How American Dark Money and Mining Billionaires are Buying the Liberals’ Climate Surrender
The Liberal Party meets this week to decide whether to dump its Net Zero pledge. Drama over a decision the average ten-year-old could tell them is simply not an option. Our media love a bit of climate chaos, but this is more than another overhyped factional squabble. Look closer and you find a deeper rot: a festering den of billionaires and fossil fuel backers infecting the body politic, poisoning the health of established democratic process to protect their extortionate profits.
The puppet master? A mob called Advance. If you hadn’t heard of them, that’s the idea.
The Fake Grassroots Machine
Advance claims to speak for “mainstream Australians” fighting city elites. It says it has 330,000 members and an average donation of $160. Sounds plausible? Battlers defending the Australian way of life?
Follow the money and the story collapses.
In 2023–24 alone, Advance pulled in $15.5 million. Hedge fund manager Simon Fenwick has tipped in over $400,000 through his family trust. Storage billionaire Sam Kennard, worth $2.6 billion, added $165,000. Then there’s the big one: the Cormack Foundation, the Liberal Party’s own investment vehicle, kicked in half a million dollars.
And who funds Cormack? Commonwealth Bank ($1.18 million), Rio Tinto ($555,000), National Australia Bank ($542,000), Wesfarmers ($533,000), and BHP ($430,000). The usual suspects: mining giants and big banks with billions riding on weak climate policy.
The money flows through obscurely named holding companies; Paslibdan Pty Ltd, Henroth Investments, deliberately hiding the source. Dark money, Australian style. And it works because we built a democracy with no truth in advertising laws and disclosure thresholds you could drive a coal train through.
Imported Tactics
Advance didn’t invent its playbook. It imported it.
The group works with RJ Dunham and Co, a Texas PR outfit specializing in conservative religious groups and right-wing faith movements. The kind of operation that helped build America’s culture war machine. Founding director Simon Fenwick openly welcomed comparisons to Trump and the “war on woke.”
Academics call Advance’s strategy “flooding the zone with shit” – a phrase from Trump strategist Steve Bannon. Unleash such a fire hose of disinformation that people give up trying to sort truth from lies.
During the Voice referendum, they ran contradictory micro-campaigns designed to sow confusion. “If you don’t know, vote No” wasn’t a slogan; it was the strategy. Polling dropped from 60 percent support to 40 percent as their media offensive kicked in.
Advance distributed digitally altered flyers depicting independent candidates as Greens when they weren’t. Their lies about Alex Dyson, a popular, local independent for Wannon were in my letter-box.
Dyson lost to the wood-duck party Liberal apparatchik, dynastic Dan Tehan, son of the late Marie, 1990s still remembered for an era from which Victoria’s never really recovered: more “market-style” funding, contracting, and private involvement in public health. Dan is a pro-coal blow-in, on the nose with locals. Olympic swimmer Emily Seebohm’s image was used without permission for transphobic billboards. Advance produced children’s books denying climate science and tried getting them into classrooms until the NSW Education Department banned them.
All of it perfectly legal. Yet calculated to exploit our naïveté and trust.
The Atlas Connection
The deeper network is global. Advance’s DNA flows from the Atlas Network, a Virginia-based consortium linking over 500 conservative think tanks in 100 countries, founded to “litter the world with free-market think tanks.”
It’s Australian partners? The Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies – both founded with money from Santos, Shell, BHP, Rio Tinto and Western Mining.
UTS researcher Jeremy Walker has documented how Advance emerged from these fossil-funded think tanks with one mission: delay climate action long enough for coal and gas to extract maximum profit. The Voice referendum wasn’t about Indigenous recognition. It was about preventing First Nations people from having constitutional standing to challenge mining projects on their land.
Maurice Newman – the climate denier who founded the Centre for Independent Studies with fossil fuel money and later chaired the ABC – was an early Advance backer. It’s the same daisy chain every time: mining money funds think tanks, think tanks spawn lobby groups, lobby groups capture political parties.
The Net Zero Retreat
Which brings us to this week. The Nationals already rolled over. Senator Matt Canavan declared “No more net zero!” back in January. Now the Liberals are deciding whether to follow.
Advance has been hammering one message: “Net Zero is a climate crusade, a wealth transfer from hardworking taxpayers to green-energy oligarchs.”
The projection is breathtaking. The actual wealth transfer is happening right now—from taxpayers to fossil fuel corporations via the mob buying up political influence.
And it’s working. The party is split. Moderate Andrew Bragg is threatening to quit if they abandon the Paris Agreement. But the pressure from Advance, amplified through the Murdoch press, backed by mining money, advised by American culture war specialists, is proving too much.
If the Liberals dump Net Zero, fossil fuel interests will have successfully rigged our climate policy for another decade. The planet will cook. Floods will intensify. Fires will worsen. And a handful of billionaires will have bought themselves a few more years of profit.
How They Get Away With It
Two regulatory black holes make this possible.
First, Australia has no federal truth in political advertising laws. South Australia and the ACT have had them for decades. They work – electoral commissioners can order retractions, courts can levy fines, democracy functions better when lying carries consequences.
But federally? You can say whatever you like in political advertising. Doesn’t matter if it’s false, misleading or demonstrably harmful. It’s all legal.
Advance was the highest-spending lobby group in the 2025 election, dropping $1.76 million on advertising. Much of it was lies. None of it was actionable.
Second, we’ve got dark money opacity that would embarrass a money laundering operation. Only donations over $15,000 require disclosure, and even then you can route them through corporate structures designed to hide the source.
What Needs To Change
Eighty-seven percent of Australians support truth in advertising laws. The fixes are known:
Legislative reform – Truth in political advertising laws based on the South Australian model. Lower the disclosure threshold to $1,000 with real-time reporting. Ban foreign entities from advising Australian campaigns. Force think tanks to declare their fossil fuel sponsors.
Relentless exposure – Every time Advance runs a campaign, name the billionaires funding it. Name Simon Fenwick. Name Sam Kennard. Name the mining companies behind the Cormack Foundation. Make the public understand this isn’t grassroots – it’s astroturf laid down by the wealthy to protect their wealth.
Political pressure – Make the Liberals choose between Advance and credibility. Force them to declare whether they take advice from American-funded culture warriors. Make them explain why they’re letting Texas PR firms dictate Australian climate policy.
Media literacy – The AEC’s “Stop and Consider” campaign needs to become a megaphone, not a whisper. Inoculate the public against disinformation by showing them the tactics before they’re deployed.
The Stakes
This isn’t about policy differences or legitimate political debate. This is corporate capture of democracy. It’s what happens when we let the rules get so loose that money can buy not just elections but entire policy frameworks.
The Liberal Party’s decision this week will tell us whether Australian democracy still belongs to Australians or whether we’ve handed the keys to fossil fuel billionaires and their American consultants.
Advance Australia? More like Advance the Interests of Mining Capital While the Planet Burns.
Time to ask which future we’re advancing towards. And time to demand our politicians choose democracy over their donors.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
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The bought and paid for Liberals. What an absolute disgrace they are.
Truth in political advertising and commentary is essential.
The ABC’s Annabel Crabb in her excellent series Civic Duty asked the head of the Electoral Commissiin whether it should monitor truth in advertising. He said absolutely not it would compromise the AEC’s independence. I agree. What we need is an independent arbiter supported by legislation giving them teeth. Fact checking units like the AAP/RMIT unit, now defunct I think, have shown such checks can take place quickly and accurately. I don’t think it would be enough to just demand correction or deletion, there would need to be significant penalties for deliberate attempts to mislead. Unfortunately I don’t see any appetite for such action from this government.
LNP has a defeatist attitude, promoted by Advance. Too many Australians think that we are only a small country — we can’t make any difference. Australia is one of 198 countries, thus 0.5% of countries. We are 27 million of 8 billion, thus 0.3% of the population. Yet Australia invented Wi-Fi, solar power, is a leader in quantum computing, and can be in renewables (which are advancing in technology all the time). Not only is Australia awash in gas, but free solar and wind power. We actually have so much renewable energy we don’t know what to do with it before we get more battery power (which can be hydro power).
Although Australia is 0.5% of the countries and 0.3% of world population, Australia emits 1.5% of greenhouse emissions. Australia needs to catch up. We should not be defeatist.
The LNP and Advance will use scare tactics about electricity prices, blaming high retail prices on renewables, or Labor’s plans. But why do we have high retail prices when wholesale prices are lower? Not everyone’s bill is up. If you have solar, you are laughing, even more with a battery or reversible EV battery. That is fine for home owners. We need to make schemes for rental properties to install solar and batteries. Distributed systems, not big central utilities are the way of the future. The LNP is wedded to old centralised generation. Actually it is the old coal facilities that are now expensive to run and maintain because they are failing that are part of the price problem.
The other parts of the energy price problem is that the LNP (under Howard) did deals to sell our gas cheaply overseas while domestically we pay high prices. Thus when we need gas to step in for now, electricity is expensive. There is also the problem of an unstable world, particularly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which has pushed global prices higher.
The LNP are simply trying to blame the wrong thing — renewables, the very thing that is probably keeping prices down. This is for political purposes.
Thanks David, I was never able find out who was funding the Cormack Foundation whenever I went looking.
There were complaints within the Liberal party that Advance had drawn away so much money it left them too little to campaign with and ended up costing them seats. Highly questionable that whatever they took would have made up for the Liberal party failing to sell its nuclear sham, falling over themselves to pick up Trump administration ideas threatening work from home, sticking with the old migration culture war and, of course, Dutton himself and the thought of what he would have been like as PM.
Advance also spent huge amounts in Greens seats. The Greens say it is because they wanted to tax the billionaires. Whatever the reason Advance ran a dishonest campaign (an excellent coverage on MWM by Wendy Bacon et al.) falsely linking the Greens with Hamas and labelling them as terrorists. Shamefully there were a number of Labor figures who worked with Advance in this deceit, and some of the organizers of offshoot astroturfing organizations had a foot in both camps.
It looks, since the Liberal party have dropped net zero, that Advance will again have a big say in the Coalition campaign, but is a bunch of billionaires, the banks and miners running the party any different to the past?
Labor teaming up with the Coalition to rig elections through the changes they made to supposedly take dark money out of politics will sadly likely make Advance, or whatever it morphs into, an even more potent force next election. It will certainly make it harder for independents.
It’s all the imported stupidity of the American new way of the Republicans & Democrats trying to smash one another to bits. It’s childish, ludicrous, time consuming and expensive, as neither of them then manage to negotiate to do anything positive for the citizens. It’s just hubris & warfare in the political sphere.
Just a complete bunch of dickheads, as are those in the UK and the majority of the ‘West’.
And now that Oz is being infected by it, it reveals the LNP are pathetic and clueless, and fully captured by the American political way.
We’d better hope Albo & Co have a sound strategy to get us out of this dismal hole. If they have they’re certainly wearing moccasins as they proceed.