Australians should remember, as the election approaches, that Tim Wilson was shortlisted in 2015 for the US-based Atlas Network’s most prestigious prize. He and his team at the Atlas Network-partner the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) had been nominated for the award for their work in bringing down Australia’s carbon price.
Crikey captured the misleading wording of the nomination for posterity before the Atlas Network became more cautious and took it – as well as its list of partners – down: “As the only major organization in Australia to publicly and consistently oppose the tax, the IPA’s work against the carbon tax was instrumental in fostering sentiment against the tax, which, in addition to its economic drawbacks, wouldn’t have achieved any environmental goals.”
The Atlas Network is the organising force that connects “almost 600 think tanks in over 100 countries” to promote big business’s goals. While the head office is not currently funded by fossil fuel, many of the partner organisations continue to be, and fighting climate change science and solutions remain core business for many of them.
In fact, a carbon price was working and has been found to be an effective method of pushing transition. Peta Credlin has admitted that the attacks on it as a “tax” were just “brutal retail politics.” The “fostering sentiment” that the Atlas Network described is the job of these so-called thinktanks. They create the permission structure for the policy that big business wants. They also enable the election of big business’s preferred political party.
Atlas’s wording highlighted that the IPA was the “only major organization in Australia” helping engineer Tony Abbott’s victory in 2013 and the resulting instant dismantling of the carbon price.
Voters need to be reminded that it is largely foreign mining interests that benefit from fostered sentiment created by thinktanks. Prizes worth $100,000 from abroad don’t often come for purely domestic campaigns. That said, one of the Atlas Network’s US partners awarded Gina Rinehart its “Lifetime Achievement Award” for her contribution to the Network’s shared goals in 2024.
Rinehart is the only known big donor to Wilson’s former employer, the IPA now. Her largesse was made public by accident: donations of over $2 million a year for two years were recorded in tax filings submitted to court. We cannot know how much more she has given. Rupert Murdoch continues to support this organisation his father co-founded in 1943. We cannot know if he gives money now, but News Corp is an “in kind” donor, providing constant platforms for the Australian Atlas partners and interlinked groups.
The IPA is 80 years old, so it seems more respectable than the temporary dark money front groups that are popping up to push messaging as suspect as the IPA’s war on the carbon “tax.” The difference is more in scale and ambition than in nature.
These bodies copy the Atlas Network model: that involves spawning new PR operations to ensure that the electorate does not come between the corporations and their profits. Because the Atlas Network no longer declares which organisations it lists as partners (and many interlinked bodies were never listed at all), we cannot declare them to be part of the Network. They serve, however, the same purpose for similar clients.
Australians for Prosperity is clearly interlinked with both the coal sector (by the only declared donation), and the Liberal Party (by its personnel). It was forced to delete two months-worth of social media posts by the Australian Electoral Commission for being unauthorised election material. Their prime targets are the independent MPs that are now representing formerly Liberal Party safe seats, and they are spreading disinformation to discredit these parliamentarians.
It may be a coincidence that the body has copied the name of one of the Atlas partners most responsible for the current debased condition of American politics, Americans for Prosperity.
Advance’s links to Australia’s Atlas Network partners were laid out by Dr Jeremy Walker in the Voice campaign. Its origin and links to the Liberal Party as well as the global thinktank operation was explored in detail in the Sydney Morning Herald. That report also illustrates the body’s links to Zionist operations, fostered through its co-founder David Adler. It has three new front groups to discredit the Greens: Greens Truth, Her Truth and Election News.
There are as many as 18 such shadowy organisations acting against renewables and in favour of nuclear energy at the moment. Most can be found on social media targeting key seats. Others can afford billboards.
Pollsters have always been a key tool in business propaganda: the Coalition’s internal pollster in this election campaign is connected to Australians for Natural Gas. That body’s director, Nathanial Smith” is also the Liberal Party’s candidate for Whitlam.
One of the old guard Atlas partners is the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance. Its founder, Tim Andrews, is now working for Grover Norquist at Atlas’s Americans for Tax Reform in DC. The current executive director is Brian Marlow.
Marlow is also functioning as the “Campaigner” for Citizen Go, under whose umbrella he appeared before federal Parliament arguing against the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill. Citizen Go is a global project constructed out of a Spanish extremist Catholic “hate group.” Citizen Go’s Australian “campaigns director” is George Christensen who has registered himself as the head of a “foreign political organisation.” The Facebook page campaigns using an “end abortion” hashtag, using misleading information. As a state MP, Nathaniel Smith argued for abortion to “remain in the Crimes Act.” The Coalition candidates’ commitment to a Christian Nationalist position is not separate from their Atlas Network links but directly connected to that movements’ transnational trend.
It is not surprising, in either of Marlow’s roles, to find such figures fighting efforts to control mis- and disinformation. With climate science as certain as it is, and the need to transition to clean sources of energy so urgent, the campaign to disrupt the transition is hard pressed to find useful truths: both misleading information and distraction can serve.
Australia needs a minority government with the crossbench granting it courage to tackle the threats to Australian politics of dark money and shadowy disinformation campaigns.
We don’t need a government containing Tim Wilson whose speech at the 2015 Atlas Network regional gathering, the Friedman Conference, celebrated his turning Human Rights Commissioner role into a defence of property rights. Think hard about why this network values protecting property but not protecting you as a community member, worker, consumer or citizen.
Also by Lucy Hamilton: Front groups working with Zionist actors are promoting Islamophobia
See also: From our archives: Tim Wilson epitomises so many things that are wrong with the Morrison government
Dear reader, we need your support
Independent sites such as The AIMN provide a platform for public interest journalists. From its humble beginning in January 2013, The AIMN has grown into one of the most trusted and popular independent media organisations.
One of the reasons we have succeeded has been due to the support we receive from our readers through their financial contributions.
With increasing costs to maintain The AIMN, we need this continued support.
Your donation – large or small – to help with the running costs of this site will be greatly appreciated.
You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
Tim Wilson, destined to be a misfit, is bent psychologically so as to focus on the tonsils while fantasising as a rear admiral. The IPA gave him an alarm clock so he could get up himself in the morning. Full of actual stupidity by choice, he believes in the importance of unfairness, to others of course. Precious Tim dreams of his righteous impunity and excellence. Such dishonesty deserves its reward, total loud denunciation. He is as Australian as a Russian Maggot.
Oh yeah.Tim fucking Wilson. he’s everything thaT’S WRONG W
ith the shitheads of the current iteration of the wankers of the alleged Liberal Party.
They are well and truly rooted..it’s all over..stand by for a remnant of right wing fuckheads.
there’ll be nothing left of these wankers after May 3rd..boofhead will be gone, and they have absolutely no one who isn’t a complete dickhead..Anus Taylor? yeah, naH.
From the article — “Think hard about why this network values protecting property but not protecting you as a community member, worker, consumer or citizen.”
Exactly.
Now, at last, we are getting down to the nitty gritty.
Peta Credlin may claim to have cooked up the ‘carbon tax’, but seems more ‘recooking’ the same used against the Clinton Administration in the US that tried to implement a carbon regime or emissions trading scheme; guess informed by Atlas Koch’s Heartland or similar…..via IPA.
Now why isn’t Lucy Hamilton’s work featured also on the mainstream media in Australia?
Oh yes, now I remember, they don’t like investigative journalism that looks into the dark world of pro nuclear manipulations. And there’s a problem with Lucy Hamilton. She REALLY does her homework – can’t have that!
Well done! Excellent expose! We wouldn’t know about these things if they weren’t exposed.
Does Timmy miss his little get-togethers with like-minded gentlemen in the Parliamentary Prayer Room?
Naughty Lucy!! Giving PP an opportunity to accurately describe the loathsome, borne-to-rule, self-entitled, self-serving waste of space ever to be kicked out of feral Parliament was just too kind.
There is only one way to ensure that the LIARBRAL$ & NOtional$ are deposed from feral Parliament is to vote LABOR at the 03 May 2025 feral elections.
.
Readers in Dickson Qld could ”DUMP DUTTON FROM DICKSON” better still
.
VOTE 1 ALI FRANCE IN DICKSON & GIVE AUSTRALIA A CARING POLITICIAN
.
Then perhaps the fresh Parliament might grow the necessary political testicles to legislate to make ALL donations to these parasitic politically influencing organisations public 24/7 including the name of the natural person donor, the corporations in which they have an interest and the intention of the donation.
A pipedream for the future is taxation of the foreign owned multinational corporations trading in Australia and paying little/no taxation.
Throughout this series of articles about the organisation and aims of the extreme Right, Lucy has shown a remarkable reluctance to acknowledge the influence that liberalism has had on right wing thinking.
Her question as to “why this network (the Right) values protecting property but not protecting you as a community member, worker, consumer or citizen” is an admission that the problem that most concerns her is ultimately the global system of finance and trade that encourages, facilitates, and protects, often by brutal means, the unlimited acquisition of property.
Unlimited acquisition of property is the beating heart of liberal economic philosophy and theory. And unlimited acquisition, in practice, becomes deprivation for some.
This is a brief answer to Lucy’s question, but it’s worthwhile to dig deeper.
It is generally acknowledged that slavery and colonialism featured strongly in the formative years of liberal thinking, but less well-known is the lasting influence that these had on our modern concept of property and the means of acquiring it.
Although developing mainly in Britain, liberalism had its great flowering after the US Revolution, this flowering featuring extraordinary expressions of devotion to liberty that became the foundation of US political culture.
With the emergence of the US as the global hegemon, US perceptions of liberty , it was assumed, would enjoy universal acceptance.
But the liberal concept of liberty as it emerged in the US contained a logical flaw of liberty for some and loss of liberty for others. This was successfully kept in the background as the urge to acquire property became the driving force in global affairs.
The almost unimaginable wealth generated by unscrupulous property accumulation (slavery, conquest and colonialism) provided the political power to off-set criticism and opposition, of which there was plenty.
But in worldly affairs, change is the only constant.
From Chris Hedges — The final stages of capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, will be marked by developments intimately familiar. Unable to expand, and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system will begin to consume the structures that sustain it. In the name of austerity and government efficiency it will prey on the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It will increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of labor.
Industries will mechanize their workplaces to trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class – bulwark of a capitalist system – initially disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes decline or remain stagnant.
Politics in late stage capitalism will become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content, and abjectly subservient to the dictates of corporations and oligarchs. But as Marx foretold, there is a limit to an economy built on the scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, he warned, when no new markets are available, and no new pools of people who can take on more debt. Capitalism will then turn on the so-called free market itself, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It will in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that make capital possible. As it causes widespread suffering it will resort to harsher forms of oppression, and attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain profits by looting state institutions in contradiction of its avowed nature. The final stage of capitalism, Marx grasped, is not capitalism at all.
That is what we are witnessing right now.
And so we see that the fanatical focus on liberty that became the hallmark of liberalism was an illusion.
But it was a lie from the beginning.
John Locke was the main influence on liberal thought in the US. His arguments for liberties based on “natural law” found their way into the US Constitution.
But Locke was a slaver.
In addition to having a financial interest in the slave trade as a shareholder in the Royal African Company, Locke was concerned with the white colonists’ expansionist march as secretary (in 1673–74) of the Council of Trade and Plantations. As has been observed: That so many of the examples Locke uses in his Second Treatise are American ones shows that his intention was to provide the settlers, for whom he had worked in so many other ways, with a powerful argument based in natural law rather than legislative decree to justify their depredations. (against Native Americans)
The problem with accepting “natural law” as a legitimate concept is that its definition is blurry, indistinct, hard to pin down.
But the advantage derived from natural law is that its general acceptance eliminated the need for legislated positions that could be closely inspected, analysed, and changed.
The worst that a Lockean proponent of natural law property rights had to contend with, was sarcasm.
As early as 1764, Benjamin Franklin, in London at the time to plead the colonists’ cause, had to face the sarcastic comments of his interlocutors: “You Americans make a great Clamour upon every little imaginary infringement of what you take to be your Liberties; and yet there are no People upon Earth such Enemies to Liberty, such absolute Tyrants, where you have the Opportunity, as you yourselves are.”
These self-styled champions of liberty branded taxation imposed without their explicit consent as synonymous with despotism and slavery. But they had no scruples about exercising the most absolute and arbitrary power over their slaves. This added to the contradictions that lie at the heart of liberalism. “How is it”, Samuel Johnson asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?”
The paradox that characterizes the American Revolution and early liberalism in general, survives.
Slavery is not something that persisted despite the success of the three liberal revolutions. (Britain, US, France) On the contrary, it experienced its maximum development following that success.
Contributing decisively to the rise of an institution synonymous with the absolute power of man over man, was the liberal world.
Embarassed by their clear double standard, the progenitors of modern liberalism employed verbal sleight-of-hand to produce a one size fits all concept of servitude. Service was merged with servitude, and so those who had nothing to sell but their labour received the same consideration as those enslaved. From Grotius — “However, slavery was not the only form of servitus, but only the ‘most ignoble … kind of Subjection. There was also servitus imperfecta, peculiar, among others, to serfs and mercenarii or wage-labourers.”
Thus, labour was subsumed under the category of ‘service’ or ‘subjection’.
Although Locke attempted to differentiate between the forms of service, labour continues to be subsumed under the category of service.
And as the purpose of service within the liberal order is to assist in property accumulation, we see that the attitudes, the beliefs, the hypocrisies of the slave-owning founders of modern liberalism have persisted to the present day.
Working class rights and aspirations enjoyed a brief day in the sun with the rise of social democracy, but with the dissolution of the Soviet Union removing the threat of revolution at home, the liberal democracies have reverted to type with the gradual reappearance of the old oppressions and the reappearance of the absolute power of man over man that was the original liberal world.
Today’s Right are the beneficiaries and heirs of the old liberal slave-owning class who realise that their power is slipping, and who utilise the discontent of those they have oppressed for centuries, to provide a mass movement that will allow them to make a final grab for accumulation before their precious system folds under the weight of its own contradictions.
Indeed Steve Davis, it’s a breath-taking saturation.
From politics, to banking, to commerce, to military, to religion and sport, and their boards and executives, their ad men and of course, not least the mainstream media, and the lesser corrupted scientists, historians and economists.
Most reasonable humanitarian survival aspirations have been mind-blown by greedy propagandists and believers in battle-line proprietary boundaries to the extent that in the ‘race’, the ‘reality’, the fixated sine qua non, has most hurtling towards obliteration with little if any recognition of participating in the components of the prevailing death-cult.
A rich, but terminal lode for desperadoes, acquisitors, demagogues and despots.
“…it’s a breath-taking saturation.”
Indeed Clakka.
Almost unbelievably so.
The frantic goings on make you wonder how much is going on behind the scenes about which we know nothing.
The article by James Moore, “My Country ‘Tis of He” has prompted legitimate questions from commenters about repression and authoritarianism that is already occurring in Australia.
What does that tell us about a single-minded focus on extreme right figures and organisations, and warnings that we must be aware of their potential to introduce repressive and authoritarian tendencies here?
It tells us that such warnings are a mis-direction.
That such warnings miss the point.
That we already have a problem with repression and authoritarianism that has nothing nothing to do with right-wing extremism.
Our problem with repression and authoritarianism will continue until we face the reality that liberal democracy gives rise to these tendencies.
This series of articles is undermining the point it is trying to make.
Steve, as I’ve said before, there is more than one definition of liberalism. You are using the Anglo tradition. I am working with it in the Euro tradition. I’m not wasting more time on the argument so you can have the Wiki link. I know individualism must be tempered with community goals and welfare. No ideology is enough on its own. Elements of this euro definition fit my general idea of a good society. As a woman surrounded by refugees, Queer folk and all the rest, I respect the respecting of individual rights and also accountable government. I’m probably a social democrat or democratic socialist overall but constantly shifting til I find my place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_in_Europe
Lucy, thank you for your response.
The Liberalism in Europe link confirms a point I’ve made several times before — that liberalism can be just about anything a liberal wants it to be, and is therefore too fluid to be sustainable in the long-term.
A fluid concept is prone to internal contradictions that will be its undoing, as we see now.
We are watching the unraveling of the liberal order.
But the link did highlight a significant point — the misuse of the term in the US. This has come about because of ignorance in the US of their own history. The founding fathers and those who followed consistently used the term as correctly as is possible with such a concept. They were focused on personal liberty, and that is still the focus of liberalism today, no matter where it is advocated.
You said “individualism must be tempered with community goals and welfare.”
I agree, individualism is important and it can be, could be, should be tempered with community goals and welfare.
My problem with the liberal approach to that aspiration is that it takes second place to economic considerations.
There is no valid economic argument to show that economics should be the main consideration of society, but if we look around we see a world in which the economy rules. We are ruled by arbitrary, artificial, manufactured measures that have little to do with economic reality, let alone the reality of peoples’ lives.
That is evidence of a sickness.
You said no ideology is enough on its own.
I agree. Social systems need to be flexible enough to change with changing circumstances. Ideology prevents that flexibility.
The outstanding example of that is China, where it took about three generations to change from a necessary rigid revolutionary survival mode to one that seems to work well in the Chinese situation.
You said “I’m…constantly shifting til I find my place.”
Some would see that as a weakness.
I see it as a strength.
Aurelien has just put out a very good article on the decline of liberalism. It touches on matters raised by Lucy in her series of articles.
Here’s some snippets.
Still, I would argue that the underlying problem, which I take to be the ever-increasing distance between the rulers and the ruled, will eventually lead to the collapse of western political systems, because the resources to reform, let alone replace, the current system no longer exist. The lack of replacement capacity will be a consistent theme of this essay.
As our society, its political and government institutions and its economic structures begin to break down, the best-organised forces, independent of what we may think of them, will start to take control as they always do. Liberalism, I fear, will be unceremoniously elbowed aside and, for all that Liberalism is justly criticised, we will not necessarily prefer what follows. Brussels will probably be reduced to something like the status of the Papacy in the late nineteenth century. But none of the forces that are likely to be unleashed—radical Islam, conservative Christianity and various nationalist and regionalist movements—can aspire to anything more than local control.
Liberal globalism has captured every mainstream political party, and elections simply replace the group in power with a superficially different alternative.
And finally Gaza, which among other things represents the irremediable death of liberal interventionism, since never has large-scale slaughter been easier to stop. But western leaders and opinion formers just don’t care because in the end death and suffering mean nothing to them: it’s all just pictures on TV, and the important thing is to crack down on those who would try to dispute official narratives and bring in genuine, as opposed to declarative, moral principles. Indeed, our ruling class is frightened of nothing so much as genuine moral principles, which would require them to do things they might find inconvenient, about situations they don’t understand.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-161912885