Voting for the LNP could actually shorten your life

There’s a reason that the Atlas Network’s “think” tanks – and their political partners – around the world target education. They claim it is because public school teachers are inclusive, or “woke”. That label is so fluid as to be endlessly adaptable. They attack education, more importantly, because the only people who will swallow their messaging are those few who profit or those too ill-informed to see the damage its implementation does them. Whether the goal is tax cuts for the rich, or the deployment of scientific disinformation for donors’ goals, the “think” tanks must be seen for what they are. Australian voters have the opportunity to learn from the anglosphere’s mistakes.

Senator Bridget McKenzie illustrated the truth behind the Trumpist Dutton campaign against the Australian education department in an interview on the ABC last week (3/4). She claimed that “certain ideas and perspectives are privileged” over “contradictory ideas”. When pressed for detail on what kind of ideas were excluded, McKenzie provided a “personal example” of students being discouraged from bringing ideas into the classroom that were “anti climate change or anti environment”.

Education is primarily dedicated to teaching knowledge that is factual. The Merchants of Doubt established in gripping detail how much effort strategists (and a handful of complicit scientists) have put into making the public believe incorrect information dating from the 1950s, well before the “think” tanks that fostered the messaging were coalesced into a global network in 1981 to streamline their cooperation. By 2009, it was known that 16 million in America alone had died from tobacco-related causes since the 1950s when Big Tobacco understood the link between smoking and cancer and chose, regardless, to conceal that fact in a tornado of disinformation. The “think” tank operations appear to disdain the death toll.

It is predictable that politicians like McKenzie have become victim to the disinformation so assiduously promoted by forces such as the “think” tanks. The tobacco disinformation strategists, scientists and playbook were transferred to protecting fossil fuel profits in the 1980s, and their disingenuous work has distorted the “knowledge” of generations since. The construction of a fake “debate” about tobacco’s impact on human health (and it is predicted to kill one billion more people this century) was the strategy also used to delay action on the ozone hole, DDT, acid rain and the climate crisis. The false “knowledge” is incorporated into partisan beliefs.

It is clearly established in the rolling disaster toll as well as the overwhelming scientific consensus that the climate crisis is here and set to become much worse. Those who call themselves “centre right” are committed to a narrative that describes that consensus as “opinion” rather than a state as close to certainty as the scientific method allows. For some, it is because a comfortable living lies in perpetuating the false narrative of debate. For others it is their identity.

School teachers, however, do not generally operate to teach false narratives that smoking tobacco is safe or that the climate is not changing. The best educators also endeavour to teach critical thinking.

A brief survey of the Atlas Network’s impact amongst our allied nations shows why critical thinking cannot be tolerated in the populace. The second Trump administration is currently adding destroying the nation’s economic success to the constant news of harms to Americans. Experts of all kinds are being driven out of their jobs and replaced by the least meritorious white men. Seventy-five percent of scientists are considering leaving the US.

“Think” tanks like Heritage have worked tirelessly to install “free market” political economies as the consensus. America, home of this oligarch-funded ideology, has much greater inequality and shorter lifespans across the socio-economic board than European peers. Atlas Network’s Heritage Foundation set out most of the current destruction of the American system in its Project 2025. That roadmap includes extending Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, expanding the widening of the gap between rich and poor. It is also a climate disaster, created for a fossil fuel-backed government.

The attempt to axe the federal Education Department is not just a whim of the posse around Trump but a longterm goal of the Republican Right, detailed in Project 2025. The goal for colleges was (accurately it seems) predicted to be a “road map to authoritarianism”. The goal for schools is ultimately to force the extinction of public education. Those who cannot afford private or church-run education will provide a disposable and desperate workforce to replace the “illegal” workforce being driven out.

In the UK, the Atlas Network was also instrumental in the own goal that was Brexit. Known as “Tufton Street” there, its “think” tanks were intimately entwined with the Tory government and its hard Brexit. That move out of the EU, so desired by the “think” tanks’ donors, cost Britain $240 billion a 2024 report estimated. The austerity measures since 2008 were also driven by Tufton Street spin merchants to the continuing detriment of the nation. It’s hardly surprising that the austerity response created the “biggest increase in inequality since Thatcher”: both were driven by the same “think” tank structures and ideology.

 

Living standards have “plummeted” and the UK has “tumbled down the league of affluent nations.” Britain now has a much sharper decline in life expectancy than its former European partners. British children raised in the austerity era are appreciably shorter than their elders or European peers. Unfortunately for Britain, having a Labour government trapped by the “think” tanks’ ideology is entrenching the problem created by the Tories.

New Zealand/Aotearoa’s first Atlas Network “restructuring” happened under a Labour leader too, earning the project the name Rogernomics after the Labour leader Roger Douglas. It is now suffering a second dose of the ideology driven by a government dominated by the Atlas Network ACT Party (a former “think” tank) threatening to prolong the recession that New Zealanders are enduring. A group of actual economists set out why the austerity and privatisation ideology driving the rightwing government’s policy is so destructive. Tobacco continues to intervene in NZ politic.

Falling living standards are recorded in NZ, with the country suffering “increasing levels of poverty and deprivation” featuring rising unemployment, food insecurity and homelessness according to a Salvation Army report. Privatisation is high on the coalition government’s agenda despite the fact it serves the public poorly. As in Russia, however, it serves the very wealthy well.

Like Britain’s schools and battered universities, education is under attack in NZ.

Australians currently experience much better living standards than many of our peer nations; it is crucial that we protect these from the functionaries of the plutocrats who would copy their peers in funnelling our common wealth into their own pockets. We are unlikely to see Dutton copying Trump’s emerging police state, but there is much else we stand to lose.

 

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