S10, Ep7: The Same Australian Think Tanks That Have Pushed Against Climate Policy for Years Say No to Indigenous Rights

Amy Westervelt: [00:00:00] Today is Indigenous Peoples Day in the U. S. and we're bringing you an update on our Australia and Atlas Network episodes about an issue facing Australia's Indigenous people this week. Talking about the upcoming vote on what they're calling the voice, a referendum to amend Australia's constitution to add a governmental body that will act as the quote unquote voice for First Nations people in the country.

Now it's important to note that First Nations people in Australia do not have treaties with the Australian government. That's a really big deal. Treaties are the thing that give indigenous people in the U. S., for example, really any power they have to fight back against land grabs, to protect water rights, and all sorts of other things.

So not surprising then that a lot of First Nations people are arguing that because this referendum does not [00:01:00] include treaty rights and therefore land rights, they would like to see something better. Fair enough. It also has the support of some of the country's largest mining companies, probably because of that whole doesn't come with land rights thing.

Which also has some First Nations leaders skeptical, so there are some valid concerns about this referendum, but there's also, you guessed it, an atlas network backed effort to weaponize those concerns, turning them into an attack on everything from, and I am quoting here, woke climate hysteria to the very idea of indigenous people having any kinds of rights, period.

The redwashing tactic that Canadian reporter Jeff Dembeke laid out in a piece for our website back in August, also a tactic that turns up over and over again in the Atlas universe, is in full force as well.

And perhaps most surprisingly, the [00:02:00] Australian media has said almost nothing about the fact that the vast majority of think tanks involved with the no campaign on the voice referendum just happened to be affiliated with the fossil fuel industry. Jeremy Walker, the researcher you heard from in our Atlas episode, joins me today to discuss his new paper on this subject, where he traces the many Atlas Network think tanks in Australia that have coordinated around the No campaign.

He talks about it as an opportunity to watch fossil fueled political propaganda unfolding live. That conversation is coming up right after this quick break. This is Drilled, the real free speech threat, and I'm Amy Westervelt.

Jeremy Walker: The Atlas units here and they're the main characters that are running it. Just today, Jacinta Price, the indigenous star of the no [00:03:00] campaign who's had her career cultivated from within the Atlas Network think tanks in Australia going back several years.

She was in the Western Australian newspaper, demanding that there's an inquiry into mining companies supporting the yes case. But the thing, of course, is that, you know, all the organizations that are running the no campaign, we know what their funding is, they were set up by oil and gas and mining companies.

So it's kind of, they're using the distrust that people have of these companies, um, you know, to attack the, uh, yes campaign. But that, that goes to the reason why it was set up in the first place. Yeah, because. As there's a quote in my paper, Silencing the Voice, which comes from John Bonython from Santos, who was the original founder of the Center for Independent Studies , and he quite literally says to another oil guy, something like what businesses would say in their own names tends to be discredited by the public as vested interest.

And that's why it's, um, so useful, this Fisher method, because they can get [00:04:00] academics to say things that, that if in their own names, if, oil and gas companies were to say it would not be taken seriously.

Amy Westervelt: Can I have you kind of back up and tell me which organizations are involved in the No campaign?

And, are they all Atlas Think Tank organizations or most or yeah, kind of what's the deal there?

Jeremy Walker: Okay. Well, it goes back a long time, so 2015, the liberal government under Prime Minister Turnbull, So the Liberals, here in Australia, it's not like in the U. S. where the Liberals are the, you know, kind of progressive party, the Liberals here are the party of big business

Amy Westervelt: Neoliberals, free market capitalists. Yes.

Jeremy Walker: that's right. But the main campaign, so, you know, the polls, if you look at the polls, they were all saying that it would just sail through.

Um, with more than 60 percent support back in the beginning of the year and in April, an organization called Advance Australia appeared, it's been around for a couple of years. [00:05:00] But it served other purposes and then it was retooled to run the anti referendum campaign. And so that appears and starts doing its thing in around April.

And since then, the support has just crashed. So, Advance was established by, and the other thing that's fascinating about this is that, You have an organization that is widely recognized in the press as the organization which is leading the campaign to defeat the referendum. And yet there's nothing on their website now which says who the responsible officers are. Nobody actually putting their name there. There's one name which is the absolute minimum required under the electoral laws as the person that signs off on it. But there is no, you know, board or council of advisors.

There's zero information about who they are, but if you look, going back to when they did declare this on the website three years ago, the two key people on the Council of Advisors was Maurice Newman and [00:06:00] another fellow called Sam Kennard. And Maurice Newman, who was one of the key founders of ADVANCE, uh, was also one of the key founders of the Center for Independent Studies, established in 1976. With Anthony Fisher's assistance. So, uh, John Bonython, the founder of Santos, which is now an enormous gas company in Australia, very powerful. It confronts indigenous people's resistance, in numerous places where they don't have consent or endorsement from traditional owners for huge new, coal seam gas projects in, places like Narrabri and Piliga where the Gomoroi people are resisting them. But in many places around the country, indigenous people, as hard as they can through whatever legal tools they can to.

To, stop, fracking and offshore gas and, to stop seismic testing in offshore habitats of great significance.

So you have Advance, which is really just a pop up campaign unit, but clearly, its [00:07:00] origins are with the Center for Independent Studies, and the Center for Independent Studies it's been very quiet, because it's public profile is much more respectable.

So whereas the Advance campaign just sort of says, you know, inflammatory things like the voice of parliament is racist, it will divide the nation on the basis of race, that it will wreck the constitution that will rewire democracy, that it's unfair. That it's too expensive, all of this stuff. And they say that over and over and over again.

And it's just quite interesting as well that on their website, they not only are attacking indigenous land right or indigenous justice and representation, they're also attacking what they call woke climate hysteria.

So that's the lead one. But then there's also the Institute of Public Affairs, which has been around a lot longer. We don't have, like in the U. S., disclosure laws about philanthropies and, civil society [00:08:00] organizations, there is no disclosure at all of who is funding these organizations , even though they do kind of permanent political influence campaigns, they don't seem to be captured by the foreign influence laws or the electoral laws. But the first money that came to the Center for Independent Studies after Fisher's tours in 1976, a couple of years later, they had secured their foundation money and that came from Santos, from Shell, from BHP and Rio Tinto, two largest mining companies in the world . And, from the Adelaide Advertiser, which is one of the Murdoch newspapers. Which John Bonython, the founder of Santos Gas Company, was also at the time the managing director of. So you have this very tight synthesis in Australia between the media and the fossil fuel industry. So I've covered two of them. There's the Institute of Public Affairs, which is quite different to the [00:09:00] CIS. They are extremely vocal and they just do constant, um, radical kind of agitprop.

Everything that they publish gets republished in the Murdoch Press. Um, a journalist I know who used to work for them told me that any story… That was happening. Um, you know, the editors would instruct the journalists to go out and get a quote from the Institute of Public Affairs. And again, the founders of that, that goes back to the 1940s.

It was founded when the Australian Labour Party won a landslide election in 1943. and it was founded by the mining companies that established the Murdoch press in the first place. And again, you had, the corporate ancestors of Rio Tinto and Western mining were represented on the board as was Keith Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's father.

We don't really know who funds them, but if you take board membership as indicative of companies looking after their investments [00:10:00] and, I think Anthony Fisher would offer board positions to big companies in exchange for donations. And so if, if we can accept that, you know, that reasonable hypothesis, the i p A has had over the last 15 or 20 years, board representation and executive staff, which come from Rio Tinto, from Woodside, which is an oil company, which got one of the biggest exploration leases ever in Australian history, almost the entire Northwest shelf. So there's a very clear pattern. Another key funder is, Gina Reinhart, who is the richest person in Australia, who inherited a huge kind of iron and coal mining empire from her father.

Another of the organizations that's involved in the No Campaign is a key organization called Liberty Works. It is definitely an Atlas affiliate. And yeah, so Liberty Works is one of the Australian think tanks. Um, They're a much more recent one. Um, and what's [00:11:00] really interesting about Liberty Works is that the, one of the other key indigenous media stars who's running the no campaign. So you've basically got two indigenous figures, really only two, who have been everywhere . They get constantly platformed on every form of media. No one ever asked them about the organizations that built their careers or who pays for those organizations .

And They just say the same things over and over again

Amy Westervelt: Well, I've seen a few different arguments. One is that, it actually doesn't do enough and therefore you should vote no. Because if you want a better representation for indigenous people, then you have to vote. No.

Jeremy Walker: Well, where this came from is, um, yeah. So in 2015, the prime minister at the time, Malcolm Turdball of the liberal national party coalition, that government initiated the process. So, There was a Referendum Council [00:12:00] authorised by the Australian Parliament that was authorised by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. And then the Referendum Council convened these incredible dialogues, where they brought in Indigenous representatives and delegates from, you know, some 300 First Nations communities.

They had a whole series of dialogues all across the country and then to discuss what they want and how they would set the process up and then there was a national constitutional convention in 2017 held at Uluru, the heart of the nation and they issued, several important documents including a very important one called the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

What that asked for was two things, they wanted to have a voice to parliament enshrined in the constitution. And they also wanted to have a Makarrata Truth Commission. Makarrata is a, is a word which means kind of, you know, coming together after a conflict to settle and make peace. And so the Makarrata Commission's role would be two things would be to negotiate [00:13:00] treaty, a treaty.

We don't have any treaty here in Australia between the first nations and the federal government, the commonwealth government, and secondly to have a truth commission, a truth and justice commission. So not unlike what they had in South Africa, to correct the historical record and, and to heal the nation that way.

These were proposals that were a result of a process initiated by the Liberal government. Yeah, so it has quite a deep history, but there's been almost zero coverage of that history again in the press, and the opposition party, which decided to campaign against the voice, they have hundreds and hundreds of, um, what I would think are quite untrue statements circulating. And the point is that they don't need to be coherent to add up to a policy agenda. There won't be another referendum to amend the constitution. It will not happen again. I would be very surprised if it ever gets up again. And they're saying things like, oh, we should have another one, or, you know, we should do something [00:14:00] different. So the, the proposal was the voice to parliament proposal is that there would be a body within the parliament that would have the authority to speak within the parliament on matters that concerned First Nations people, but it's a very minimal reform. That voice to parliament is not proposed to have any powers. It's not proposed to be able to introduce legislation. The delegates that would be part of the voice would have no right to vote in on legislation, not to veto or anything like that.

And yet there's been this enormous amount of disinformation circulated, saying that it would veto legislation that the voice would veto decisions of the High Courts. They would, you know, institute a reparations tax or compulsorily acquire land.

All of these things are entirely false, but that doesn't matter because the point is not to articulate an alternative vision of justice. It's merely to [00:15:00] create so much confusion and doubt

This is precisely how it works. Like the idea is to create confusion and then operationalize that confusion to vote the thing down.

Amy Westervelt: At what point did the No campaign really start to blitz people with ad buys and media hits and all of that?

Jeremy Walker: They've been going since April and immediately the vote started to crash in the polls. And then there was a very important moment where the Federal Liberal Party leader, Peter Dutton, went to the Liberal Party conference where all of the state liberal parties were there and on the agenda was all how are we going to respond to this referendum and it was the Western Australian branch of the party the one that's you know most dominated by oil and gas that proposed that they should campaign for its defeat and then that was adopted by the federal liberal party leader . This is just really quite tragic because during the previous Liberal government's term, which was,[00:16:00] 2013 until 2022, so they had nine years in power, three terms in government. Ken Wyatt, the Minister of Indigenous Australians in that government, he was a huge supporter of this referendum process. And he resigned in protest when Peter Dutton decided to oppose it, but not only that his role in the liberal party has been replaced by Jacinta Price, whose whole career was sponsored by the Atlas Network.

Amy Westervelt: Oh wow.

Jeremy Walker: So let me get back to what Liberty works because this is an interesting one .

So Liberty works, I don't know exactly when they were founded, I think around 2017, 2018, but what they did was they then hosted, for several years, the conservative political action conference, the CPAC .

They have a association with the American Conservative Union.[00:17:00] they have had conferences in Hungary where one of their stars is Viktor Orbán from Hungary who has more or less dismantled the judicial and electoral safeguards of Hungarian democracy, has reportedly banned wind farms, put taxes on solar panels, and so on.

So the Liberty Works role was to host these conferences in Australia and one of the things that came in the previous government's term was a foreign influence register where political actors, which were working with foreign governments, would be required to declare their, their agents of a foreign principle in the country.

This was brought in by the liberal government at the time. And then one of the results of that was that Tony Abbott, the ex Australian prime minister, who made a speech at a conference hosted by the Hungarian government and praised Viktor Orban in that speech, was then asked to register as an agent of a [00:18:00] foreign principal, which he took great offense at.

And then not long after that, Liberty Works itself was requested to provide documents, because there was a whole lot of U.S. Politicians, conservative politicians involved in those conferences as well. So they were asked to make disclosures under the scheme, which they vehemently refused to do. They just simply refused. And then they mounted a challenge to the constitutional law. They said it restricted freedom of speech and so on. They tried to overturn the foreign influence scheme without even having made any efforts to comply with it , which was unsuccessful.

And they've since apparently refused to pay the court costs to the Commonwealth. The chair of Liberty Works is Warren Mundine, the main indigenous spokesman of the No campaign. And if you look at their website– again, they've shut their website down now to, I guess, to clean up, to make it impenetrable to the public about who's running the No Campaign. But again, if you look at the old versions of it, you can [00:19:00] see that you have Jacinta Price there saying that, the racial discrimination act, which prevents hate speech against ethnic minorities and Aboriginal people is discriminatory and should be gotten rid of, that it creates racism rather than protects people from racism.

And then alongside all of these articles, saying that we should not have renewable energy or that we shouldn't have government support for it. So all of this kind of fossil fuel disinformation influence peddling.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Whenever I've talked to people there, they've said that it's hard to get editors to greenlight anything that might result in a defamation charge or just a lot of harassment in general.

Jeremy Walker: And so we end up with like one, one way that this Overton window works is that if newsrooms don't have much money. They don't have time to do in-depth investigations.

They don't have the resources. And editors are quite nervous to sign off on anything like that. But just to give you another example, we [00:20:00] have the Bureau of Meteorology, which is a public organization which reports the weather. Right. And one of the ways that this works is that the conservatives will get into power and they'll say, Oh, we need, you know, there's too much government spending.

We've got to cut budgets. And so they'll cut the budget or to Bureau of Meteorology. And I'll say you need to go out and find corporate sponsorship. And again, it's all oil companies that have filled that gap in the Bureau of Meteorology sponsorship. So that when we had, in 2019 and 2020, we had absolutely catastrophic heat waves, on the back of several years of intense drought , and then pretty much the whole country caught fire and vast sections of remnant forests in Australia burned over several months. . And during that period, there's a good story on Michael West, one of the independent small publishers they discovered under FOI that, The Bureau of Meteorology wanted to run stories on its website showing how it was global [00:21:00] warming, which was driving these extreme temperatures. And they had to get sign off from their corporate partners who refused to allow them to do that. So even during this massive climate catastrophe event, the public Bureau of Meteorology, which has a duty to report, um, and serve the public was being censored from within by the oil and gas industry

Amy Westervelt: wow.

Jeremy Walker: But we could go on also Australia's peak scientific body, the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial and Research Organization, their whole world class ocean and atmosphere division was more or less completely gutted in the previous government's term.

That organization has always had a strong oil and mining presence within it because it was set up both to do pure science and also to do industrial development science. But that's, that again has another organization that has been, attacked in the past for a report saying that we have to reduce emissions rapidly because of catastrophic climate change and then there'll be attacked for [00:22:00] being political .

And then, you know, another way this also works is that you've got oil companies going out there and sponsoring the football clubs . Santos for a while was sponsoring the national rugby team. And so they get their, their branding on all the jerseys of the national sports teams and so on as well.

It's really quite odd because they don't sell to the public, right? No one goes and buys Santos gas. You know, it's not even advertising. It's just basically putting their name out there and associating with sport.

And that's the other thing in quite disappointing about the media here in Australia. There's been no attempt to investigate these organizations or their backgrounds and no one has made the link between the fact that nearly

all the organizations now campaigning against the no vote are also the people who've been campaigning against climate policy for 20 or 30 years in this country.

Amy Westervelt: that was going to be my question was whether anyone had covered that and why you think that is. I mean, of course, the Murdoch press isn't going to cover it, but it's surprising to me, even the less [00:23:00] aligned outlets haven't covered it.

Jeremy Walker: No, it's, it's really quite alarming, but I mean, there was a, there was a famous anthropologist, by the name of Stanner, who gave some very important lectures in the six late sixties. It was called the great Australian silence. And it was where he was talking about how this sort of complicity and taboo against talking about the various acts of genocide that were committed against Indigenous nations here. How there was this enormous silence that made it impossible to raise these issues and talk about them. And, that's also true in Australia with anything to do with the fossil fuel industry. Now the reasons for that are multiple, but one would be that the way that the Atlas has been operating here is to… so there's this thing, the, the Overton window, right?

The Overton window about how to shift the debate, to frame what it's possible . So here you have like the IPA , the Institute of Public Affairs is, you know, they just say things that are just [00:24:00] so far to the right that no one could support them.

But then, if there's a say, there's a liberal government in power, they'll move a little bit that way and say, well, we reject that extreme position, but we want to restore a bit of balance. And they'll move things just a little bit further over to the right. So the kind of really incredible radical statements, normalize, you know, it allows politicians to say, Oh, you know, we're centrist, we wouldn't do that, but they move a little bit further each time. And yeah, and the other part of the Overton window, as was described in, um, by Chafuen, the Atlas president from 99, 19.

Is it nine around the early 90s right up to 2017?

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, he was 91 to 2018

Jeremy Walker: And he says that not just about carefully crafting ideological messaging, which either increases the number of ideas that a politician can support or decreases them. So they [00:25:00] make it impossible for some things to be said without losing electoral support or they make things possible to be said whilst not losing electoral support further. But the other thing that they talk about and he talks about is that the Atlas people need to also take over organisations and change their processes and that's very much what's happened here in Australia.

So, A key site of this has been the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the public broadcaster, which has had a very large number of people with backgrounds in the Atlas Network from the Center for Independent Studies or the Institute of Public Affairs. But not only that, if you look, and if you look at present there, there aren't any now, the last One resigned a few months back I believe, but the current senior executive and board includes people from the Murdoch press and also from channel seven, which is one of the major corporate media organizations in Australia and a company [00:26:00] called seven group owned 40 percent of channel seven. And again, they're another Western Australian oil and gas company that has, you know, joint ventures with Shell and Woodside and all the major oil and gas companies. So they have a very powerful role in the Australian media landscape of encouraging hostility towards climate, youth climate protesters and things like that.

So there's this kind of, so there's that level of penetration right across the mastheads, the main mastheads in Australia. But there's also this great fear of reporting. I think, it's my impression, because we also have these very pro plaintiff defamation laws in Australia where these very expensive lawsuits can be launched against media organizations that speak out. So Australia has a very timid and cautious media landscape, unfortunately. We don't have a First Amendment. We only have implied right of political, free political communication. There's no direct statement of that in the Constitution. [00:27:00] It's only been established through implication in legal settlements.

So it's a very difficult landscape for journalists to work in Australia, even the very good ones have a hard time of it.

Amy Westervelt: That's it for this time. Make sure to come back tomorrow for our regularly scheduled episode, which looks at why and how the fossil fuel industry has particularly targeted indigenous led protest over the years. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.