Australia's Atlas Network partners claim Advance's victories as their own

One of the panels at last weekend's Advance Australia conference exposed much about the Atlas and Mont Pelerin Society connected operations.

On Friday and Saturday last weekend, Advance Australia held its first conference called Evolve 2026.

Advance is an astroturf group: they make “fake grass roots” messaging to foster a radicalised Right bloc in the Australian civic discourse. It began as a counterpoint to Get Up, which was established to deploy the public’s small donations into a unified messaging outfit, in an effort to match big donors’ distorting sway in the making of Australian policy.

Anthony Klan’s investigations have repeatedly shown that multi-millionaires are backing the project to distort debate in Australia, and donation declarations recently revealed that Gina Rinehart gave Advance $895,000 in the last year through Hancock.

Allowing the public a lobbying body to represent us was not to go unchecked.

The blurb for the event showed the body’s commitment to making Australia part of the “political storm” that is “raging” across Trump’s US, Farage’s UK and Europe. The function of the conference was largely strategic, with several sessions on data, messaging and communications. Another goal was agenda setting: there was think tanker Mia Schlicht’s session on fighting Net Zero; Victorian Liberal insurgent MP Moira Deeming placed the “family” at the centre of Australian thinking; Tony Abbott declared that “mass immigration across the Anglosphere must cease.”

A third goal was likely networking. In that light, it is disturbing that Home Affairs granted a visa to an American representative of an Islamophobic hate group, the American Alliance for Freedom. Another international guest was Benjamin Harnwell, representing Steve Bannon’s War Room, a significant engine of radicalisation for Trump’s base. Harnwell had been intended to run Bannon’s “gladiator school” in an Italian monastery to train far right politicians and influencers in Bannon’s Movement to save the West.

When questioned on the visa allocated to the representative of a hate group, Home Affairs refused to comment on individual cases. The office also refused to comment on whether a visa would be granted to an antisemitic hate group representative.

One panel was labelled “Australia at the Crossroads”. This panel seemed to represent the Mont Pelerin Society and its Atlas Network’s senior operations in Australia. This excellent explanation by the ABC’s business and economics specialist journalist Gareth Hutchens contextualises the long history of that influence operation which moved neoliberalism from the fringes after WW2 to Thatcher’s “There Is No Alternative”.

The Advance panel, featuring four men with connections to Atlas Network and MPS-linked operations, made clear that they considered Advance’s victories their victories.

The most senior, Maurice Newman, has a long history in the operations. He has been named as the man who brought MPS’s Milton Friedman to Australia in the mid 1970s when Newman was helping to set up the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) in Sydney. He was a Mont Pelerin member from 1976, the year the CIS was established and was on the first board. Newman was also a founder of Advance.

Newman confirmed during Friday’s panel about CIS: “I was there and helped to create that. We had ICI, Shell, BHP, Western Mining Corporation. All of these companies gave us”, he estimated around $50,000 each but summarised it as, “a lot of money that got it going.” The fury amongst the assembled men at business (perhaps because it has substantially abandoned the now radicalised think tanks) was a refrain. The fault is not that the think tanks have moved to the fringe, but the “wokeification of corporate Australia”.

Newman fairly diagnosed that corporate concentration is a problem for the Australian economy without recognising that the mechanisms to enable it were constructed by the MPS’s Law and Economics movement, as documented by Yale professor Mehrsa Baradaran. Newman’s odd judgment was that these monopolies, which worked so hard to colonise government to crush small competitors and build their power, are now run by government. He blames government, for example, for the banks’ refusal to provide funding to coal operations. It is not an unnatural concern in the man who emerged from Deutsche Bank, long a trusted ally to mining.

Newman expressed fear of an unaccountable rampant public service as an “inversion of democracy”. He asserted also that the media has been captured by the public service. The men across the course of the panel call for a DOGE to slash public services in Australia.

Another two representatives of the think tank operations on the panel were Dan Wild and John Roskam of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). It was a 2015 IPA publication that gave its name to the panel. The pair reiterate the predictable talking points, but the more heated expression of them by the newer addition to the think tank roster, Wild, echoes the radicalisation of the IPA’s messaging over the years.

The man who appears to be an outlier on the panel is Steve Baxter. Baxter is an investor probably best known for his time on the Shark Tank show, but Baxter introduced himself as, “I’m in Defence”. During the panel Baxter declared himself to be a Libertarian Party member (and he is a donor): that political operation, and its predecessor the Liberal Democrat party, are both constructions of MPS member and Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance (Atlas partner) economist John Humphreys.

Baxter depicted himself as an “early-stage investor” and listed three ways that he is “investing” in Australia’s political remaking. When he described his position as “centre right”, it is worth noting that this was his prescription for the Coalition’s future: “This is the same Coalition that got out of Net Zero and stayed in Paris? Nah. Burn the left out. Anyone near the centre and the left, burn them out.”

Baxter told the audience he was paying to send 20 “kids” to the CPAC conference in the US in a few weeks: this is the Atlas partner-founded conference operation that is core to the MAGA movement. He also announced: “I back genuine content creators who create centre-right, free enterprise, free speech content all around the world because I think the battle of ideas starts somewhere else and flows through here.” There are also a pair of “entrepreneurs” he backs who are giving away flags.

Such fostering of young “conservatives” and the networking of them with international partners is classic Atlas strategy. Promotion of “grassroots” messaging to convey the goals of the donors was one of the strategies sociologist Alex Carey documented in capital’s “management of democracy”.

The panel’s attitude to immigration forecasts that the “racially-tinged” operations so harmful to the Voice referendum are set to continue. The ugliest expression of this was: “We’re not getting the people that we need. And we know from what we’ve been seeing on the streets of Sydney and Melbourne and elsewhere recently, a lot of them are undesirable. We need to have a closer look at who comes here and the circumstances in which they come.”

These think tank men say that “we” at Advance won against the Voice, are winning on Australia Day, are winning against the “divisive” Welcome to Country, are winning against Net Zero and against limits on disinformation. Hate speech laws, they count as a loss. Wild depicted the main political parties as the “uniparty”. They seem open to One Nation, full of excitement about Farage’s Reform and Trump’s America.

Alex Carey documented the outsized power of such well-funded information operations: we need to address this before our civic discourse becomes as poisonous as those of the US and UK.