Federal treasurer: Pauline Hanson "a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gina Rinehart"

Amongst other Atlas Network-sphere gossip in Australia this week, Jim Chalmers named Pauline Hanson's nativist far right party as a Rinehart asset.

The leader of Australia’s far right party, Pauline Hanson yesterday boasted to the press about the “sexy” new plane she had been gifted by mining billionaire Gina Rinehart’s business. The magnate has been flying the politician with a scandal-beset past around in her own plane regularly before this.

When questioned about the announcement, the federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers said: “I think Pauline Hanson’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gina Rinehart, and we know this because whenever Pauline Hanson is asked to vote in the interests of Australian workers, she instead votes in the interests of Gina Rinehart.”(1) Her party votes, he observed, “regularly” and “consistently” against government projects intended to aid “people who work and people who struggle”.

In 2012, Rinehart argued that Australian workers should compete with African workers on $2 a day. She may have allowed something for inflation since, but wants to end the minimum wage.

Gina Rinehart has been a massive donor to the conservative parties of Australia for a long time. She is the one of two confirmed current donors to the Atlas Network partner, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), information revealed in court filings. (Journalist Mike Seccombe said in 2022 that the Murdoch family was the other.) Most of the junktank’s traditional business support has fled, wary of the stigma of the body’s extremist culture war activities. Now Rinehart is one of the big donors to the Atlas-linked astroturf operation Advance.

Rinehart has recently become a very open supporter of One Nation, tying support for Hanson and One Nation to support for Trump.

At the same time the plane was gifted, two of Rinehart’s Hancock people donated $500,000 each to the party. This seems surprisingly generous from professor and Hancock director Ian Plimer. Adam Giles, former Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, and scandalous (Murdoch) Sky News talking head, was the other. Working as a CEO of Hancock Agriculture must be very well remunerated.(2)

Plimer is a longterm activist against climate science and action, who is connected to the IPA. As a geologist, he has a lifelong investment in mining. He remains listed on the “academic advisory council” of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which institution IPA’s “Distinguished Fellow” Tony Abbott left in March (although the website still lists him as on the board of trustees). The UK-based GWPF is a notorious climate knowledge disrupter. It has thick links to the Atlas Network and has an offshoot, the American Friends of the GWPF, through which large sums have been funnelled from US Atlas Network donor foundations and fossil fuel corporations. Plimer publishes via what functions as the Atlas Network’s Australian vanity press Connor Court.

The same One Nation announcement included a donation from Angus and Sarah Aitken for a further $1 million. The Aitkens also donate to the astroturf group Advance.

Australians should be watching One Nation and Advance as the operations that the tycoons are punting on to hand them the policy and fire sale opportunities the plutocrats won when Trump’s team took power. The Advance conference and donation revelations have made it very clear that the money is tired of their usual tool, the “conservative” Coalition parties.(3)

A footnote from Chalmers’s press conference was the question about Tim Wilson (who recently sang - badly - in the chamber) creating a music playlist for the budget. IPA alumnus Wilson was shortlisted by the Atlas Network for their prime award for his destruction of Australian climate action. He used his time as Human Rights Commissioner to fight for property rights, because that is the only human right that his fellows on the (Atlas partner and steering committee) Mont Pelerin Society have ever consistently entertained since 1947. Any other human right risks impeding profit.

Crikey reported (see extract below) in 2025 that Wilson was also a doctoral student at the RMIT Blockchain project. This has been a Mont Pelerin Society and IPA project paid for out of RMIT funds, The Guardian reported in 2020, at a time when RMIT was slashing jobs elsewhere. (Both Chris Berg and Jason Potts were MPS members as of 2011. So was Sinclair Davidson mentioned in The Guardian account of the RMIT body. Wilson was invited in 2012.) The tech end of the broader Atlas-verse is interested in any technology that can detach the rich from government oversight.

More from the Atlas Network Australia sphere this week. The Executive Director of the Atlas partner the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), Michael Stutchbury, had an article published in the Australian Financial Review (AFR) fighting a windfall tax on gas. He is listed as a “columnist” but there is no mention of his role at the CIS. This is traditional at the AFR where Stutchbury was recently Editor-in-Chief and -at-Large. The newspaper consistently publishes work by “fellows” and “academics” linked to Atlas partners without reference to the fact that they are affiliated to junktanks representing opaque donor interests.(4)

The degree of commitment to Rinehart’s goals held by people at the well-funded junktanks and astroturf bodies of Australia should be of concern to voters. Her Atlas Society (Atlas Network partner) prize for her lifelong dedication to Ayn Rand, her puerile adulation of Trump and utter disdain for the wellbeing of the Australian populace should make these machinations an urgent provocation for government reforms.

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(1) The rest of the quote: “ Whether it’s in industrial relations, whether it’s in cost of living relief, what we’ve seen again and again from One Nation is they typically vote the way that Gina Rinehart wants them to rather than how the workers and battlers of this country need them to. If you go back through One Nation’s voting record, what you’ll see is a very consistent pattern of voting against the interests of people who work and people who struggle in this country, and so I don’t think its a big surprise to see this very close relationship between One Nation and Gina Rinehart. Gina Rinehart’s got an agenda she’s flagged before. She’s flagged things like getting rid of the minimum wage and all of these sorts of things, and I think pretty frequently we see One Nation dance to Gina Rinehart’s tune.”

(2) Note that Jacinta Price (CIS) has a mother who was awarded a medal by the defunct Atlas Network-linked Bennelong Society. Bess Price served in Giles’s NT ministry.

Angelos Frangopoulos who was Sky CEO when Giles interviewed alleged “Neo Nazi” Blair Cottrell went on to become CEO of the (at least) equally toxic GB News in the UK. That platform is now nicknamed Reform TV for the way that it functions as that far right party’s promotional outlet. Like One Nation, purported party of the battler Reform is surrounded by multi-millionaires and billionaires.

(3) Channel 9’s Karl “Joe Bogan” Stefanovic is running a sideline new interview channel promoting One Nation and far right figures. It is worth noting that former 9 owner and Advance-funding billionaire Jamie Packer is “one of his best friends” and groomsmen. (Edited 2/5 to show that relationship.) Is Packer backing KS’s new enterprise?

(4) Stutchbury took over the role from Tom Switzer. The latter remains a “Senior Fellow” at the CIS. Switzer had a program at the ABC during that time, where his affiliation with a junktank was not listed. His (qualified) wife is Corporate Affairs Director at the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. Those are three Atlas-interlinked beachheads inside Australian university campuses. Tony Abbott was one of the founders of, and is a director at, the operation. (Edit: I found Stutchbury’s new article reproduced at the CIS site and his affiliation is listed at the bottom on this iteration, so the AFR may have changed that lack-of-transparency policy. The paywall makes it difficult to know.)

Note: this was edited later on the 30/4 to include Sinclair Davidson as a further MPS member in the Blockchain Hub at RMIT.