Far from crawling back under their rocks after a humiliating repudiation just three months ago, ultra-conservatives are doubling down on their fact-defying mission to kill Australia’s net-zero climate action. But a Senate inquiry with the power to compel witnesses is preparing to pose hot-and-hard questions.
Climate and energy mis- and disinformation top the menu, and the Australian Greens are running the kitchen.
Among the battles in the grey world of propaganda and third-party lobbying, few burn as hot as the one between the Greens and the far-right’s PR attack dog outfit Advance. There’s hardly an RWNJ cause célèbre that Advance doesn’t embrace. But above all, it’s virulently anti-net zero, anti-large-scale renewables, and anti the Greens as the political personification of all it detests.
No prizes for suspecting there’s fossil-fuel industry financial backing in the background, however much the advertising and socials big-spending Advance claims to be funded by grassroots support.
Best buds
Ideologically speaking, Advance is joined at the hip with Australia’s richest woman, the Trump-loving multi-billionaire mining heiress Gina Rinehart, who’s been telling the annual Murdoch media-run “Bush Summits” that Australia is speeding towards “Climategate”, with crippling impacts on farmers and food producers (like her). Rural and regional audiences are classic territory for Advance too.
It’s hard to top the $10 million that flowed through Advance to fight the Voice referendum in 2023. Yet earlier this year, Australian Electoral Commission donations data showed Advance had amassed a war chest of more than $15 million in 2023-24, most of it “dark money” — with only a bit over $1 million attributed to named sources, including Liberal Party benefactor the Cormack Foundation.
In the year leading up to the May 3 federal election, Advance poured millions into its “Greens Truth” crusade, accusing the Greens of having lost their way, straying far from their “Bob Brown” environmental roots. Advance has since claimed it “belted” and “destroyed” the Greens, although crucially it didn’t lay a finger on Labor, which remains committed to climate targets such as 82% renewables and 43% net zero by 2030. If anything, climate-denying far-right shenanigans drove votes to Labor.
But whether it was due to Advance’s damnation or other factors, the Greens had a terrible election. While clinging to their Senate numbers, they lost three of their four lower house seats, including that of party leader Adam Bandt’s seat of Melbourne. But now the Greens may get the next laugh over Advance, if not the last one.
Whishing and hoping
Peter Whish-Wilson, a Greens senator from Tasmania, has cleverly manoeuvered for and is chairing the Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity in Climate Change and Energy. In a side deal with the government, the Greens get to run one such inquiry, and this one won in a hotly contested internal selection process. It’s now open for public submissions, with an initial deadline of September 12. It will conduct hearings around the country, with a scheduled final reporting date of February 4.
The terms of reference are broad, covering Australian politics, domestic and international “media narratives”, public policy debate and outcomes, think-tanks and their international networks, social media with its bots and trolls, “astroturf” groups (i.e. fake “grassroots”), and anything else that’s relevant. Civil society groups and individuals who have been co-ordinating to fight rampant climate and energy transition misinformation and disinformation are mobilising to ensure there’s plenty of red meat on the menu.
The inquiry has the power to compel witnesses to attend hearings and give evidence, and it’s a safe bet Advance will be high up on any hit list. Advance certainly thinks so. In a social post with an image of a “kangaroo court”, national spokeswoman Sandra Bourke urged followers to make submissions:
“SHAME! Community & environmental concerns are real — yet those in power are abusing their position to bully, silence, and force communities into accepting reckless renewables and green conspiracy crap. Billions wasted. Voices crushed. Democracy is dying in Australia.”
The “bully” allegation is rich, given that this month Advance launched an extraordinary campaign to force all Coalition politicians — especially Liberal “weaklings” — to abandon Australia’s bipartisan commitment to the UN Paris Agreement and net zero by 2050. In a post-election “pox on all your houses” threat to mainstream political parties, it warns them: “Dump net zero, or we’ll dump you.” In the past week Liberal MPs were bombarded with intimidating emails.
Net gains
In an amusing twist, one of the opposition’s two members on the six-member committee is Matt Canavan, a Nationals-aligned senator from coal country in Queensland who is a fanatical opponent to net zero. The opposition’s other committee member, Liberal senator from South Australia Andrew McLachlan, appears more inclined to keep the Coalition in the net-zero game, so maybe the conservatives are having a bet each way.
But as with the whole parliament, the opposition is a sideshow. The voting numbers on the committee are firmly in the pro-climate action camp. Aside from Whish-Wilson as chair, which gives him a casting vote, there are two Labor senators and independent David Pocock from the ACT, a long-time climate campaigner and net-zero champion.
Anyone for Advance on toast?
“Power to compel witnesses” sounds like it could be fun!
Popcorn is ready.
Murray Hogarth closing paragraphs confirm Sandra Bourke’s comment that this is a Kangaroo Court from start to finish.
Good luck with taking on these nasty forces who have unlimited international money behind them but no hold on the truth. We can see in the USA how far bs, propaganda, and misinformation has distorted politics there and now leading to further distortion of the democratic structures there.
A call to arms for everyone who cares about the planet to do what they can to halt the advance of these forces of evil.
As a humble but, I believe well informed, pensioner I will continue to do what I can to spread the word on renewable energy and the fossil fuel fuelled assault on the planet’s future.
Advance are straight out fascists standing on the hose of history
Yes, let it roll, bring them out from their holes and expose the lies, and the greed behind it.
I f democracy IS dying in Australia, then Advance stands close to being the chief executioner. The electorate spoke very clearly about their tactics leading up to May 3, and Advance came out smelling like something that should have been buried quite a while back.
If this Senate Select Committee achieves nothing else, it should bring most (hopefully all) the shadowy bodies lurking behind some of the more outrageous and egregious campaigns we’ve seen lately against climate-directed policies, and net zero in particular. That would be a very good thing, and might shut some of them up for a good while. We can but hope …
You’re right Dick, we can but hope.
The terms of reference include “connections between Australian organisations and international think tank and influence networks associated with the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation related to matters of public policy;” This should be fun!
It will be a waste of time and money and feed meat daily to Sky and the Murdoch press who will simply run more articles as a result of this inquiry twisting the facts to suit their audiences. There is no reason on earth that the govt cannot getup and explain the truth and then the anti truth and prove why it is wrong. This inquiry is a really really stupid idea dreamt up by people who simply do not understand how to sell a to an audience, the proof being that Albanese failed to sell the referendum.
Experience suggests that, whatever you do, the malicious Mullahs of Murdochristan will attack you – the only difference being in the nature of the attack: positive action, like this inquiry, probably will be twisted and turned against the truth, but silence would have been sold as consent or admission of defeat.
Placating the bullies never works, so we might as well shine the lights on the dark places.
So what? The election results prove a very different story. Empty vessels have a habit of making a lot of noise!
It won’t matter one iota as the mainstream media, particularly the commercial media, won’t cover it.
Let’s hope you are wrong, but I fear you may be right. There remains no spine in the Albanese government so far. And given all former Resources Ministers for the last twenty years now work for the fossil fuel industry, presumably Bowen will be next.
“Advance poured millions into its “Greens Truth” crusade, accusing the Greens of having lost their way, straying far from their “Bob Brown” environmental roots.”
In which case, Advance should be pleased that the Greens are returning to their “environmental roots” with this Senate enquiry.
Re Adam Bandt losing his seat of Melbourne, I wonder how much the ratepayers of Yarra Council contributed to that. Yarra sits within the electorate and the Council was dominated by an ideological crusading group of Greens who rode roughshod over the interests of many ratepayers in their decisions. They were overwhelmingly voted out in May last year.
The Yarra Council situation you mention may have been part of the story but I think that, if you look at the wider numbers (Greens vote nationally only marginally lower at worst) and the particulars in Melbourne, it turns out that this result had much more to do with a necessary but unlucky AEC redrawing of electoral boundaries which split that core Greens constituency across two electorates combined with the collapse of the Liberal vote in those complicated three-cornered contests where this matters enormously.
While the final outcome wasn’t happy for the Greens, it was probably more just the fortunes of preferential voting than either anything they did that was especially wrong or, indeed, anything that Advance did being especially effective – that last point being at least some cause for tentative hope.
Dark money is a pernicious influence that is on the rise. You only have to look at what’s happening in the US and it has been infiltrating Australian politics for some time now. Advance is a truly despicable, malignant lobbyist funded by fossil fuel interests and billionaires. It’s also very racist!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6633182/
It will be interesting to see their reaction when they are forced out from beneath the rocks they’re hiding under and have a light shone on them.
hope so!
Advance on burnt toast with two scrambled eggs on the faces of Canavan and Gina.
The coalition must be hoping and praying that advance does dump them but surely they know what a hollow threat that is. Although given the fact the coalition gave dutts a standing ovation for his electoral disaster and sussan claims to wander the halls of parliament wondering what Peter would say about a particular subject, perhaps not.
The world thought the worst was behind us on May 8, 1945. Like the mythological phoenix, which is known for its cycle of death and rebirth from its own ashes, so too is Advance the fascist phoenix of world and Australian politics. Evil has always been with us and always will. Some relief is in knowing that, as Dante wrote in ‘The Inferno,’ the nine levels of Hell will one day be filled with both the 1930’s fascists and their modern day equivalent.
👍🏿
The battle over “net zero” has been fought and lost by the Libs and their fellow travellers. This committee is simply an opportunity to bayonet the losers.
Technology Luddites always lose. History shows this always happens.
Figures out today show Australians are buying home batteries at rates far in excess of optimistic economic forecasts. Middle Australia is on board and spending with their ears pricked back.
AEMO are saying that specific supply threats during the transition have disappeared due to this unexpected uptake.
It’ll take a while to get there. But, things are getting better.
Why would any fair minded Australian believe any thing Rhino says or does, they Advance are a version of Americas
MAGA Party and also run buy extreme Right Wing individuals. We as Australians do not want to go down that road after realising the way Trump is playing the same tune. Wake up Australia before it is too late.
Given that the science of climate change is so unequivocal, and the fact that it is already clearly happening, I can only presume that some of these Advance-type people (and the Murdoch press) have decided that they would prefer to have a country (and a world) where only the rich can realistically thrive and to hell with the rest of the population.
I don’t know if their kids and grandkids will thank them however.
In the not too distant future:
Australian government announcement: There is so much renewable energy now, electricity will be free to all.
Advance: Free? Outrageous! Socialism! We will fight this!
The utterly useless continue to be utterly pointless.
This sounds like an ideal opportunity to expose the shadowy Atlas Network and its links to Advance and fossil fuelled oligarchs running climate and energy disinformation campaigns…
Surely Advance’s puppeteers and other interfering characters would constitute foreign interference at some point.