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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Lucy Hamilton -
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Terence Mills -
Steve Davis -
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BJ Chippindale
Return to home pageHorrifying. Will Kiwis submit to this?
Imagine taking your Democracy model car to a garage to get a wheel alignment. The garage employs 2 amateur mechanics. One is classically trained in lining his/her pockets while preaching the virtues of liberalism and trickle-down economics, the other mechanic is a consensus wo/man preaching the virtues of communalism, all cars are equal, all else is misinfo.
Both end up fighting over who gets to service your car, one works on for an hour, the other intevenes and does an hour 6uilding 6ack 6etter. You drive the car away, none the wiser that it was serviced by 2 mechanics with different agenda. And then you wonder why your good olde Democracy model has a speed wobble. You didn’t do your research, you trusted duds. Wake up, the answer is not neo-cons and not the one-world govt of Communists sitting in positions of power at the UN, WHO or WEF. Vote LNP & Labor out.
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“Communists sitting in positions of power at the UN, WHO or WEF.”
Wow.
Tell us more.
Lucy, another great article, but I live for the day when you concede that the differences between liberalism and neo-liberalism are merely cosmetic, or differences of intensity. They both have the same aims, and the same pathways to those aims.
Your itemising of the neo-liberal leanings of the new NZ government included — undermining indigenous rights, antagonism to indigenous culture, funding from tobacco and fossil fuel lobbies, privatizations, selling of sensitive land, dismantling the welfare state, rorting parliamentary benefits schemes, undermining of renewable energy. These are all common to liberalism, and even to Labor to a lesser extent.
Neo-liberalism is the honest version of liberalism. They don’t hide their intentions to the same extent as liberals. Theirs is liberalism with the smiley mask off. I cannot think of a neo-liberal policy that liberals would baulk at. Electoral backlash would be the only factor I can think of for baulking, but I’m happy to be corrected on that.
The problem is liberal economics — the economics of greed.
Thank you for the link to the Tom Bergin interview, it’s a beauty. I loved the quote from the home page — Any society that allows itself to become radically unequal eventually collapses into an uprising or a police state—or both. Join venture capitalist Nick Hanauer and some of the world’s leading economic and political thinkers in an exploration of who gets what and why. Turns out, everything you learned about economics is wrong. And if we don’t do something about rising inequality, the pitchforks are coming.
We just get 1 nasty virus more or less under control and a far worse , more deadly one takes hold !
Whilst Atlas and Advance claim to have influenced the No vote in the Voice Referendum in Australia, further analysis would seem to suggest that the opposition of prominent Aboriginal leaders, Warren Mundine and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, had a more significant impact on disinterested Australians who, as a friend of mine noted : ‘if the first nations people can’t come together on this then best we let it lapse’.
As regards the Dunkley by-election, Advance put a lot of money into their anti-Labor campaign but at the end of the day Labor actually saw a small increase in their first preference vote + 0.93 which is quite exceptional for a by-election.
Voters both in Australia and New Zealand are not mugs.
Terence Mills: Both Price and Mundine were/are linked to Atlas via CIS and to an extent IPA. YouTube by UTS video now up on presentation explaining Voice No campaign and including Walker, MacLean (‘Democracy in Chains’), DeSmog’s DeMelle, Roberts, Ludlum & Goodman:
‘The Atlas Network: Big oil, climate disinformation and constitutional democracy’
Further to Monbiot’s descriptor ‘junk tanks’, he had a related Guardian article January:
‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies’
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/06/rishi-sunak-javier-milei-donald-trump-atlas-network
One would argue too that the RW media cartel, social media campaigns and influencers, with Fox/Murdoch central in promoting the talking points of Atlas or Koch Network’s ‘segregation economics’ of James Buchanan and old ZPG Tanton Network’s white nativism masquerading as environmental solutions via e.g. locally SPA and patrons….
A form of corrupt nativist authoritarianism that also crosses over to shared interests with Putin’s Russia and Orban’s Hungary where the Danube Inst. (linked to Atlas Heritage Foundation) employes or invites the likes of Tony Abbott* and his advisor Mark Higgie; pro fossil fuels, anti-EU, anti-NATO and anti-liberal democracy.
*Abbott claims to support Ukraine, but unchallenged in safe spaces of a Murdoch WSJ event with House Speaker Johnson and Credlin on SkyNews,yet belies the ecosystem he inhabits in Hungary, UK (Atlas/Koch Tufton St. GWPF), Australia and US pro-Putin FoxNews and e.g. presenting at Heritage Foundation, recently described by GOP never Trumper Bill Kristol as:
‘Bill Kristol @BillKristol 10 Dec 2023
Heritage Foundation and Viktor Orbán are not simply against aid for Ukraine. They are against Ukraine. They hate Ukraine, because a) they’re pro-Putin, and b) they hate liberal democracy, especially one fighting to defend itself against a brutal dictator.’
https://x.com/BillKristol/status/1733892421895746022?s=20
Of course the Atlas Heritage Foundation is behind plans for the next GOP presidency, for now Trump, to go full Christo nationalist and authoritarian via Project2025
https://www.project2025.org/
A scary read, Lucy,
Are the pakeha right intelligensia close enough to a critical mass to destroy the treaty and reset society?
If so Atlas is on a winner.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. Again, thanks to Andrew for important context, and for answering Terence’s point so clearly. Wam: this is a long game. Atlas Network has been destroying America and countries around the world for decades, to the great pleasure of (mainly but not solely American) corporate predators. The chapter in Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money on how Atlas and Wall St decided to destroy Obama after his first victory is emblematic. Yes, the punters are susceptible, if the strategists have the correct messages and tools. They absolutely have the money to buy both.
Iman’s both-sidesing was sadly lacking in clear vision about one side carrying on as deeply flawed business as usual, while the other is on an authoritarian trajectory. Neoliberalism is a step towards a surveillance/police state because as the ultra wealthy win the utter freedoms they demand, the masses are pushed towards every kind of misery and those conditions are unsustainable.
Steve Davis, I understand your point. I consider myself left with an intense critique of liberalism but as a woman with Queer and non-White friends, I also see the failings of the kind of left that fails to add intersectionality to a worker’s critique of the status quo. Liberalism doesn’t need throwing out with the bathwater. We can use the best of any philosophy to build a better future if we only work hard enough against the creeps intending to steer us towards the aforementioned authoritarian-UHNWI paradise.
This was one of the first articles to tie the American “Kochtopus” to an international framework, revealing its name. It shows the damage done to Latin America by these creeps. https://theintercept.com/2017/08/09/atlas-network-alejandro-chafuen-libertarian-think-tank-latin-america-brazil/
Terence, this is Jeremy Walker’s briefer intro to the way that Price and Mundine are tools of the Atlas Network. It links to his peer reviewed article on the topic, which I highly recommend.
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/atlas-networks-fossil-fuelled-campaign-against-the-voice,17973
Lucy
Thanks for that – I hadn’t been aware that the Mundine/Price duo were so closely aligned to Atlas.
As regards New Zealand I was surprised that their government would let the last commercial free-to-air news broadcaster just walk away leaving a massive gap in FTA broadcasting. A gap that I would imagine the likes of FOX /SKY would be eyeing off – that could be disastrous for authentic, objective and impartial journalism in New Zealand.
Lucy, thank you for responding.
You say that “Liberalism doesn’t need throwing out with the bathwater.”
That seems to imply that you see liberalism as having unique virtues not found elsewhere. That we would lose things of importance if we walked away from liberalism.
Have I assumed correctly on this?
Excellent article, Lucy.
Thanks for naming the kiwi names.
Imo, NZ is in more grave danger than Oz. For several decades now it has been transforming with a commercial expansionist agenda, with the agriculturalists and much of the broader community holding out the shakers and movers of that as heroes. Much of the ‘white’ community, beguiled by the onrush of wealth have been massively over-capitalizing everything, and lurching forward with hubris. They sought to bring the graft of their over-pumped agricultural wreckage to Oz, and succeeded for a while.
With Ardern gone under massive covert pressures, the conveniently liquid Peters remaining, and the economy tanking (by design), the ‘white’ populace and country as a whole is ripe for the picking.
Despite cross-Tasman competitiveness, I don’t wish it upon them.
I’ll be forwarding this article to a couple of kiwi friends.
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Thanks so much, Clakka. Appreciate it and would love to hear what they think.
Steve – see the question on the traditionalism piece.
Concerning to hear about the Atlas Network’s influence in New Zealand. It’s essential to ensure that policy changes reflect the will of the people and preserve the nation’s interests.
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@Terence Mills: Your friend’s comment encapsulates just how chillingly effective the influence of the “local Atlas partner organisations” as described by Lucy were in capturing the waverers and toppling the Referendum by recruiting well-positioned conservative indigenous politicians, such as the Prices and Mundine.
One did not need to ferret too deeply in the run-up to find Jacinta Nampijinpa Price all over the CIS and conservative media.
Your friend’s comment also resonates with the Yes campaign’s counter-slogan, “If you don’t know, look it up”.
Not to deny the alarming significance of the influence of this Atlas Network and its malevolent intentions along with its acolytes proliferating like triffids across the planet, spawned from within the bosom of the Great Satanic empire which has gifted the planet such dark entities as the Koch brothers along with their similarly-minded titans of capitalism intent on moulding governments and communities into vassal-like forms of obedience & subservience that act to further their aims, but it strikes me with some irony that the resources & tools that enabled these minions of Satan to rise to the heights of power and wealth that they enjoy are the very same that are currently ushering the demise of this once garden of Eden called planet Earth; capitalism run rampant & unchecked, resource extraction and usage massively outstripping regenerative capacity, along with, alas, so many billions of biped hominids all dependent on, essentially, the same needs… food, water, shelter.
The closing chapters of the book detailing this remarkable story of the journey of man, whether we call it 300,000 years for Homo sapiens or 1.8 million for the genus Homo, will not be comfortable reading.
Look up the NZ government minister Casey Costello to see how malignant Atlas is.
Costello helped undermine the Voice, in Australia , and now she’s this side of the Tasman undermining the Smokefree legislation.
Thanks, Mike. So Costello’s Hobson’s Pledge is connected to NZI or NZ TPU?
“@Lucy Hamilton it appears that they may be. I think NZI would dispute it as they try to look respectable. As for TPU well things like this make it a clear YES. ” Costello Costello co-founded Hobson’s Pledge and has also been involved in the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union, a right-wing lobby group, including as board chair.
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Thanks for this.
There is also a problem with the news media being co-opted as part of their campaign to put the owning class in control.
Atlas needs to shift the Overton Window, and it is assisted by the fact that the news has to make a profit.
I wrote this to explain the depth of that problem.
https://medium.com/@bj.chippindale/owned-3a5602124f7b
We are not getting out of this trouble easily. The media is NOT exposing the lie of “Taxpayer Money” that is fundamental to their propaganda. Without a source of information that is not corrupted, the people are doomed to be enslaved by the people who have corrupted their sources of information.
Nothing good is coming out of Atlas. Their fundamental misunderstandings of money, economics, and the philosophy they espouse are fatal to any society that falls under their control.