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Silencing the Voice: the fossil-fuelled Atlas Network’s campaign against constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australia

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Abstract

Australians will soon vote in a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australia in its 1901 Constitution and establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament. A year ago, polling suggested the referendum proposal of the 2017 National Constitutional Convention and its Uluru Statement from the Heart enjoyed 60% support. Since lead anti-Voice campaign organisation Advance Australia began its media offensive, the Yes vote has declined to 40%. This article argues the No campaign is being conducted on behalf of fossil-fuel corporations and their allies, whose efforts to mislead the public on life-and-death matters reach back over half a century. Coordinated across the Australian branches of the little-known Atlas Network, a global infrastructure of 500+ ‘think-tanks’ including the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute of Public Affairs and LibertyWorks, I demonstrate that the No campaign shares the aims and methods of the longstanding Atlas disinformation campaign against climate policy. Opposition to long-overdue constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians can be traced to fears the Voice might strengthen the capacity of Indigenous communities and Australia’s parliamentary democracy to rein in the polluting industries driving us toward climate and ecological collapse.
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Citation: Walker, J. 2023.
Silencing the Voice: The
Fossil-fuelled Atlas
Network’s Campaign against
Constitutional Recognition
of Indigenous Australia.
Cosmopolitan Civil Societies:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
,
15:2, 105– 125. https://doi.
org/10.5130/ccs.v15.i2.8813
ISSN 1837- 5391 | Published by
UTS ePRESS | https://epress.
lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.
php/mcs
ARTICLE REFEREED
Silencing the Voice: the Fossil-fuelled Atlas
Network’s Campaign against Constitutional
Recognition of Indigenous Australia
Jeremy Walker
University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Corresponding author: Jeremy Walker, University of Technology Sydney, 15 Broadway, Ultimo,
NSW 2007, Australia, Jeremy.Walker@uts.edu.au
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5130/ccs.v15.i2.8813
Article History: Received 13/09/2023; Revised 28/09/2023; Accepted 30/09/2023;
Published30/09/2023
Abstract
Australians will soon vote in a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australia in its 1901
Constitution and establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament. Earlier this year, polling
suggested the referendum proposal of the 2017 National Constitutional Convention and
its Uluru Statement from the Heart enjoyed 60% support. Since lead anti-Voice campaign
organisation Advance Australia began its media offensive, the Yes vote has declined to
40%. This article argues the No campaign is being conducted on behalf of fossil-fuel
corporations and their allies, whose efforts to mislead the public on life-and-death
matters reach back over half a century. Coordinated across the Australian branches of
the little-known Atlas Network, a global infrastructure of 500+ ‘think-tanks’ including
the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute of Public Affairs and LibertyWorks, I
demonstrate that the No campaign shares the aims and methods of the longstanding Atlas
disinformation campaign against climate policy. Opposition to long-overdue constitutional
recognition for Indigenous Australians can be traced to fears the Voice might strengthen
the capacity of Indigenous communities and Australia’s parliamentary democracy to rein
in the polluting industries driving us toward climate and ecological collapse.
105 DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTEREST The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. FUNDING This research was supported
by a research grant awarded by the Climate Social Science Network (Brown University, USA) and conducted
under approval of the University of Technology Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee.
How could it be otherwise? at peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears
from world history in merely the last two hundred years?
With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can
shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.
- Uluru Statement from the Heart, 2017 National Constitutional Convention
Introduction
Australians will soon vote in an historic referendum to nally recognise First Nations people’s deep time
habitation of their sacred country by a minor amendment to the 1901 federal Constitution of Australia. It
should be a time of hope and optimism as Australia’s diverse, multicultural communities unite to assert their
goodness of heart, and willingness to acknowledge Indigenous peoples’ deep history, profound cultural and
scientic achievements, the wrongs done them by governments, and the capacity for a democratic people to
alter the ways in which it consents to be governed in order to oer justice where it has long been denied.
How could anyone not be moved by the generosity of the Uluru Statement from the Heart (2023)?
It invites Australians to walk with the First Nations to heal the wounds of colonial violence, disrespect
and dispossession that continue to generate suering, trauma and poverty, and remain a burden on the
conscience of the nation. A successful Yes vote will be a small step toward righting constitutional wrongs.
From little things, big things grow.
e sovereignty of the British Crown over the land claimed as Australia was established by the legal
ction of terra nullius and the overwhelming fact of land appropriation through violence, legal or otherwise.
e 1901 Constitution establishing the Commonwealth of Australia was drafted by several conventions of
several dozen white men and approved in some of the Colonies by vote. Delegating the British monarch’s
power via an appointed Governor-General to a federal parliament and judiciary, apportioning powers
between federal and state governments, the Constitution makes no mention of the Australian lands and
waters itself. It includes a race power aimed at preserving Anglo-Saxon supremacy over the continent.
e Constitution entered into force not by a vote of free and independent Australians on the democratic
principle of popular sovereignty, but by a 1900 act of Queen Victoria’s Imperial Parliament of the United
Kingdom (Lindell 1986), at a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples were systematically denied
human and civil rights. Frontier violence and punitive police raids on Aboriginal communities continued
with ocial sanction at least as late as the Coniston massacre of 1928.
e referendum proposal for constitutional recognition and a First Nations Voice to Parliament is an
outcome of the Referendum Council appointed in 2015 by Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, and
the dialogues undertaken by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities leading to the National
Constitutional Convention held at Uluru in 2017, when delegates of First Nations communities came
together with constitutional experts and judges to oer Turnbull proposals for a referendum to establish “a
Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Constitution” and “the establishment of a Makarrata Commission for
the purpose of treaty making and truth-telling”, which can be accomplished without constitutional change
(Uluru Statement 2017; Referendum Council 2017). Presented with the Uluru proposals, Turnbull rejected
them. e coming referendum fullls the promise of the present Labor government of Anthony Albanese to
honour the National Constitutional Convention and its Uluru Statement.
Australia is among the last of states forged in the colonial era to deny constitutional recognition to its
rst peoples. e referendum proposal for a Voice to Parliament composed of Indigenous representatives is
altogether minimalist, intended to achieve a measure of recognition acceptable to First Nations, but without
containing proposals for land rights unacceptable to the extractive interests that dominate Australia’s quarry
Walker
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Vol. 15, No. 2 2023106
economy. Understandably, some Indigenous leaders think it already too much of a compromise. e Voice
will not have the power to introduce or vote on proposed legislation, only to retain a permanent advisory
presence and to speak to Parliament on matters concerning First Nations’ interests. ere is no guarantee
the voices of the Indigenous Australians elected to this body will be listened to, but they will be able to
speak, from within the national parliament.
It is worth comparing the situation with our neighbours over the Tasman Sea. With no single
constitutional document, Aotearoa/New Zealand is a plurinational, proportional democracy. e 1840
Treaty of Waitangi is integral to its constitutional settlement. With guaranteed Māori seats in the
parliament, Māori voters may choose to join a special electoral roll to elect these MPs or join the general roll
and vote for other candidates (Xanthaki & O’Sullivan 2009). Since 1987, Te Reo Māori has been recognised
as an ocial language of state, taught in schools alongside English. Māori legal concepts of sacred land and
water enjoy judicial recognition, for example, in the acknowledgment of the Whanganui River as a legal
person with voice and rights (Charpleix 2018). e sky has not fallen on the Pākehā.
Polling cited by Uluru dialogue co-chair Pat Anderson suggests over 80% of Indigenous Australians
will vote Yes at the referendum. Comprising but 3% of the voting population, Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islanders can only depend on the goodwill and conscience of Australian voters for the recognition and
justice sought for generations by Indigenous advocates, protestors and their allies. Polling suggests national
support for Yes has rapidly collapsed from over 60% in April 2023, when the No campaign led by Advance
Australia began its media oensive, to 40% or less by September (Evershed & Nicholas 2023).
Ken Wyatt, minister for Indigenous Australians in the previous Liberal/National government, has
called on the nation to vote Yes. When Opposition leader Peter Dutton announced the Coalition would
campaign to defeat the referendum, adopting the position proposed by the state Liberals of oil and gas
dominated Western Australia, Wyatt resigned his membership of the Liberal Party in protest (ABC 2023).
Noel Pearson, an architect of the Uluru Statement, says that following Dutton’s decision he was “troubled
by dreams, and the spectre of the Dutton Liberal Party’s Judas betrayal of our country.” Dutton, he says, “is
behaving like an undertaker preparing the grave to bury the Voice” (Evans 2023).
How has Australia’s national media informed the electorate and conducted public dialogue on the Uluru
constitutional reform proposals? Have the views of diverse elders, community leaders, judges, constitutional
lawyers, and civil society been fairly and widely presented to place Australia’s constitutional situation in
appropriate historical and international context? e most obvious feature of ‘the debate’ is that News
Corp, the wider corporate media, the National Press Club and the public broadcaster ABC have provided
daily platforms to the two Indigenous people fronting the Advance Vote No campaign: Warren Nyunggai
Mundine, and Senator Jacinta Nampajinpa Price, who occupies Wyatt’s former role as shadow minister for
Indigenous Australians. Upon these faces the No campaign’s optics and online advertising almost entirely
depends.
Commentators have noted their often-inconsistent positions and contradictory statements, which oer
little considered analysis or respectful reection on Indigenous Australia’s law, lore and constitutional past,
present and future. Price and Mundine’s public communications feature repetitive restatements of the
inammatory slogans widely propagated by Fair/Advance Australia (2023a): “e Indigenous Voice to
Parliament will wreck our Constitution, rewire our democracy, and divide Australians by race. It’s divisive,
it’s dangerous, it’s expensive and it’s not fair.” ere is surprisingly little evidence that Price or Mundine
can claim to speak with the endorsement of any First Nations community. e Central Land Council
representing the Price family’s Central Australian communities say they are “sick of her continued attacks
on land councils and other peak Aboriginal organisations. [..] she needs to stop pretending we are her
people” (Vivian 2023). Why have they been aorded so much airtime?
Walker
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Vol. 15, No. 2 2023107
is article attempts to provide an historical and international context within which we might ask,
for whom do they speak? What might be the possible motives of the No campaign? What methods of
political communication are deployed in service of these aims? What are the origins and dimensions
of the permanent, networked political infrastructure presently mobilised to defeat the 2017 National
Constitutional Convention’s referendum proposals? Which business interests might be the silent investors
in (and potential nancial beneciaries of ) a No result? How might the Vote No campaign be historically
or strategically aligned with other inuence campaigns conducted by this network, in Australia and other
nations, in particular the promotion of counter-science disinformation and opposition to eective climate
policy? Attempting to answer these questions leads us to examine the history of the ‘thinktanks’ comprising
the Australian branch of the little-known global Atlas Network.
Advance Australia and the global Atlas Network
For months, Australian voters have been confronted across social and legacy media with a sophisticated,
well-nanced anti-Voice campaign, led by the organisation Advance Australia. Little attention has been
paid to its origins.
Advance was established to counter GetUp, an advocacy campaign NGO, in the 2019 federal election
and to defend (unsuccessfully), ex-Liberal prime minister Tony Abbot’s seat of Warringah from climate
and integrity independent Zali Steggall. Now a ‘distinguished fellow’ of the Institute of Public Aairs
(est. 1943), Abbot claims it is ‘an act of love’ to vote down the Voice (IPA 2023). During the 2022 federal
election, Advance election materials featured Chinese president Xi Jinping voting Labor, insinuating
that the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is somehow a crypto-Communist party. e Australian Electoral
Commission found Advance posters falsely depicting independents David Pocock and Zali Steggall as
Green Party candidates in breach of the Electoral Act. Such election material was “likely to mislead or
deceive an elector [..] even one who is unintelligent, or gullible, or naïve” (AEC 2022).
Registered as a third-party election campaigner with the AEC, and re-tooled to campaign against the
Voice referendum, Advance no longer provides names of its responsible ocers on its public website. e
archived version of its website names an advisory council including Maurice Newman and Sam Kennard
(Advance 2019), a board member of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS 2023a). Established in 1976,
Newman and the late Neville Kennard (of Kennard’s Hire) were closely involved in the founding of the CIS
(Kelly 1992, p. 47), which currently names Mundine as director of its ‘Indigenous Forum’ and Price as an
associate (CIS 2023b).
Looking beyond the impression of signicant Indigenous opposition to a Yes vote generated by constant
media attention to Price and Mundine, let us examine the closely integrated network of organisations with
which they are aliated and that have cultivated their public careers: the CIS, the IPA, LibertyWorks, the
now defunct Bennelong Society, and the international Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
What these organisations all share, by personnel, interlocking board memberships, and/or formal aliation,
is integration with the global Atlas Network (2020a).
Not itself a think-tank, Atlas is ‘the mother of all thinktanks’, an umbrella organisation co-ordinating
515 ‘public policy research institutes’ across 99 countries. Until recently, these were mapped and listed on the
Atlas website (Atlas Network 2020a). Organisations and social networks are, of course, composed entirely of
individuals. e specic public individuals, activists and responsible ocers of the Atlas-linked organisations
discussed in this article are mentioned by way of example, in service of my aim to contribute to academic
and public-interest knowledge. e factual evidence I rely upon here to analyse the Australian outposts of
the Atlas Network are the public actions and public statements of Atlas-aliated political actors as reported
in the public media, and as published on the public websites of Atlas-linked ‘thinktanks’ alongside the public
proles of their executive sta and board members.
Walker
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Vol. 15, No. 2 2023108
Registered in Delaware in 1981 as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation by the English businessman
Antony Fisher (and later renamed), the Atlas Network aims to “litter the world with free-market think-
tanks” modelled on Fisher’s prototype neoliberal thinktank founded in 1955, the London-based Institute
of Economic Aairs (Blundell 2001; Salles-Djelic 2017). e better-known Atlas thinktanks in the
Anglophone world include the Fraser Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan
Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
e Atlas Network’s ever-growing roster of think-tanks have foundational histories of oil-derived
core funding among wider corporate support, including from ExxonMobil and other oil majors, from
the oil-rening billionaires Charles and David Koch’s ‘philanthropic’ foundations, and those of Richard
Mellon Scaife, heir to the family banking, Alcoa and Gulf Oil/Chevron fortune. anks to US nancial
transparency laws, the tax deductible ‘non-prot’ Atlas think-tanks comprising the American branch of
the Network have partially documented nancial histories (Rothmyer 1981; Brulle 2014; ExxonSecrets
2014; Chafuen 2021a)1. e Australian Atlas organisations have for decades worked in concert with their
US-based counterparts to challenge the long-established scientic conrmation of global warming, and
to oppose government policies to phase out fossil-fuel extraction and combustion, such as carbon taxation,
government support for renewable energy, and an eective UN climate treaty (Wilkinson 2020). In 1988,
the IPCC was formed, the global public was alerted by scientists and news media that global warming had
begun, and Exxon executives were internally notied that the public position of Exxon and the American
Petroleum Institute (API) would be to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientic conclusions regarding
the potential enhanced greenhouse eect” (Climate Files, 2023a). Since 1988, the Atlas Network has
continuously expanded its funding base and multiplied across borders into its present global constellation
of 500+ thinktanks and numerous spin-o campaign units. A core aim of this expansion was to enhance oil
industry eorts to undermine support for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC,
est. 1992) and to prevent the negotiation of binding, equitable, quantied, timetabled, legislated, science-
based national CO2 reduction targets (Walker & Johnson 2018).
ere is ample historical and circumstantial evidence suggesting that the anti-Voice campaign supports
objectives closely aligned with the Atlas Network’s permanent anti-climate policy campaign, and is being
conducted through proxies in the interests of extractive business interests that have opposed First Nations’
pleas for self-determination, recognition and land justice in the past. Whilst it is true that major mining
corporations operating in Australia – e.g. BHP and Rio Tinto - have recently moved to divest their fossil
fuel divisions and have publicly announced their support for the Voice, the statements of petroleum
companies Woodside, Santos and the oil and gas lobby APPEA (now Energy Australia) on the Voice
are equivocal at best, reecting fossil industry concern that the numerous legal challenges mounted by
Indigenous communities against new fossil fuel projects could be further strengthened by the inuence an
Indigenous advisory body might have on the implementation of federal laws at the executive level (SBS
2023; McKilroy & Macdonald-Smith 2023)2. Since limited disclosure laws prevent Australians from
knowing who nances the Australian Atlas organisations, it is possible that funds from any number of
fossil/mining companies and their banks could be owing through ‘dark money’ channels to them.
1 Search DeSmog.com for individual organisation profiles (including financial data compiled from publicly available
Form 990s) of US institutes listed on the Atlas (2020a) ‘global partner directory’.
2 The state governments of South Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland, Western Australia, Tasmania, New
South Wales and Victoria have declared their support for and initiated dialogues and processes toward state-level Treaties
with First Nations communities (Hobbs 2020). Given that major fossil/mining project approvals require authorisations from
the Commonwealth government, these developments lie beyond the concerns of our present interest in the inter-national
Atlas Network’s obstruction of Australian constitutional reform.
Walker
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Vol. 15, No. 2 2023109
The first rule of Atlas Network is never talk about Atlas Network
Few have heard of the Atlas. Presenting itself as “a non-prot organization that aims to secure for all
individuals the rights to economic and personal freedom through its global network of strategic partners”,
the Atlas Network (2023) carefully avoids publicity in its own name. is is key to its capacity to constantly
generate abundant, seemingly diusely-sourced ‘independent’ publications and media content promoting
the same agendas, to exert inuence on public opinion and policy without its corporate investors or the
global Network itself being exposed to public scrutiny. Importantly, the Atlas Network is not itself a ‘think-
tank’. It rather acts as a tax-deductible fundraising, networking and advisory service which services private
billionaires, ‘philanthropic’ foundations and corporations by assisting them to found new tax-deductible
Atlas institutes and temporary campaign units. rough these, the Atlas Network and its private investors
coordinate permanent political inuence campaigns on behalf of international business, variously at state,
national, regional and international scales. At the centre of this global architecture of corporate political
communication is the Atlas headquarters at the Virginia campus of George Mason University, which,
like the US thinktanks of the wider Atlas Network, has a history of funding from the Koch foundations
(Stripling 2016; MacLean 2017). e name Atlas’ may refer either to this central oce, or to the entire set
of thinktanks comprising the Network. Whilst its existence is all but unknown to political commentators, as
Fang (2017) observes of its role in the election of Brazil’s radically anti-Indigenous president Jair Bolsonaro,
the Atlas has “reshaped political power in country after country”.
As historians of the neoliberal counter-revolution have shown (e.g. Cockett 1995; Mirowski & Plehwe
2009), the ideology of ‘free market’ globalisation – deregulation, privatisation, repression of trade unions,
anti-environmentalism, regressive tax cuts – was forged over time by the original globalists, the invite-
only private membership of the elite Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), the ‘inner sanctum’ of the neoliberal
movement. Executive and academic board positions of Atlas think-tanks are usually held by MPS members
(Mirowski & Plehwe 2009, p. 4). e inaugural 1947 MPS conference included the ultra-libertarian
Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman of the Chicago
School. Born to a wealthy family of mine owners and educated at the elite schools of Eton and Cambridge
(Blundell 2001, p. 48), Antony Fisher became a disciple of Hayek following his shock at UK Labour’s 1945
election win, and was inducted into the MPS in 1954.
On Hayek’s advice, Fisher devoted himself to a life-long mission to inuence the views of the ‘second-
hand dealers in ideas’ – journalists, teachers, lecturers – and devised for this task the prototype neoliberal
thinktank: the Institute of Economic Aairs (est. 1955). By the mid-1960s, the IEA had secured continuing
support from Shell and BP. By the mid-late 1970s, the IEA was supported by numerous transnational
banks and corporations, including Shell, BP, Rio Tinto, Exxon, Texaco and Gulf Oil (IEA, 1980). e
public remained in the dark regarding IEA’s sources of funding, money deployed to commission, purchase,
publicise and mass-disseminate the books, pamphlets and op-eds of MPS academics in easily digestible
formats through libraries and the mass media to the general public. us was generated the ‘climate of
opinion’ to which Margaret atcher attributed her 1979 election victory. Without Fisher’s IEA and the
subsequent global proliferation of think-tanks deploying its methods, MPS scholars may well have remained
marginalised on the radical right-wing fringes of legal and economic thought.
In public, neoliberals claim to defend ‘freedom of the individual’ through ‘free markets’, ‘the rule of
law’ and ‘small government’. In reality, the MPS/Atlas Network aims to institutionalise a supra-national
legal order of rules to ‘encase’ the global market, immunising wealthy elites and transnational corporations
from the unwanted ‘government interventions’ of majoritarian democracy and national parliaments, whilst
simultaneously striving to capture, transform and strengthen the coercive, interventionist powers of the
strong state (Slobodian 2018; Whyte 2019). e cynical, often authoritarian attitudes of MPS scholars
toward universal surage, parliamentary sovereignty, human rights, and third-world decolonisation and
Walker
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Vol. 15, No. 2 2023110
independence movements have been noted by scholars (Brown 2015; Biebricher 2020; Cornelissen 2017 &
2023), as have the eorts of MPS legal theorists to devise near-irreversible constitutional restrictions on the
powers of democratic governments to impose redistributive taxation to fund public provision of universal
healthcare and higher education (Maclean 2017; Farrant & Tarko 2019; Silva 2020, Alemparte 2022).
Australian business and political elites have taken a leading role in the Network. A 2013 directory of
MPS members across 67 countries obtained by DeSmog (2021) includes numerous Australians: the largest
national cohort after the United States. Many of the names listed will be unfamiliar to most Australians.
Others will be, such as John Howard, Liberal prime minister of Australia (1996-2007), who joined the MPS
in 20103. Promising ‘bucket loads of extinguishment’ of native title, the Howard government came to power
amidst a mining industry fear campaign against the 1992 Mabo judgement, the 1993 Native Title Act, and
the 1996 Wik decision. Confessing ‘climate scepticism’, Howard refused Australia’s ratication of the UN
Kyoto Protocol. Cultivating white nationalism and the Christian right, Howard shifted the Liberal party’s
secular liberalism to conservative neoliberalism. Howard lost the 2007 election, in part for obstructing
climate policy and refusing an apology to the Stolen Generations, victims of government-mandated child
removal and cultural assimilation.
Another well-known MPS member is ex-Member for Goldstein Tim Wilson (MPS 2012). For several
years prior to his 2013 entry to parliament with the incoming Liberal/National government of Tony Abbot,
Wilson worked as climate policy director of the IPA (2012), which the Atlas Network (2015) credited
with co-ordinating the relentless media campaign against the climate policies of Julia Gillard’s Labor
government. In recent years the executives and corporate board members of the IPA have been recruited
amongst the senior managers of Rio Tinto, Shell, Woodside, and petroleum engineering company Clough.
In 2013, the Abbott government introduced a raft of bills to repeal the previous government’s clean energy
and carbon pricing legislation.
In parallel, News Corp and the local Atlas thinktanks launched a campaign against human rights
protections for minorities in Australian law. In 2011, the Federal Court ruled in favour of nine prominent
Aboriginal leaders who sued lead News Corp ‘opinion columnist Andrew Bolt under section 18C of the
1975 Racial Discrimination Act, which oers protection from abusive racial vilication (ABC 2011). e
Murdoch press and local Atlas units promptly joined an attack on 18C. e IPA went further, demanding
the abolition of the Australian Human Rights Commission (IPA 2013). In 2013, Wilson was appointed
Human Rights Commissioner, ostensibly to ‘restore balance’ ( Jabour 2013). e role was recently assumed
by Lorraine Finlay, another IPA staer (Remeikis 2021). International human rights covenants arming
Indigenous people’s rights to culture, consultation and consent over traditional lands are a key frontier in
legal eorts to limit new rounds of fossil fuel production and thus the damage caused by it (United Nations
2022; van Asselt 2023).
e MPS membership meets annually in international hotels, often in parallel with Atlas workshops
restricted to funders and think-tank directors. Claiming the tax-deductible ‘non-prot’ status of educational
‘research institutes’, individual Atlas units rigorously hide from the public their common sources of fossil
fuel and other corporate funding, and the fact that their for-prot campaigns are conducted in concert
with other Atlas units. Neither Atlas or MPS conferences are open to the public; they do not issue press
statements and rarely publish proceedings (although see Bennett 2020). Each thinktank is designed
to generate a constant ow of easily read outputs, duly amplied by aligned media to inuence public
opinion and shape government policy. Flooding the public sphere with constantly repackaged ‘opinion
pieces, ‘research papers, submissions to government inquiries, Facebook memes and shock-jock outrage,
these agenda-setting policy campaigns present to the citizen as a diverse array of opinion from multiple
3 MPS members are hereafter denoted by year of acceptance as members, according to the DeSmog (2021a) member
list, and scholarly literature reporting on primary documents held in the MPS archives.
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independent sources on a wide set of policy issues, such that it would be reasonable to accept some of these
views as one’s own, or at least believe they are widely held by fellow citizens. Meanwhile, Atlas aliates such
as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) draft radically pro-corporate, anti-labour and anti-
climate legislation to be introduced by aligned politicians (Wilce & Graves 2014).
Scholars have expressed concern regarding the limited capacity of citizens to identify intentional
disinformation and its intended side-eect, the voluntary propagation of disinformation by those who
believe it to be true (misinformation). Disinformation campaigns aim to ‘shift the Overton window’, taking
advantage of the false-balance framing of ‘both sides’ journalism. As Alejandro Chafuen (MPS 1980, Atlas
Network president 1991-2017) reports, it was Joseph Overton of the Atlas-aliated Mackinac Centre
who developed the concept of the Overton window “as a process that leads to policy change”. is involves
crafting ideological messages “that can increase or decrease the number of ideas politicians can support
without unduly risking their electoral support”, and by other means, such as “taking control of organizations
and institutions, modifying processes so outcomes can be more favourable to freedom, and pushing for middle-
of-the-road solutions which might create a culture more respectful of freedom (Chafuen 2023, p. 68; my
italics).
e Advance strategy of generating extensive media coverage of a small number of Indigenous speakers
to create the impression of signicant Indigenous community opposition to legal reforms which would
enhance their rights has been applied by Atlas elsewhere. In Canada, proposed legislation to give eect
to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was targeted by the Atlas Network through
the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) (Atlas Network 2020b). e UNDRIP arms Indigenous
peoples’ right of free, prior and informed consent before governments approve large development projects
signicantly impacting upon traditional lands. As political momentum began building in 2016 for Canada
to implement UNDRIP, this “concerned the team at MLI”. As an internal Atlas report noted, the aim of the
MLI campaign was removing potential barriers to the expansion of oil and gas projects (Dembicki 2022).
Although the UNDRIP bill “got a rough ride in the Commons and in the Senate”, with Conservative MPs
voting against the bill claiming it would give Indigenous people a veto over natural resource projects, the
UNDRIP Act was eventually passed into law (CBC 2021).
Whilst there is no land justice element to the Voice proposal, the co-ordinated opposition to Indigenous
constitutional recognition by the Australian arm of the Atlas Network we can assume is motivated by the
same intentions underlying the permanent Atlas campaign against climate policy, that is, to minimise the
possibility of democratic government challenging the ever-expanding frontier of fossil fuel extraction.
Traditional owners have raised legal challenges to fossil fuel projects, for instance, to Santos, and Woodside
(and thereby to foreign joint-venture partners like ExxonMobil, BP and Shell) in the Murujuga/Burrup,
Pilliga and Tiwi Island gas basins. Should an Indigenous Voice be constitutionalised in Parliament, First
Nations representatives might raise objections to such fossil and mining projects. Ratication of UNDRIP
(and with it the right to informed, freely given, prior consent over changes in land use) might also be raised
on the agenda of a Makarrata truth commission and in treaty negotiations. is would seem a likely motive
of the Australian Atlas units and their (undeclared) corporate investors for the defeat of the Voice, and with
it the national unity and political momentum required to implement the Uluru process.
Advance claims that the Voice is a project of ‘inner city elites and woke politicians’, that it will ‘divide
us on the basis of race’ and ‘wreck your constitution (Advance 2023). Although its elsewhere-declared
funders include hedge fund millionaires and well-heeled owners of Sydney Harbour waterfront properties
(Wilson & Buckley 2023), Advance’s website features dumbed-down slogans, clearly aimed at stoking white
nationalist grievance among rural and suburban voters against the First Nations voice, and also against
‘woke climate hysteria’ (Advance 2023). Known as ‘astroturng’, this corporate PR strategy creates the
articial impression of an authentic grassroots mobilisation (Beder 2002). e claims made by Advance have
proliferated across the electorate, supported by an amnesiac press and a legion of fake social media accounts.
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Fact-checking eorts, though well intended, merely re-broadcasts the disinformation as the media ‘both
sides’ distracting, inammatory, untrue and trivial claims, sucking oxygen from democratic deliberation on
the relative merits of the referendum proposal. Unidentiable social media accounts have propagated ‘serious
misinformation’, alleging the Voice (with no decision-making powers) will veto laws and court decisions,
or require new land taxes, reparations payments, the closure of national parks and the surrender of farms
to First Nations. e No campaign has created an atmosphere of license for hate speech and overtly racist
attacks on Indigenous people, who report daily distress and dread at the prospect of the referendum being
defeated (Connick 2023).
The Voice is a project of ‘elites’: oil company owners and the origins
of the Australian Atlas
In 1974, Antony Fisher was invited to Vancouver by petroleum, logging and other business interests to
establish the Fraser Institute, his rst known IEA-cloning eort outside of Britain. In 1976, Fisher’s
services were retained by oil and mining executives to build an Australian version of the IEA, his second
international commission. e origins of the CIS are indicative of the origin story of the Atlas Network, of
which the anti-Voice campaign is only the most recent Atlas intervention altering the course of Australian
history. e CIS was provided with foundation grants by transnational resource exporting companies to
counter the popular program of the Whitlam government (1972-1975): to restore Australian sovereignty,
control and ownership over hydrocarbon and uranium resources, universal access to healthcare and tertiary
education, a national system of environmental law and national parks, and the promotion of Aboriginal
equality through land rights (Walker 2022; Huf 2023).
In 1975, Maurice Newman (MPS 1976) organised Milton Friedman’s Australian speaking tour.
Friedman was own direct from Chile (Courvisanos & Millmow 2006), where he and other MPS
economists were advising General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, in the neoliberals’ rst
experiment in radical free-market ‘shock therapy’ (Klein 2017, pp. 49-128). At the time, supporters of
the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende deposed in the coup were being
tortured and ‘disappeared’ en masse. Friedman’s implicit critique of Whitlam’s economic policy was widely
lauded in the press. In 1976, Ron Kitching (MPS 1983) and Roger Randerson (MPS 1983) arranged
Hayek’s Australian speaking tour. A self-confessed “radical anti-socialist”, in one lecture, Hayek prosecuted
his critique of “unlimited democracy” in terms reecting the collaboration of MPS economists and
constitutional theorists with Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship: “What present trends point to is the emergence
of ever larger numbers, for whose welfare and status government has assumed responsibility it cannot
discharge, and whose revolt when they are not paid enough, or asked to do more work than they like, will
have to be subdued with the knout and the machine-gun” (Hayek 1979, p. 96).
e same year, John Bonython, manager of News Corp’s Adelaide Advertiser and co-founder of gas giant
Santos, arranged two Australian visits from Antony Fisher to privately gather support from corporates,
wealthy individuals and right-wing politicians for an Australian IEA-clone. In a 1976 letter, Bonython
described the origins of the CIS to John Murchison of the ultra-rich Texas oil family, head of Santos’ joint-
venture partner Delhi International (later acquired by Esso Australia):
We have had a sad time here of recent years with the very regrettable Labour-Socialist Federal
Government [..] I hope that, Labour having been expelled from oce, the Liberals under Fraser
may get us back to a better state before long.
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Describing the think-tank method perfected by Fisher through which corporations could exert inuence
over public opinion, education, elections and legislation whilst appearing not to engage in political activity
at all, Bonython writes:
Recently, at my instigation, Australia has had a visit from one Antony Fisher of London. [..] What
you may say, what any business itself may say, is put down by many to ‘vested interest’ [..] Fisher
has a technique of getting academics to say and write under their own names what business cannot say
for itself. [..] Fisher’s method seems to me to be the best I have come across. Sporadic attempts to
defend private enterprise, private property, freedom of choice, must of course be made whenever
possible. However, Fisher’s method is not so sporadic. It is a continuing process. e method can be
backed up in many ways - by a society etc. [..] Fisher’s ideas as to method should be of real interest and
benet, and incidentally, they should benet you. (Bonython 1976; my emphasis)
e founding grants of the CIS were supplied in 1979 by Santos, Shell, BHP, Rio Tinto, Western Mining
Corporation (WMC) and News Corp’s Adelaide Advertiser, arranged by Newman, Bonython, and Hugh
Morgan (Kelly 1992, p. 47). Morgan was a powerbroker in Australian and international mining politics:
chair of WMC (later acquired by BHP), chair of Alcoa Australia, a board director of the Alcoa parent
company based in the Scaife-Mellon seat of Pittsburgh, a leader of the Australian Mining Industry Council
(AMIC) and its successor, the Minerals Council of Australia (Order of Australia 2021). He was variously
a board director of the CIS, and (with Woodside’s Charles Goode) of the IPA and the Liberal Party’s
Cormack Foundation; in 1983 Morgan accepted Fisher’s invitation to join the inaugural Atlas business
advisory board (Chafuen 2012b).
The Voice will ‘Divide us on the basis of race’: against Aboriginal self-
determination and land rights
Oering impoverished Aboriginal communities standing to negotiate with powerful mining companies
that had never had to consult with them before, Whitlam’s ALP promised First Nations a right of veto
on unwanted mining projects, including for protection of sacred sites. British company Rio Tinto voiced
its opposition through its Australian subsidiary, in terms reminiscent of the Fair/Advance claims that
constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australia is ‘unfair’ and ‘divisive’:
Giving mineral rights, in eect, to Aboriginals and not to other landholders is divisive. CRA
believes that Aboriginal title to land should be held on the same basis as that of any other Australian.
(Roberts 1981, p. 91)
Rio Tinto then possessed major cross-holdings in Australian uranium leases, as did other known think-
tank funders Exxon, BP, and WMC (Roberts 1981, p. 126). At the time, the ALP opposition supported the
policy of the powerful anti-nuclear alliance of the peace, labour, environment and Aboriginal land rights
movements: ‘leave it in the ground’. is changed after Bob Hawke returned the ALP to government in
1983.
From the late 1980s to early 2000s, Morgan collaborated with his speechwriter Ray Evans (MPS 1988)
and John Stone (Federal Treasury Secretary 1979-1984; MPS 2008) to found four single-issue campaign
groups (Kelly 2019). Each were designed to push public debate rightward in pursuit of the political goals
of mining capital; abolishing wage arbitration and weakening unions (HR Nicholls Society), ‘states-
rights’ constitutionalism (Samuel Griths Society); climate disinformation and policy obstruction (the
Lavoisier Group) and the Bennelong Society. Advocating the return of 1950s-style assimilationist policy,
the Bennelong Society sought to delegitimise the consensus on Indigenous self-determination, alleging
that the causes of contemporary poverty and disadvantage were not, as Aboriginal leaders maintained, in
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colonial land dispossession, systemic incarceration and child removal, but in social welfare payment and the
inalienable, collective land titles awarded under the limited scope of the 1976 Aboriginal Land Rights Act
and the 1993 Native Title Act. Stone opened a 2017 Quadrant article by “acknowledging the traditional
owners of this country: King George III and all his heirs and assigns” (Kelly 2019, p. 93).
Ex-Labor minister and IPA fellow Gary Johns was president of the Bennelong Society in its later years
(BS 2012). Largely composed of white business conservatives, the society cultivated Indigenous gures
willing to criticize Aboriginal leaders and organisations in support of the Howard government’s policies.
Mundine was awarded the 2005 Bennelong Medal for his “proposal to change the way community owned
land is controlled”. Bess Price (Jacinta’s mother) received the 2009 medal for her “challenge to white
students and cranky Kooris and Murris from down south who know nothing about Aboriginal people and
who hate whitefellas” and “her forthright defence of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response”
(BS 2012). As Watson writes (2010, p. 605):
[..] the NTER was a raft of measures introduced by the Commonwealth in August 2007, in response
to allegations of child sexual abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. e measures
included the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal lands, the quarantining of welfare payments,
prohibitions on alcohol, and the vesting of expansive powers in the Commonwealth Minister to
intervene in the aairs of Aboriginal organisations.
Weakening native title rights and Aboriginal land councils, in a traumatic re-invasion of Country, Howard
mobilised the Army in 2007 to enforce the NTER upon remote communities.
In the sensitive context of the Voice referendum campaign, Gary Johns has revived 1930s-style ‘blood
quantum’ racial biology, proposing that since “It is possible to test Aboriginal lineage […] blood will have to
be measured for all benets and jobs’’ (Hurst 2023). Johns is now a spokesman of the anti-Voice campaign
unit Recognise a Better Way (2023). He was a speaker at the 2023 Sydney conference of the international
Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) which headlined the Vote No campaign, as were fellow
Atlas networkers Newman, Price, and Mundine, along with One Nation senator Pauline Hanson (CPAC
2023a). In 2018, ocers of Hanson’s One Nation party were secretly lmed by Al Jazeera in a Washington
meeting pitching to Koch Industries for funding: “What you can do to help us, and it’s going to go down to
money at the end of the day [..] we can change the voting system in our country, the way people operate, if
we’ve got the money to do it” (Charley 2019)4.
The Voice will ‘wreck your Constitution’ and ‘rewire your democracy’:
authoritarian neoliberalism, the CPAC, and the criminalisation of
climate protest
In 2007, Newman was appointed by Howard to chair the ABC board. Also appointed was the revisionist
historian Keith Windschuttle, following an attack on historians who had inuenced legal opinion away
from judicial denial of Aboriginal property rights in land (e.g. Reynolds, 1981 & 1987). Windschuttle
(2002) denied evidence of widespread massacres, arguing that Aboriginal resistance to violent frontier land
appropriation should rather be understood as criminal violations of settler’s property rights. Additional
Howard appointments to the ABC board included IPA fellow Ron Brunton, News Corp columnist Janet
Albrechtsen (MPS 2011; IPA director 2016) and Steven Skala, a board director of Deutsche Bank and the
CIS. From 1984 to 2001, Newman was also a director of Deutsche Bank, still among the worlds’ largest
nanciers of new hydrocarbon development (ABC 2008; BankTrack 2023), and since 2002, an advisor to
4 There is no known evidence that Koch actually supplied any such funds.
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Marsh McLennan, insurance brokers to the Adani coal project long resisted by Wangan and Jagalingou
custodians (Fernyhough 2020).
A vocal science sceptic and opponent of clean energy, as chair of the ABC Newman criticized the media
for being too willing to accept the scientic consensus on global warming (Elliot 2014). In a speech to ABC
sta, Newman declared climate change an example of “group-think”, complaining that “contrary views had
not been tolerated, and those who expressed them had been labelled and mocked” (Trembath 2011). Since
the 1988 ‘Exxon position’, most of the ‘contrary voices’ platformed by media covering ‘both sides’ of the
‘climate debate’ have been published by or otherwise associated with Atlas-aliated groups, whose funding
sources are never disclosed by the speakers or their interviewers to audiences. e Howard era marked a
profound shift in the ideology of the Liberal Party, from secular ‘broad-church liberalism to the radically
anti-scientic, reactionary neoliberalism promoted via the MPS/Atlas Network by its fossil-fuel (and other)
corporate sponsors.
Fifty-four years ago, scientists’ warnings that unchecked fossil-combustion emissions would cause
catastrophic global heating by the early to mid-21st century were foregrounded in the opening paragraphs
of the 1969 report of the Senate Select Committee on Air Pollution (1969, p. 2) convened by John Gortons
Liberal government, which drew on extensive sworn evidence submitted in public by government, university
and fossil/mining industry scientists. Convened in response to mounting calls from governments and
citizens for comprehensive national and international regulation of polluting industry, the proceedings of
the 1971 AMIC conference Progress: Mining and the Environment likewise noted scientists’ warnings that
irreversible atmospheric CO2 accumulation would eventually melt the icecaps (Nelson 1971, p. 3). From the
mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, condential internal scientic reports commissioned by Shell, Exxon
and the American Petroleum Institute reported this evidence in detail, also without challenge to well-
established science (Climate Files 2023b).
In 2013, incoming Liberal PM Tony Abbott appointed Newman chair of a business advisory council,
which called for stringent budget cuts to eliminate ‘green and red tape’. Soon after, Newman declared there
was no evidence linking fossil-fuel combustion to global warming: the real agenda was a conspiracy of the
United Nations for world take-over (Cox 2014). Newman made similar claims in his speech to the 2023
Sydney CPAC conference, warning that young minds were being “bombarded” with relentless “doomsday
climate propaganda”, drawing parallels between the 1930s Nazi subversion of the democratic Weimar
constitution and the present political situation in Australia (CPAC 2023b). Javier Milei, current front-
runner for the presidency of gas-rich Argentina, with extensive connections to Argentina’s Atlas think-
tanks, has similarly described climate change as “another lie of socialism”, “part of the agenda of Cultural
Marxism” (Araldi 2022).
Placed in the international context of Newman’s career as Australia’s veteran MPS/Atlas networker, the
Advance (2023) claim that the Voice will ‘wreck your constitution’, and its seemingly bizarre labelling of
Indigenous Yes campaigners as ‘communists’ are concerning. is is more than an anachronistic appeal to the
Cold War worldview of an ageing voting demographic. Real or imaginary, for the transnational corporation,
the ‘pro-Western’ dictatorships of the Cold War, and the libertarian-authoritarian far-right, the communist
is the primordial enemy, someone who can be deprived of rights, or life, without sanction.
e admiration of the CPAC for autocratic governments should be carefully scrutinised. In 2022, the
CPAC held a conference in Hungary, addressed by far-right president Viktor Orbán, who has eroded the
country’s democratic and judicial safeguards in pursuit of ‘illiberal democracy’. Since 2013, according to
Dorosz (2020),
Hungary’s carbon emissions have increased, and its share of renewables has fallen substantially.
e government has abolished its environmental ministry,banned wind energy and introduced a
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special tax on solar panels. [..] Orban is now building new nuclear reactors. [In 2019] he vetoed the
European Union’s 2050 carbon neutrality goal.
Orbán’s opposition to clean energy and promotion of nuclear reactors parallels the policy position now
widely advocated by Australian Atlas pundits and the LNP federal opposition. Beauchamp (2022) reports
that in a speech prior to the 2022 Texas CPAC conference, Orbán said “we do not want to become peoples
of mixed-race”; in his Texas conference speech, Orbán encouraged the Trumpian assault on electoral
institutions, civil and minority rights, and environmental protection: “we cannot ght successfully by liberal
means, because our opponents use liberal institutions, concepts, and language to disguise their Marxist and
hegemonic plans.”
LibertyWorks is yet another Australian Atlas unit. Chaired by Warren Mundine, LibertyWorks has failed
to repay to the public revenue the costs of its failed High Court challenge aiming to overturn Australia’s
foreign inuence registration scheme, designed to render transparent foreign inuences on domestic
politics (Taylor 2023). e case was mounted after Tony Abbot was requested to register following his
attendance at a 2019 Budapest conference organised by the Hungarian government, at which Abbot praised
Orbán. LibertyWorks, which has hosted several of the American Conservative Union’s CPAC events in
Australia, refused requests from the Australian government to comply with the disclosures required under
the scheme (Karp 2020). Now defunct, its archived website features Price claiming s18C of the Racial
Discrimination Act “encourages rather than discourages racism (LibertyWorks 2017), alongside a stream of
articles opposing renewable energy and climate policy. LibertyWorks (2018) board members have included
ex-IPA executive Alan Moran (MPS 2011) - now working with Chicago’s anti-climate policy Atlas unit
the Heartland Institute (2019) - and John Humphreys (MPS 2011). Humphreys was a founder of the
Australian Libertarian Society (est. 2000) and is presently chief economist with the Australian Taxpayers
Alliance (est. 2011). Both organisations are aliated with the Atlas Network (2014, 2020a). Reports that
Mundine is being considered for pre-selection to a safe Liberal Senate seat (Maddison & Massola 2023)
provides further evidence of the Atlas Network’s long march through the Liberal Party and Australian
public institutions.
e role of senior Liberal ex-politicians in such international networks does not stop with Abbott and
the CPAC. John Howard works with London-based climate disinformation unit the Global Warming
Policy Foundation. Tony Abbott recently joined its board. In 2019, another London organisation, Policy
Exchange (PE) released a report branding Extinction Rebellion and non-violent climate protest movements
as ‘extremists’ aiming to overthrow the British state (Wilson & Walton, 2019). Just as corporate-drafted
bills generated by ALEC and passed in US states reclassied non-violent environmentalists as ‘terrorists’
(Parker 2009), PE’s calls for aggressive prosecution and expanded police powers were promptly made law
by the Conservative government, with similar policy shifts achieved through similar methods recently in
Germany and elsewhere (Barnett & Bright 2023; Westerwelt & Dembicki, 2023). In the subsequent UK
police crackdown, climate protestors have received long jail sentences. Some have been jailed for contempt
of court, in breach of rulings made by a judge forbidding them to speak to juries about the climate crisis or
the history of peaceful civil rights movement in their defence (Laville 2023). State governments in Australia,
with bipartisan support of Labor and the LNP, have similarly rushed through draconian laws without public
debate, criminalising non-violent protestors who face police surveillance, jail and heavy nes (Rowlands
2023). Such laws can only be for the benet of the predominantly foreign-owned oil, gas and coal
companies operating in Australia, many of which pay zero company tax and zero Petroleum Resource Rent
Tax on hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenues (ATO 2023). Reportedly funded by ExxonMobil
(Horton 2022), the registered owner of Policy Exchange is Alexander Downer (OpenCorporates 2023),
foreign minister in the Howard government, who is presently advising UK Border Force on its policy to
‘stop the boats’ (Attorney General’s Department 2023).
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Conclusion
Australian voters carry an historic responsibility in the coming referendum. Not only do they have the
opportunity to celebrate and arm First Nation’s profound knowledge as cultural custodians of country
for untold generations, they also carry the weight of responsibility for the integrity of Australia’s our
liberal democratic institutions and systems of elected government, our reputation among the nations of
the world, and the right of our children to have hope for the future. Should the Atlas Network’s ‘Vote No’
campaign shout down a profoundly important constitutional vote through racial provocation and ubiquitous
disinformation, Australians will have conceded yet more power to the most powerfully-organised opponents
of national self-determination and parliamentary sovereignty, to those who would, in pursuit of temporary
riches for a tiny elite, render the Earth progressively uninhabitable. If Australians continue to turn a blind
eye to the shadowy, far-right political infrastructure of the Atlas think-tanks and campaign organisations,
which exert considerable inuence over elections and public life without transparency or accountability,
Australians may nd themselves increasingly voiceless in the illiberal democracy of a petro-state.
Are Australians ready to listen, instead, to the voices of the most ancient abiding culture on Earth, which
teaches respect, responsibility, reciprocity and the sacred obligation to care for country? I hope the answer is
Yes, for the hour is late.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of two anonymous reviewers and the editors in preparing
this article, as well as feedback from academic colleagues and other expert readers of initial drafts.
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Chapter
Full-text available
Around 2019, Australia became the world’s largest exporter of both coal and ‘natural gas’ (fossil methane), and thus the third largest exporter of greenhouse emissions. Australia provides a signal case of the general history of the neoliberal project, which has always been closely integrated with ‘fossil capital’, from its origins in the resistance of early 20th century business chambers to the regulation of capitalism by parliamentary democracy through to the global coalition of hydrocarbon interests organised since the 1980s to obstruct climate policy. Reading the history of the neoliberal ‘globalists’ from the present of the climate emergency requires us to exceed the conventional terms of economic thought and confront the vast conflagration of hydrocarbon fuels foundational to the globalisation of ‘the world economy’. Until the recent advances of renewable energy, heat from fossil-fire was almost unchallengeable as the primary source of industrial power. Climate policy, competition from lower-cost renewables, and financial divestment present existential threats to the business model of coal, oil and gas corporations, which is to maximise fire and heat: the direct energy product it sells, and the direct planetary by-product of gases released during hydrocarbon extraction and combustion. Conversely, the organisation of fossil capital to prevent decarbonisation threatens not only democracy in jurisdictions where it once seemed secure, but the survival of human civilisation and the Earth as we know it. This chapter offers an historical outline of the Australian roots and branches of what can only incompletely be understood as the ‘neoliberal thought collective’. Emphasizing the long-term structural relationship between the geopolitical strategies of extractive multinationals and the political organisations fostered by them to discipline and capture governments, this is less a chapter in the history of ‘ideas’ than of “corporation-sponsored persuasion and propaganda”.
Article
Full-text available
We juxtapose 386 prominent contrarians with 386 expert scientists by tracking their digital footprints across ∼200,000 research publications and ∼100,000 English-language digital and print media articles on climate change. Projecting these individuals across the same backdrop facilitates quantifying disparities in media visibility and scientific authority, and identifying organization patterns within their association networks. Here we show via direct comparison that contrarians are featured in 49% more media articles than scientists. Yet when comparing visibility in mainstream media sources only, we observe just a 1% excess visibility, which objectively demonstrates the crowding out of professional mainstream sources by the proliferation of new media sources, many of which contribute to the production and consumption of climate change disinformation at scale. These results demonstrate why climate scientists should increasingly exert their authority in scientific and public discourse, and why professional journalists and editors should adjust the disproportionate attention given to contrarians.
Chapter
This chapter analyzes the political-economic views of Mont Pelerin Society members and other relevant promoters of the market economy around 1980. Most of the analysis is based on the papers presented at the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (September 7 to September 12, 1980). The topics discussed focused on “Constraints on Government,” which was the theme of the meeting. In this chapter I have sections on the underground or informal economy; the monetary debates; the power of the bureaucracy; nationalization; regulation; and immigration. Going beyond the 1980 meeting the chapter describes many books and authors that led some to describe this period as “a time of optimism for libertarians.” Some of the authors mentioned include Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Henri Lepage, Donald J. Devine, Michael E. Novak, George Gilder, Charles Murray, Walter E. Williams, Peter Bauer, Hernando de Soto, and Deepak Lal.KeywordsMont Pelerin Society1980ImmigrationReaganLibertarianismBureaucracyInflationHoover Institution
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