The Australian has made itself the newspaper of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. This reflects the fact that Australia’s Right is part of a transnational network of networkers. It also conveys that these figures aim to shape the thinking of Australia’s “conservative” leaders in troubling directions.
ARC is one of the conference circuits that conveys, broadly-speaking, National Conservatism (NatCon) ideology. Like NatCon itself, ARC feigns intellectual credibility for its messaging. NatCon is a form of nationalism where religion acts as a placeholder for “race”. Christian Nationalists fight alongside Israeli-Jewish and Hindutva nationalists for their ethnostates. Religion is intended to pervade government, whether culturally or as an unfalsifiable justification for policy built on prejudice.
They have absorbed the “decline and fall” narrative of Edward Gibbon and, more worryingly, Weimar “philosopher” Oswald Spengler. Now, apparently, the West is decadent and decaying. ARC’s people will lead its “renewal”.
The cynicism and despair that the ideologues note is present. This malaise is largely driven by the harm done to most of us by extreme “free market” colonisation of our societies. Our governments are in alliance with or captive to the demands of business and plutocrats: the duopoly’s failure to represent us is the result. No matter how we vote, the major parties will not let us address climate or injustice or the funnelling of our common wealth up to the super rich.
In a century-long pattern, business’s “public relations” operations choose distraction as the gambit. It would not suit the interests around The Australian for us to demand genuine reform or accountable, representative government. Instead, we must blame “culture” and “progressivism” for despair.
After the second London ARC conference in February, the body was more prominent in The Australian’s pages; usually the presence of ideas and figures from the networks go unattributed. Both Paul Kelly and Greg Sheridan wrote feature articles for the 22 February-23 February edition. Both were marked as travelling “to London as a guest of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship”. The op-ed page on 20 February boasted two columns that were “edited versions” of the speeches the authors delivered at the conference. There was also a puff piece for the event by co-founder John Anderson on 18 February.
Kelly’s feature declares ARC is addressing “the recognition that Western societies are increasingly divided and diminished, plagued by a crisis of meaning, weakened by ineffective governments, suffering from a loss of trust in institutions and beset by a fracture between powerful elites and alienated publics”. These voices cannot attribute such problems to neoliberalism, where much of the blame belongs, so we must return as a civilisation to “the things that once made us great”. The “opponent is secular progressivism”.
What has “secular progressivism” done to us? The list is long: “narcissistic individualism; its substitution for religious norms; its suspicion of traditional families; its deployment of state power to advance its values; its compulsion to big government and higher taxes; its attachment to false education theory in schools; its promotion of climate catastrophe; its renewable ideology driving soaring energy prices; its hostility to resource development; its indifference to the collapse in fertility and the coming demographic crisis; its promotion of identity politics in an attack on liberal universalism and its disdain for national symbols and patriotism.”
It’s clear here that the standard neoliberal truthiness remains embedded in NatCon thinking. Government, tax, protections remain their decades-old enemy. Climate obfuscation is a crucial part of the broad NatCon project. ARC was pervaded with fossil fuel companies and their spruikers. Its major funder (and board member) has approximately $2 billion in fossil fuel investments.
It is not new either for ultra-conservative and religious messaging to accompany business PR operations. What is new, perhaps, is the transnational co-operation to embed the “free market” function combined with religious identity and “morality” culturally among the power players of our societies. Theocrats from the extreme end of evangelical and Catholic faiths are intending to impose their prejudices on us as policy and call it “renewal”.
The audience cannot be allowed to notice either the divorce from facts or the extremity of the positions. Sheridan begins his ARC feature boosting the embattled Tory leader Kemi Badenoch by describing Donald Trump as “[energising] all centre right forces”. This, alongside “conservative”, is the political label these radicals choose for themselves. It is a tactic, not an accurate description.
Erica Komisar is one of the ARC board members alongside Anderson, Tony Abbott, John Howard, Amanda Stoker and Andrew Hastie. Her condensed speech printed in The Australian (20 February) continues her line of blaming working mothers for the psychological harm they do to their small children. (Other board members include Katy Faust who argues adults should be stripped of rights that might harm children, including divorce, and Louise Perry who thinks women should revert to 1950s sexual morality.)
The other condensed speech is by board member Douglas Murray. He has previously said Europe is a “continent and culture caught in the act of suicide”. His 2023 interview on Anderson’s YouTube channel exposes his disturbing ideas, including his linking of Islam with “barbarism.” He co-operates with Daniel Pipes, who espouses “rabidly anti-Muslim views”, who was also given (another) anti-Palestine feature in The Australian. Pipes has laundered Europe’s Far Right and Neo Nazis as his fellow “civilisationalists”. Erik Prince, another speaker, was announced as affiliated with the long-disgraced Blackwater. The neo-crusader associations of that mercenary force are not an embarrassment here.
Kevin Roberts, the extremist Catholic behind Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, was interviewed by Anderson while they were in London. Theocrat Speaker of the US House, Mike Johnson, is a board member at ARC and gave the keynote in 2025. Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, was a former fossil fuel lobbyist and employee at Liberty Energy, a fracking services company with partnership interests in the Beetaloo Basin. He spoke at the event, again promoting fossil fuel consumption. He declared in 2023, “There is no climate crisis.”
Hastie argued at a conference soon after ARC that Australia should open up rare earth minerals in Australia to Americans to pacify Trump. Foreign governments need no more invitation to take Australia’s resources than they already have.
ARC has an Australian Chapter and had its first conference in Sydneyin 2024.
While ARC might boast more “sparkling orations and clever op-eds” than its worrying overlapping networks, it offers a worldview that has a very limited role for most of us. For women, the place is breeding since decline narratives are invested in birth rates. For people who don’t belong to the “Judeo-Christian civilisation”, ARC 2025 speeches kept any support for “forcible deportation” beliefs on the polite end of the speaker’s repertoire.
We need to understand the narratives our “conservative” compatriots are being told. It won’t be easy to push back against the might of the organs pushing the message, but we need to be discussing how we try. The movement tells us it is growing.
This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
This essay was first published in Pearls and Irritations.
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Seems like a mob of propagandists sharing talking points and swapping lines to be used to set Oz up for further extortion by their backers. Nothing but a craven collective of toxic fairyfloss spinners.
Lucy is not happy that the Right makes an issue out of the ills that flow from what they call “secular progressivism”.
But what is secular progressivism?
It’s just another term for the liberal world order.
Lucy says, with what I assume is sarcasm– What has “secular progressivism” done to us? The list is long: “narcissistic individualism; its substitution for religious norms; its suspicion of traditional families; its deployment of state power to advance its values; its compulsion to big government and higher taxes; its attachment to false education theory in schools; its promotion of climate catastrophe; its renewable ideology driving soaring energy prices; its hostility to resource development; its indifference to the collapse in fertility and the coming demographic crisis; its promotion of identity politics in an attack on liberal universalism and its disdain for national symbols and patriotism”
What does the list tell us?
It tells us that some of the Right’s grievances are valid.
Liberalism has produced widespread narcissistic individualism that eats away at community values.
It has undermined religious values and substituted market forces that must be appeased for a vengeful god that must be appeased.
It does deploy state power to protect liberal priorities such as profit and endless property accumulation.
Liberalism does falsify education programs.
To be fair, the rest of the list is just a bundle of contradictions looking to infect feeble minds, but the point is that not everything the Right stands for is without merit.
The other outstanding point is the assumption that any problems within the liberal order are not the fault of liberal values because liberalism, it is blithely assumed, is the pinnacle of social evolution.
Liberals would starve the ratbag Right of oxygen if they engaged in some serious reflection and self-examination, and began putting their house in order.
But they will not.
Because they cannot.
Because if they did, it would no longer be liberalism.
Lucy’s observation that “[n]ow, apparently, the West is decadent and decaying” seems uncontroversial to this scribbler. A broad inspection of many western hemisphere societies would seemingly afford many examples of decadence & decay.
Similarly, Paul Kelly’s offering that “…Western societies are increasingly divided and diminished, plagued by a crisis of meaning, weakened by ineffective governments, suffering from a loss of trust in institutions and beset by a fracture between powerful elites and alienated publics” has an overtone of truth around it.
I’m less enamoured by his conclusion, though, that we must return to “the things that once made us great”. Examples would have helped. Is he referring to western societies at large, or Australia in particular? If the latter, what, then, was it that deserved that adjectival merit in years gone by? Colonial expansion at the tragic expense of the indigenous peoples? The White Australia policy? The blight of involving young men in tragic wars overseas? Or less controversial acts; building cities, providing full employment for working-age men at salaries that enabled single-income home ownership? It seems a throwaway phrase… things that once made us great.
If those things did, in fact, exist, then why do they no longer… were they wantonly discarded, or were they, like old farm outbuildings, simply destined to decay over time? Just as physicists insist on the remorseless trend of entropic systems, is it appropriate to couple that observation with societies at large; to argue that all societies tend over time toward dissolution and decay?
Stve,
Which particular “religious values” would you like to see in place of those championed by “secular progressivism”?
Leefe, good question.
You won’t get an argument from me about the negative influence organised religion has had on social progress.
But having said that, religion at the personal level can be extremely positive. Life-changing even.
And even organised religion has, to its credit, always worked to preserve community values. Whether it did this to protect the community or itself is beside the point; it’s contribution was positive.
The right-wing source that provided the list that Lucy quoted gave no details as to which religious norms it was worried about, and I doubt that their concern about the values being undermined would be the same as mine.
The problem with the effect that liberalism has had on society is that with its focus on the individual, it undermined community values and community welfare and replaced it with mindless narcissistic consumerism.
So I guess the short answer to your question is — community solidarity.