CPAC Australia believes it has "won". What does that mean?

People are laughing that CPAC Australia believes Tony Abbott's victory is its victory, or any victory frankly. We need to understand the bigger game being played out.

Tony Abbott was announced the president of Australia’s long-term preeminent “conservative” party on Friday. CPAC Australia shared a Facebook post celebrating the leadership of the three factions of Australia’s “centre-right” political spectrum being held by “conservatives.” Audiences on social media laughed at the idea that Tony Abbott heading up anything could herald victory. They also found it risible that a minnow like CPAC Australia should claim victory in that questionable achievement.

For international readers, Tony Abbott is a former Prime Minister and a deeply disdained figure who represents an extremist Catholic and neoliberal vision for the country. There is no respect for his acumen or belief that this vision would be electorally attractive in a nation with compulsory and ranked-choice voting.

It is worth putting CPAC Australia’s claim in context to see what it actually means.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), founded in 1974 in the US, was an offshoot of two future Atlas Network partners, the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom (which merged with Young America’s Foundation). Both can be found on the Atlas Network partner list here. CPAC radicalised to become the core of MAGA America and Trump’s support base. CPAC Australia (2018-9) was founded out of Atlas Network partner LibertyWorks (2015). That entity was created when Andrew Cooper was Director of Special Projects at the Australian Institute for Progress (AiP), another Atlas Network partner.

The chart on the left shows the Australian and New Zealand partners listed in the global directory at the Atlas Network site in August 2018, now removed. Cooper has removed LibertyWorks and AiP from his LinkedIn. Read this for ^ listed Mannkal insights into the influence operation.

The AiP has, in the last few years been linked with information operations for both coal and tobacco. One of AiP’s directors hosts far right figures on his separate micro-front’s podcast.

Tony Abbott is a “Distinguished Fellow” at the Institute for Public Affairs (another Atlas Network partner). Even today, he remains listed as “active” at the Danube Institute on the Attorney-General’s foreign influence registry. He most recently spoke there in March. That is an Atlas Network-linked far right information operation in Budapest. Viktor Orbán’s English language and European operations were a core component of the transnational Christofascist “national conservative” project. Note also Abbott’s departure from a UK-based and Atlas-interlinked climate denial operation: the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The economist at the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, John Humphreys, has been trying to establish a political arm for the Atlas Network’s Australian operations, presumably to mimic the ACT Party in New Zealand/Aotearoa. That Atlas Network “think tank”-turned-party seems to be having substantial sway in the NZ coalition government despite only gaining 8% of the vote. Humphreys’ Liberal Democrat Party, which morphed into the Libertarian Party, gained little traction. [Edit: Libertarian Party has an abortion-limiting bill in NSW parliament, which will be promoted by One Nation.]

Now it appears the Atlas Network partner affiliates in Australia are looking to One Nation to fill that role.

In February, the spin machine Advance held a conference to announce to those involved the far right bigotries* and cutting edge strategies that would be core to the propaganda operations to follow. The Atlas Network panel there claimed Advance’s victories as their own.

Speakers at the Advance conference expressed disgust for the “uniparty” of the majors. Apparently the Liberal National coalition in opposition is indistinguishable from the Labor government. The few speakers for whom I was able to hear recordings appeared to hold off committing expressly to One Nation, Australia’s far right nativist party, perhaps until they could be more certain that the chaotic entity would not implode given the rogue political figures gathering around its already unwieldy personnel.

Conal Feehely attended the Advance conference undercover and reported a radically divisive message but cutting edge strategy:

These are classic Atlas Network activities: even before it was incorporated in 1981, the architecture of influence was using the newest developments in propaganda/public relations, polling and market research. Its strategies were invasive and persistent. We saw over the Voice to Parliament referendum how effective and toxic Advance’s PR could be.

Gina Rinehart and Rupert Murdoch are the only two substantial public donors to Atlas Network partners in Australia in recent years. Gina Rinehart is now openly listed as donating to the IPA, to Advance and to One Nation. The federal Treasurer referred to One Nation’s Pauline Hanson as a “wholly owned subsidiary” of Rinehart. Rinehart received a lifetime achievement award from the US Atlas partner the Atlas Society. She is now working to gain control of (mining-linked) Channel 7 (having given up on a board seat at 9 and influence through 10).

In America, Charles Koch is the major donor and strategist leading dark money neoliberal spin and climate disinformation: Atlas Network operations, broadly defined, are there nicknamed the Kochtopus. Maybe Rinehart imagines a Ginopus for Australia.

Rinehart took Hanson to speak at an elite CPAC event at Mar a Lago (when she was supposed to be sitting in parliament). Read details from her appalling speech.

The Murdochs father and son continue to donate-in-kind to Atlas Network partners by providing media platforms for their voices. Lachlan Murdoch is also closely intertwined with Tony Abbott and his Murdoch mate Peta Credlin. Gossip at the time suggested that Abbott was put onto the Fox board by (the notoriously… not bright) Lachlan to “run” Australia’s Right.

From Jason Koutsoukis in The Saturday Paper, 16-22 May 2026.

Tony Abbott also remains on the Advisory Board of the Christian Nationalist (God throughout government) Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) in the UK. Murdoch’s The Australian has made itself the outlet for this body and for its new manifestation, re-made by John Anderson into the Aspire Conference. The London conference brings together the worst theocrats, fossil fuel boosters, “Christian” rights-stripping bodies and Islamophobes.

It’s likely Abbott (with fmr PM Howard and fmr Deputy PM Anderson, both ARC Board members) would have been pushing the much more saleable Andrew Hastie, another ARC Board member, into leading the Liberal Party (since the current leader Angus Taylor radiates “least impressive boarding house captain a private school endured in a decade”). Hastie is brighter, and despite refusing to rule out that his Christian faith is so reactionary as to be Creationist, would have done a more adept job. Unfortunately for them both, Hastie is apparently remaining ethically committed to speaking truth in the trial of his former SAS peer accused of war crimes in Afghanistan. Abbott and the far right crowd are ride-or-die for the accused. [You really need to subscribe to The Saturday Paper for Jason Koutsoukis’s coverage.]

Laughably, Abbott has said he will step down from his role as advisor to Advance, where he has been since its inception. Such theatre means nothing. Sarah Basford Canales reported at The Guardian:

Whitestone is linked to the Australian Christian Lobby, a theocratic Christian body.

It is not new that Tony Abbott, Gina Rinehart and the IPA should be a functional unity. In 2014, during Abbott’s failed Prime Ministership, the Greens leader observed:

It was, Christine Milne judged, government for mining magnates and media moguls.

New Zealand/Aotearoa is enduring another neoliberal restructuring steered, almost certainly, by its Atlas Network partner. The country is poorer. People are miserable and divided. Māori rights are being savaged. Corporate predators, however, are happy. An Atlas Network affiliate serves as Chief Advisor to the Prime Minister and has been consulting with big business to legislate to prevent climate litigation.

What is new for the possible Atlas Network-integrated coalition trying to take government in Australia is the extremist Christian and fascistic bigotry pervading the world that Atlas built. The Heritage Foundation that wrote the Mandate for Leadership setting out Ronald Reagan’s revolution in 1981 is now the drafter of Project 2025 and Project Esther and “Saving America by Saving the Family.” Heritage claims to have left Atlas, but we can’t know. The technicalities barely seem to matter.

One Nation has committed to mass deportations. Fascistic parties currently pretend that “remigration” will be voluntary. In fact we’ve seen the devastation created in the violence on America’s streets and in its emerging concentration camps. If this coalition gains power, First Peoples’ welfare, reproductive rights, LGBTQIA civic existence and the safety of non-white Australians will all be threatened.

When CPAC Australia claims “victory,” it is for the broadly-defined Atlas Network operations in Australia. For donors and strategists, political parties and propagandists. The “conservative values” it boasts of in that Facebook post look a lot more like fascism in the USA.

It might be hard for urban Australians to imagine these donor-driven radicals winning government, but it could happen if we don’t fight back. See the integration of the components, not the fragments. Start planning.

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*From Feehely’s account: