This week Advance Australia finally grabbed some media attention, unveiling a new mascot. The bizarre, widely mocked Captain GetUp is a man in an orange superhero suit, who aims to expose left-wing lobby group GetUp’s alleged foreign funding and links with Labor and the Greens. With Advance Australia now back in the spotlight ahead of the election, Crikey looks beyond the lurid superhero costume. Yes Advance Australia has been raising money and attracting wealthy and influential supporters but can it really emerge as a serious rival to GetUp?
What does Advance Australia want?
Advance Australia pitches itself as standing up for “mainstream Australians”, a voice for the everyday punters with traditional values under siege from modernity and political correctness. More specifically, Advance Australia is clearly trying to position itself as the anti-GetUp. When the left-wing campaign organisation drew up a “hit-list” of conservative Liberals it was planning to target at the election (Peter Dutton came out on top), Advance Australia, promised to hit back. Currently, the organisation is focusing its attention on electorates like Tony Abbott’s Warringah and Dutton’s Dickson, hoping to keep conservatives in parliament.
While GetUp runs specific campaigns, including ones to bring asylum seekers onshore and to stop the Adani mine, Advance Australia is also trying to take action on the topics they care about. The organisation currently has two designated campaigns, to keep Australia Day on January 26, and against Labor’s franking policy. A key problem that has hamstrung previous conservative efforts to rival GetUp has been an inability to focus on issues that cut-through with the electorate. Advance may be no exception — the Australia Day debate remains something of a seasonal culture war issue, while a campaign against Labor’s franking changes has failed to really resonate.
Who is behind Advance Australia?
Advance Australia claims not to be affiliated with any political party. But let’s look a little deeper. National Director Gerard Benedet is a Liberal party lifer, who worked for Tony Abbott as an 18-year-old, and was most recently chief of staff to former Queensland Liberal National Party leader Tim Nicholls during his unsuccessful 2017 election campaign.
Its leadership also unsurprisingly draws heavily from the political right.
Businessman and former ABC chair Maurice Newman, who once claimed climate change was a UN-backed plot to create a new world order, sits on Advance Australia’s advisory council. He’s joined by David Adler, who presides over pro-Israel Australian Jewish Association, which last year extended an invitation to Canadian white supremacist Lauren Southern. Sam Kennard, the self-storage supremo and one-time Liberal Democrat candidate who publicly railed when his business fell foul of workplace gender equality laws, is also on board.
Can it match GetUp’s achievements?
GetUp have concerned the Australian right for years, and with good reason. The organisation raised over $10 million in the last year, mostly gathered through small donations, and boasts over 1 million members. Since its founding 14 years ago, it has had some big political successes — from winning a High Court case against the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) over constitutionality of electoral laws in 2010, to providing considerable support in the fight to legalise same-sex marriage in Australia.
Conservatives have often attacked GetUp’s influence as somehow unfair — on three separate occasions, most recently in 2019, the AEC has concluded that GetUp is independent of any political party. It is frequently accused, most recently by Captain GetUp himself, of being funded by foreign interests, including George Soros.
But imitation is the best form of flattery, and the right has, for many years, been desperate to create their own lobby group with similar clout. Advance Australia could be their best hope — since its founding in November, the group has raised $395,000, and amassed 27,500 members.
However, money alone may not be enough. GetUp still has the advantage in terms of membership and campaigning clout. Advance’s message meanwhile, is failing to gain traction in key marginal seats. Still, they’ve always got the man in the orange superhero suit.
The joke is in the name: Advance Australia, who apparently wants to regress Australia to some imaginary glorious past. And it picks as its signature ‘issues’ entrenched insult and offence to Blackfellas in respect of Australian Day and defending leeches who get a tax refund on tax they have not paid.
It seems that what offends the right the most is authentic democracy so effectively exercised by over 1 million Australian who are members and financial supporters of GetUp! GetUp! has become crucial as a counterweight to secret corporate lobbies who have done so much damage to Australian society.
All Advance Australia demonstrates is that the Right has run right out of ideas.
Exactly BA, when GetUp has racked up as much influence on all other parties as the IPA has on the LNP, then our democracy will be in a much healthier state.
But AA will doubtless gather strong support from the greedy rich, and their not too bright ultra conservative cheer squad – fortunately there are not that many of them.
I believe GetUp does report its funding sources, not so the treasonous IPA.
Advance Australia and the Murdoch press – but no one mentions the m.o. of Murdoch’s politically partisan 70% of our hard copy media, SKY and their various shock-jock dependants?The way they dictate the daily gobble?
Karen Middleton raised the “Murdoch” spectre on The Dum last night – in the context of “foreign entities meddling/access in our politics” (well China anyway) – and didn’t “Feathers” fly off in another direction at the very mention?
And just how inane has The Dum become?
Tonight “Feathers” and her panel “discussed” this – including Murdoch Muppet Smethurst, on about how ‘unfair GetUp! is because it targets specific candidates’?????
Seriously.
While Murdoch’s Limited News (with it’s massive dominance of our “news” media – both directly and those metastasising other parts of the “opinion as news” media, trying to influence the opinions of the voting public their way – that take their cue from it) targets whole parties – Labor, The Greens, and Palmer’s rabble (after Palmer and his mob crossed Rupert)? The sort of one-eyed, partisan, subjective opinion-as-news hatchet job Smethurst is happy to wield from her elite position?
And no one – notably “Feathers” as chair – mentioned Murdoch’s similar, if more sledge-hammer, m.o?
…… Perhaps it’s time to rename it “The Bucket” …. or “The Spitoon”?
GetUp’s strength is in the huge, interested support base it can rally. People power.
No matter how many Liberal Party donors squander their money on Advance Australia, it won’t have that popular base and won’t achieve anything.
Much like the Liberal propaganda site “The Fair Go” which vanished without a trace, so will Advance Australia. And I could have told you that even before they launched “Captain GetUp” to put beyond all doubt that they are being run by the opposite of whatever a marketing genius is. Perhaps we have found the one man in Australia besides Rowan Dean and Michael Stutchbury who thinks Rowan Dean is funny.
So is “Captain Getup” supposed to be anti-Getup? That’s confusing…
The point of GetUp is to provide a voice for individuals frustrated at the right-wing bias of Australian media, and partly counter the financial influence of corporations etc. It enthuses everyday people who feel that less-selfish policies are deliberately overlooked by major players. For lots of people like myself, its arrival was a wonderful antidote to feeling perenially disappointed by Labor’s centrism.
With that in mind I can’t imagine there’d be many everyday people who are keen to hit the hustings for a right-wing equivalent, in order maintain the entitled status of the already rich and powerful. Why would you bother?