Tim Wilson and the Atlas Network: shadowy influences damaging Australia's democracy

In this election, Australians need to learn from New Zealand/Aotearoa. Don't vote Atlas.

Australians and New Zealanders reading this will be pleased to hear that the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, has named and explained the Atlas Network in a piece today, with much attention to the NZ/Ao experience of having a former Atlas “think” tank as a governing party in the coalition. (Disclosure: I contributed to Clark’s research.)

It’s a very safe piece, with lots of the Atlas Network’s own spin about its operations given undue weight. If you haven’t read The Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway, do so soon to see the utter ruthlessness of the operation both as proto-Atlas and then networked officially as Atlas. At least this safe approach should protect the ABC from Atlas’s usual litigious response.

Australia has an Atlas-interlinked party in our electoral mix. At this stage the Libertarian Party (previously the Liberal Democrats) is a very small organisation. Both iterations of the party were founded by John Humphreys who is chief economist of the (Atlas) Australian Taxpayers Alliance (ATA) and a director of the shadowy Australian Economic Education Foundation. He is also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society (Atlas’s functional steering committee) at last leaking of the rolls. I discuss below how the new President of the ATA is also functioning as the Campaigner for Christian extremist organisation Citizen Go Aus/NZ and appeared before the Australian senate in that role arguing against the Mis/Disinformation bill.

There are also officially Atlas-connected candidates for the forthcoming election. The most notable is probably Tim Wilson, also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society:

Australians should remember, as the election approaches, that Tim Wilson was shortlisted in 2015 for the US-based Atlas Network’s most prestigious prize. He and his team at the Atlas Network-partner the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) had been nominated for the award for their work in bringing down Australia’s carbon price.

Crikey captured the misleading wording of the nomination for posterity before the Atlas Network became more cautious and took it – as well as its list of partners – down: “As the only major organization in Australia to publicly and consistently oppose the tax, the IPA’s work against the carbon tax was instrumental in fostering sentiment against the tax, which, in addition to its economic drawbacks, wouldn’t have achieved any environmental goals.”

The Atlas Network is the organising force that connects “almost 600 think tanks in over 100 countries” to promote big business’s goals. While the head office is not currently funded by fossil fuel, many of the partner organisations continue to be, and fighting climate change science and solutions remain core business for many of them.

In fact, a carbon price was working and has been found to be an effective method of pushing transition. Peta Credlin has admitted that the attacks on it as a “tax” were just “brutal retail politics.” The “fostering sentiment” that the Atlas Network described is the job of these so-called thinktanks. They create the permission structure for the policy that big business wants. They also enable the election of big business’s preferred political party.

Atlas’s wording highlighted that the IPA was the “only major organization in Australia” helping engineer Tony Abbott’s victory in 2013 and the resulting instant dismantling of the carbon price.

Voters need to be reminded that it is largely foreign mining interests that benefit from fostered sentiment created by thinktanks. Prizes worth $100,000 from abroad don’t often come for purely domestic campaigns. That said, one of the Atlas Network’s US partners awarded Gina Rinehart its “Lifetime Achievement Award” for her contribution to the Network’s shared goals in 2024.

Rinehart is the only known big donor to Wilson’s former employer, the IPA now. Her largesse was made public by accident: donations of over $2 million a year for two years were recorded in tax filings submitted to court. We cannot know how much more she has given. Rupert Murdoch continues to support this organisation his father co-founded in 1943. We cannot know if he gives money now, but News Corp is an “in kind” donor, providing constant platforms for the Australian Atlas partners and interlinked groups.

The IPA is 80 years old, so it seems more respectable than the temporary dark money front groups that are popping up to push messaging as suspect as the IPA’s war on the carbon “tax.” The difference is more in scale and ambition than in nature.

These bodies copy the Atlas Network model: that involves spawning new PR operations to ensure that the electorate does not come between the corporations and their profits. Because the Atlas Network no longer declares which organisations it lists as partners (and many interlinked bodies were never listed at all), we cannot declare them to be part of the Network. They serve, however, the same purpose for similar clients.

Australians for Prosperity is clearly interlinked with both the coal sector (by the only declared donation), and the Liberal Party (by its personnel). It was forced to delete two months-worth of social media posts by the Australian Electoral Commission for being unauthorised election material. Their prime targets are the independent MPs that are now representing formerly Liberal Party safe seats, and they are spreading disinformation to discredit these parliamentarians.

It may be a coincidence that the body has copied the name of one of the Atlas partners most responsible for the current debased condition of American politics, Americans for Prosperity.

Advance’s links to Australia’s Atlas Network partners were laid out by Dr Jeremy Walker in the Voice campaign. Its origin and links to the Liberal Party as well as the global thinktank operation was explored in detail in the Sydney Morning Herald. That report also illustrates the body’s links to Zionist operations, fostered through its co-founder David Adler. It has three new front groups to discredit the Greens: Greens Truth, Her Truth and Election News.

There are as many as 18 such shadowy organisations acting against renewables and in favour of nuclear energy at the moment. Most can be found on social media targeting key seats. Others can afford billboards.

Pollsters have always been a key tool in business propaganda: the Coalition’s internal pollster in this election campaign is connected to Australians for Natural Gas. That body’s director, Nathanial Smith” is also the Liberal Party’s candidate for Whitlam.

One of the old guard Atlas partners is the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance. Its founder, Tim Andrews, is now working for Grover Norquist at Atlas’s Americans for Tax Reform in DC. The current executive director is Brian Marlow.

Marlow is also functioning as the “Campaigner” for Citizen Go, under whose umbrella he appeared before federal Parliament arguing against the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill. Citizen Go is a global project constructed out of a Spanish extremist Catholic “hate group.” Citizen Go’s Australian “campaigns director” is George Christensen who has registered himself as the head of a “foreign political organisation.” The Facebook page campaigns using an “end abortion” hashtag, using misleading information. As a state MP, Nathaniel Smith argued for abortion to “remain in the Crimes Act.” The Coalition candidates’ commitment to a Christian Nationalist position is not separate from their Atlas Network links but directly connected to that movements’ transnational trend.

It is not surprising, in either of Marlow’s roles, to find such figures fighting efforts to control mis- and disinformation. With climate science as certain as it is, and the need to transition to clean sources of energy so urgent, the campaign to disrupt the transition is hard pressed to find useful truths: both misleading information and distraction can serve.

Australia needs a minority government with the crossbench granting it courage to tackle the threats to Australian politics of dark money and shadowy disinformation campaigns.

We don’t need a government containing Tim Wilson whose speech at the 2015 Atlas Network regional gathering, the Friedman Conference, celebrated his turning Human Rights Commissioner role into a defence of property rights. Think hard about why this network values protecting property but not protecting you as a community member, worker, consumer or citizen.

This essay was previously published at the AIMN.