Don't ignore the flurry of activity by Australia's radicalising Right
A recently leaked National Mining Day video revealed how hard Gina Rinehart is leaning into importing Trumpist "Drill baby Drill" politics to Australia. It's just the latest example.
Australia is a petrostate. Don’t fool yourself that we have self-determination or party politics independent of the instructions of the mining lobby, corporations and foreign governments dependent upon our natural resources.
The fact that the fossil fuel sector contributes very little to our economy is usually kept hidden. In fact, our tax dollars subsidised the sector to the tune of 14.5 billion in the 2023-4 year, up 31%.
It is not just corporate leaders and oligarchs who dictate policy to our politicians. The Saturday Paper covered the degree to which gas-dependent Japan and South Korea have pressured our government as well.
In the leaked video, Rinehart boasts about how much mining corporations have contributed to the nation’s wellbeing in the last two years. That is because the Albanese government is making them contribute five times as much as they were (according to FriendlyJordies who factchecks the video). She follows up that boast with her instruction that the LNP be returned to power. There’ll be no need to boast about contribution to the nation when the mining sector’s political outreach operation is returned to power, and the back-up option, with its irritating attempts at independence, is removed.
Rinehart also complains in the video about Albanese government environmental costs impacting mining.
The mining lobby notoriously did much to bring down Kevin Rudd’s government when he attempted a mining “super profits” tax. Labor politicians have run scared from that implicit (or restated?) threat ever since. As FriendlyJordies points out, the steps taken by the Albanese government in this context are worth acknowledging.
The Atlas Network fits within this architecture of influence, using junktanks intended to manufacture consent through a chorus of voices reiterating PR for fossil fuel (and other controversial economic actors). The interlinked Advance body has just produced a video attacking renewables. It’s worth noting that the frenzy of activity by the interrelated groups and networks fighting renewables is quite so frenzied because renewables are clearly the cheapest and fastest way we can transition energy production to a post-carbon model. These “free market” fanatics are determined to extract maximum taxpayer money, to enforce market dominance and maintain their profits as long as possible.
(This is not an aberration. The Atlas Network’s junktanks have largely been dominated by “free market” messaging, but it always functioned as a veil, whether the operatives understood that or not. Law professor Mehrsa Baradaran’s The Quiet Coup outlines how the neoliberal project (of which the Atlas Network is an arm) was, since the 1950s, dedicated to gaining control of government, using it to help big corporations destroy their market competition and entrench their control. This American Bar Association account of the antecedents of the Atlas Network is very readable: the oligarchs were happy to pay for pet economists who would argue that monopoly is “efficient.”)
The importance of mining to the Atlas Network’s operations in Australia is highlighted by the fact that Hugh Morgan and Gina Rinehart are the most noted individual actors supporting Atlas’s junktanks here over its history.
The crippling hold the individuals and networks have held over energy policy for decades now means that our gas is expensive, because governments repeatedly botched deals and enabled the east coast’s producers to link our gas costs to international prices without a domestic reserve. It also means that our tired energy system is vulnerable because we have been prevented from taking the crucial steps to build towards a modern and reliable system of power production. Both the resulting cost of living crisis and the fragile energy network can be deployed as sado-populist weapons against the current government.
The leaked video exposes Rinehart’s dedication to Donald Trump. She flies her “Drill baby drill” or “Dig baby Dig” signs. She attempts to import the American Republican In Name Only (RINO) trope to terrorise Liberals In Names Only (LINO). The radicalised clown-car that has taken over the Republican Party is her goal for Australia. Any moderates remaining, or empirical-policy driven candidates, are to be driven out.
Rinehart also wants to copy Trump’s oligarch-run Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE - a joke name) so that the ultra rich can pay even less tax. The fact that it means even fewer services is linked to her neofeudal goals, not an accident.
At every point in her speech, Rinehart reveals her self-interest and a striking lack of intellectual heft, debunking once again the idea that oligarchs are intelligent. This is a one-woman display of why smarter oligarchs have used the Atlas Network’s junktanks to promote their wishlist: it sounds so much more grotesque coming out of the oligarchs’ own mouths.
Liberal politicians and Pauline Hanson were amongst the figures receiving Rinehart’s instruction at the Santos-constructed location for Mining Day.
Activity by the various Atlas-interlinked networks and groups has been intense over 2024. The Centre for Independent Studies has been producing a constant stream of pro-nuclear energy material despite this campaign signalling the betrayal of everything that the body was established to promote. Free markets are its god. Billions of tax dollars would be required to establish a nuclear energy sector in Australia at this late stage in the picture: the market has already said no. Apparently socialism is good when there are profits for the donors at stake?
In May, and again in October, a rash of conferences and events took place to foster the required messaging for different audiences. At the elite level, the faux-intellectual bodies interconnected with NatCon had their more dignified-seeming gatherings. Meanwhile at the Triple Conference and the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Australia, the culture war and conspiracy crowd did their work for the “grassroots” distraction messaging.
This account was published in June, with earlier proof of Rinehart’s cringe crush on Trump:
The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) has stepped up its efforts after its October conference in London. Campbell Newman’s ecstatic promise at an Atlas Network-partner event – at the Australian Institute for Progress (AiP) – to continue to develop it here in the meantime has taken form (with or without his involvement).
Marcus Foord has been appointed the Convenor of the “Australian Chapter of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.” His previous work includes functioning as a staffer for Senator Sarah Henderson who has been seen at rightwing “insurgency” events that undermine the efforts to shore up electable centrism in the Victorian Liberal Party.
Word of mouth reports suggest that two fundraising events took place in Sydney and Melbourne for ARC Australia in April. Membership recruiting emails are circulating.
ARC was founded by former National Party leader John Anderson in conjunction with Baroness Philippa Stroud formerly of the Legatum hedge fund’s “think tank” and pop-psychologist Jordan Peterson. The National Party’s pro-fossil fuel “think tank”, the Page Research Centre sends out emails that declare such inaccurate propaganda as
“The rapid build out of renewables paired with the retiring of our coal fired power stations has been rationalised upon two dangerously false calculations.
Anderson is the Chairman of the Board for Page. Its new CEO is Gerard Holland who has been working for the Legatum Institute for over three years, and as a paid “researcher” for the ARC according to Stroud’s parliamentary declaration, before taking on the Page role.
Stroud, incidentally, belongs to a controversial church where her husband is a leader, the Newfrontiers church. It has been accused of homophobia, fights abortion access and embraces “joyful female submission.” Stroud was reported to be in Australia for the ARC fund-raising events.
The Atlas Network-partner Mannkal Economic Education Foundation, joined by the range of other domestic Atlas partners, hosted a conference on the 17th of April with the American network’s Atlas Society. While the Atlas Network denies that its name is drawn from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the Atlas Society is dedicated to celebrating Rand’s legacy. The conference was instigated to award the Atlas Society’s lifetime achievement award to Gina Rinehart, the first female recipient.
In Rinehart’s acceptance speech she reiterated her dedication since the age of 13 to Rand’s puerile “philosophy” that aims to dignify greed and selfishness. Furthermore Rinehart used the “courage” referred to in the speech celebrating her own career as an excuse to celebrate convicted felon Donald Trump. She spoke with devotion of the reason Trump rises each morning to pursue a second term in the White House. It is not, apparently, to quash the plethora of cases addressing his constant criminality and sedition. Neither is it an aggrieved narcissism determined to win and take revenge. It is because, Rinehart quoted, “I love America and I love the American people.” Rinehart concluded that Australia needed more politicians like Trump. If anyone needs proof that success is not linked to intellect, we have it there.
The other speeches at the day reiterated the talking points present at all NatCon events. The war to save fossil fuels from socialist renewables, the war on woke, preservation of an eye-wincingly narrow definition of family, the protection of children from modernity. Vacuous Briton Brendan O’Neill fabricated straw men of “woke” positions, denigrated “climate change hysteria” and claimed that bourgeois self-loathing had led the West to push our children into the “arms of barbarism.” He describes protesting for peace and justice in Israel as preferring “the antisemitic horror of Hamas” to the enlightened gains of our own societies. The implication is that all Palestinians are terrorists. Not even the babies deserve our outcry.
It is not surprising that Janet Albrechtsen was one of the presenters. She was a member of the secretive, invitation-only Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) the last time its membership was leaked. The MPS is the inner sanctum of the Atlas Network and a centre of climate denialactivity.
Albrechtsen’s speech was driven by the “injustices” around the Lehrmann case. She celebrated the judicial activism of Antonin Scalia, “conservative intellectual gladiator,” who legitimised the marginal theory of “Originalism” that is underpinning NatCon activity within theAmerican Supreme Court. Her speech nevertheless strongly condemned “activist judges,” a current trope of the rightwing culture war that delegitimises any judicial decision they find objectionable.
Albrechtsen’s determined effort to combat the MeToo movement in campaigning for Bruce Lehrmann and against Shane Drumgold became the primary factor ensuring that legal findings against Drumgold could have “no legal effect.” Albrechtsen criticised media interventions for Higgins, and yet the public has access to thorough detailing of her own extensive “media interventions” against Higgins in Acting Justice Kaye’s judgment.
The Page newsletter cited above also quoted the Mannkal conference’s “evidence” on energy policy.
Elsewhere, Atlas Network partner the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) is rolling out events trying to dignify its embarrassing “CIS Energy Program”, which betrays the boasted academic credentials of the parent “thinktank.” It is an instrument to promote nuclear energy which is widely understood in the Australian market to be a mechanism to delaytransition to clean energy, having missed the moment where nuclear would have been a reasonable option. Unfortunately reputable figures are allowing themselves to be made tools in these performances, granting credibility to a disingenuous project.
We must pay attention to these events and “thinktank” activity: there are overlapping figures, organisations and donors – domestic and international – at work cooperating to achieve their goals. They function primarily to free corporations from the regulations that protect us and the taxes that fund society. Now, however, they have pushed to the foreground the illiberal project of the NatCon movement too.
The Atlas Network is funded by a range of beleaguered corporate sectors such as fossil fuel, tobacco and private healthcare. It rewards its funders and activists. An Atlas Network-partner, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) was a finalist for one of Atlas’s grand awards, the Templeton Freedom Award, for its work under Tim Wilson to defeat the so-called “carbon tax.”
When the Atlas Society CEO, wearing a jewelled dollar-sign brooch, presented aspiring-oligarch Rinehart her award, the CEO bemoaned the “incredibly hostile regulatory climate in which [mining] is forced to operate.”
The most significant goal appears to be resisting the energy transition. Whether from Russia, through Orbán, or American donors and their architecture of influence, the money and message promote continued carbon emissions. Orbán is now overtly connecting his influence bodies with the American fossil-fuel funded Atlas Network. The particular partner, the Heritage Foundation, with which the alliance was made is the same one planning the fossil fuel-driven and extremist Christian Project 2025 for a new Trump administration. Tony Abbott’s April speaking tour with Orbán’s Danube Institute, including an event co-hosted by the Quadrant Journal in Sydney, is particularly troubling.
The reactionary goals of the funders are turned into a populist culture war with every enemy labelled “woke.” They aim to elect their illiberal leaders with such a base.
Whether inspired by reactionary religion, like Philippa Stroud appears to be, or clinging to religion as a cultural symbol representing “traditional” values, these groups place religion in some form as a core element of their identity.
Their conventions and gatherings are largely staged out of sight, but the kaleidoscope of figures and issues connected across the networks is aiming to impose strict rules on our societies.
The old “conservative” debate about the primacy of freedom or virtue has relinquished “freedom” as a goal except for their corporations who must operate without regulation. “Virtue” must be imposed on a renegade majority that they perceive to have lost it, producing an existential crisis. Democracy has become a weapon of the enemy.
Their definition of “virtue” is not one embraced by the majority in the societies these coalitions intend to impose it upon. If we don’t watch them, we cannot understand the clues they grant us as they arm themselves for battle.