clive Palmer will still be able to drive “one of his trucks through the loopholes” that the JSCEM reforms will enact. There seems to be no intention to tackle the major parties’ business councils where “memberships” are not treated as donations. The JSCEM needs to do better: this is crucial democracy protection.

We will need an independent committee to assess bodies and individual spending for integrity, transparency, and honesty. Money that tends to be spent on distorting debates ought to be taxed and/or fined. This should cover so-called think-tanks, especially ones allied with international shadowy groups like the Atlas Network. This last category includes the CIS, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), and the Australian Taxpayer Association.

The Albanese government has been a disappointment above all in its failure to act on climate beyond mere rhetoric. The new 116 fossil fuel projects listed to commence are a disaster in a moment when every fraction of a temperature rise means more compounding extreme events set to befall us.

Labor, like the 2022 Coalition, must be open to challenge by quality independents and minor parties. Otherwise, the fossil fuel sector is set to maintain its state capture of our governments. Our climate action potential will remain stalled. Parties of government must be forced to respond to community concerns rather than corporate and sector investments. Crushing protest and blocking competition from independents is not how democracy should function.

The referendum showed how vulnerable our electorate is to all the games emerging out of the American Right. It is imperative that we urge the Albanese government to speed up the integrity platform reforms it promised, and to do them with precision. No government lasts indefinitely: Labor needs to protect itself from a post-democratic Right as much as the nation needs them to do it.

If the major parties plan to prevent future challenges to their control of government we need to protest before they embed it in legislation.

 

This was first published in Peals and Irritations as Dark Money is distorting the Voice debate

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Conservative parties have become post-democratic: the Voice No campaign is another blow.

The 21st century international Right which has hijacked the old conservative parties is post-democratic. The use that the Coalition parties are making of the Voice debate shows the Australian inflection of this trend.

In the USA, the MAGA wing has taken over the already radicalising Republican Party. The conservatives of old tried to ride the tiger of popular grievance. They needed to in order to garner enough votes to win government for plutocrat policies. Now the big cat is eating the party’s face. A Trump (or copycat) win in the 2024 election would mean dire outcomes for America’s battered democratic systems. Trump is forecasting executing generals and shoplifters, sending the National Guard into cities to “combat crime,” mass militarised deportations and purging the civil service of anyone not strictly devoted to his cult. As many as 50,000 employees would be targeted. He has threatened to investigate news organisations for treason if he wins.

Directly after a violent mob invaded their workplace in 2021, 147 Republican congresspeople continued to refuse to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory despite the fact that almost all of them knew it was the most secure election in US history.

The UK Tories threw their country over a cliff with Brexit built on lies and bigotry. The economy is savaged. The living standard is declining. The attempt to implement ideological-extreme economic policy was a catastrophe. Like the Republicans, they are forced to foment deadly culture war hatreds to distract the public from their failures.

Both the Republicans and the Tories have the advantage of deeply flawed electoral systems to maintain their hold on power. The absence of compulsory voting is the plutocrat’s friend.

The Republicans have the electoral college, a long history of suppressing the vote, and gerrymandered states with ever more partisan control of voting. The diligent work to subvert representation is well established.

The Tories worked to damage the independence of their electoral commission and introduced the unnecessary obstacle of voter ID in echo of Republican anti-democratic gambits. They simultaneously introduced suppression of the media, protest, and whistleblowers.

Australia is blessed by comparison. Our independent system of Electoral Commissions is critical to maintaining faith in the integrity of the system. Our compulsory voting and compulsory preferential voting are both protections from the machinations of oligarchs.

In the pandemic era, the mass inequalities of neoliberal capitalism have been exposed in much greater clarity. “Essential” workers were sacrificed while the white collar class worked from home in much greater comfort. The savings and reliable income of the upper cohort protected them from the terror of losing everything. Governments around the affluent world were forced to look at measures to stop the precariat becoming homeless and starved.

Voters are less tolerant of the old narratives that keep us in our place having seen so glaringly the chasm in pandemic experience.

The Australian Liberal Party has no interest in returning to its more moderate past where it balanced the needs of money with that of the worker and role of government. That version of itself has a chance to win government, but it can no longer acknowledge that the three forces have a legitimate voice. Workers are slackers. Government is the problem. “Woke” forces – like the Labor Party and and an independent media – are an impediment to their goals. The current Right no longer believes their opposition has a legitimate right to govern.

The NSW Liberals managed the first Australian attack on an electoral system that forces parties to campaign on viable platforms. Stripping the preferential system of the “compulsory” aspect gave them a leg up at the last election, although it wasn’t enough.

It will take much more work for the parties of the Right to cut away at the democratic processes in Australia that impede their push towards a more illiberal democracy.

The Voice to Parliament is being used as one of their tools.

Peta Credlin admitted in 2017 on Sky News that there had been no “carbon tax.” She explained, “It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know. It was many other things in nomenclature terms but we made it a carbon tax.” She described this reframing as “brutal retail politics.” And, she pointed out, that Tony Abbott used that perversion of the truth to overthrow Julia Gillard within six months.

The Voice is being used in precisely this deceitful “wedge issue” role to damage Albanese. Credlin is herself one of the generals directing the battle against a mere advisory body intended to help raise the wellbeing of First Nations people. And the wedge is fracturing the nation.

The use of culture war topics can be relatively trivial – such as the battle against induction cooktops. It can also be devastating, literally life and death, in the vindictive campaigns against First Nations people, refugees and trans people (as the vanguard for reversing marriage equality reforms). The point is to forge an anti-“woke” identity within the base: those coopted will never be able to vote for the demonised centre, let alone the Left. They will have lost the ability to see the facts to be debated, with all educated “elites” despised as the enemy dedicated to deception. Compassion and nuance are portrayed as weakness.

The No campaign, as a tool against democracy, has another facet. This role is a much longer-term gameplay. (And we see in almost a century of work against egalitarian reforms how long-term the vision on the international Right actually is.)

The second goal is to break faith in the democratic project itself. The base longs for the “honesty” of post-democratic authoritarianism where “elites” no longer deceive the populace about having a say. Trump’s MAGA crowds bay for the blood of military leaders and even Republican politicians who have not paid obeisance to their cult leader assiduously enough.

Around the Australian federal and state elections in 2022, the radicalised base spread conspiracies borrowed from the American sphere. Dominion voting machines were skewing the vote, even though those Trump-myth machines are not in use here. We vote on paper, in case they hadn’t noticed. Votes were, the Australian conspiracists claimed, thrown out or brought in.

The AEC’s Twitter/X account is tirelessly battling the cascade of lies on social media that are spreading saying that the AEC itself and the referendum processes are fraudulent. Peter Dutton exacerbated that conspiracy thinking in his declarations about the use of ticks not crosses meaning the referendum was “rigged.”

The latest polls suggest that while Dutton’s inexcusable decision to turn the Voice referendum into a wedge issue might prevent the referendum passing, it has damaged his own standing with voters. We must resist these culture war distractions wielded by divisive politicians and their spin doctors.

If the referendum fails, the Right – from parliament to the media and the social media swamps – will have caused great harm to First Nations people and the populace more broadly. The reiteration of voter fraud theories will have augmented the idea that voting is corrupted and the government is illegitimate. If the referendum succeeds, that latter message will gain in volume.

It is imperative that Liberal Party leaders contradict those rumours of a broken democratic process firmly if they want to prove the claim that they are post-democratic wrong.

 

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