With millions of dollars flowing in from some of the country’s wealthiest people, the so-called right-wing antidote to GetUp should be one of the most powerful forces in politics. Yet the fledgling Advance Australia group is still mired in obscurity.
Figures released this week show just how much its supporters are trying to turn the organisation into an effective vanguard against left-wing activism.
Despite having gained almost no public profile since it was set up in 2018 (unless you count its weird Captain GetUp misfire during the last election), Advance Australia was the second biggest spender on political campaigns in the 2019-20 financial year after the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). It spent $1.5 million on campaigns to “save free speech” and keep Australia Day on January 26.
That’s more than 10 times the amount spent by GetUp — just $114,570.
Of course the figures don’t tell the full story. Australia’s political donation rules are so lax that only donations greater than $14,300 need be disclosed.
But it raises the question: who exactly are the wealthy benefactors propping up this flailing organisation, even when it seems to be fading into irrelevance?
It’s no secret the group is closely tied to the Liberal Party. As Crikey has reported, its former national director Gerard Benedet was 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.
In the past two years it has received a steady stream of income from Sixmilebridge Pty Ltd, an entity controlled by former concrete magnate Rodney O’Neil, whose family has been a fixture in Sydney’s harbourside suburbs for decades.
Sixmilebridge has appeared on various conservative parties’ donor returns in the past few years. But it directed all its funding to Advance Australia this year.
The latest donor returns show the O’Neil family also provided Advance Australia with more income through several other entities. Telowar Pty Ltd, registered to O’Neil’s Double Bay address, donated $75,000.
And Willimbury, controlled by O’Neil’s brother Colin, and Helen O’Neil, threw in another $75k.
And Sixmilebridge contributed another $75,000 on top of that, rounding out the O’Neils’ contribution to $225,000.
Advance Australia also got $150,000 from the Burleigh Trust, $25,000 from businessman Peter Farrell and another $75,000 from Negidi Pty Ltd, which is not listed with the corporate regulator.
There was a big injection of cash last year — $1 million from Simon Fenwick, a Dan Andrews-hating fundie who had been moved to support the organisation after watching “socialism fail all around the world”.
Fenwick had previously been on Advance Australia’s advisory board and donated $280,000 to the Liberal Party in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election.
Advance Australia has a shopping list of cultural crusades it wants to push into the mainstream. Its most recent missive is a petition against Cricket Australia over its removal of the words “Australia Day” from its Big Bash League advertising material — more evidence, Advance Australia says, that the organisation is being bullied by “the Marxist-led Black Lives Matter movement”.
However, gaining mainstream appeal might be hard for a group backed almost solely by an investment banker and a bloke from Double Bay.
So GetUp! engages in ‘left-wing activism’. What effing nonsense. Why is it ‘left-wing’ to campaign for social and economic equity, government transparency, saving the environment from rapacious capital, indigenous equity and welfare, eradication of oppressive racism etc etc. If all these are ‘left-wing’ causes, then ‘right-wing’ must translate as support for deliberate social and economic inequity, corruption and secrecy, deliberate environmental destruction and deliberate oppression of black and brown people.
Excuse me Been Around, but I feel the journalist used “left-wing activism” in the right context. I am completely apolitical, but must we turn a blind eye to Extinction Rebellion, left-wing radical feminism, university indoctrination camps, PC mother load, does anybody actually read the Age newspaper these days?
” rapacious capital, indigenous equity and welfare, eradication of oppressive racism etc etc.”
Agree with you on these points if it’s not a pretext for something worse.
This is about advance Australia and getup, Time and Tide. Extinction Rebellion is a different group. Mixing up these things tends to make your apolitical stance look like right wing propaganda.
Apolitical, and there’s a pig studying porcine aviation.
“if it’s not a pretext for something worse.”
I’m always baffled at the way in which conservative minded folks (unfailingly and seemingly en masse) jump to some absurd extreme when opposing change.
The ol’ ‘where will it end??!!’ counter argument is so silly.
More often than not it will end here, right where the line is drawn today.
Unless I missed something and now that we have gay marriage everybody is now marrying their dogs and cats?
The word “extreme” is missing in this conversation. Most parties/groups have problems with their fringe dwellers, more often than not they are younger people just cutting their teeth. It’s the older people among them that we have to watch.
The old laundromat isn’t as good at cleaning money compared to the poker machines. And tax havens have sprung up all around the world. It’s called progress?
I don’t think this organisation has been able to rise above the intellectual magnificence of Captain Getup, no amount of money can galvanise the selfish rich to match a community that thinks and acts.
The liberal party is putting more coal into the boilers of the titanic.
“Marxist led Black Lives Matter movement.”
The extent of their intellectual capacity is encapsulated in those words. As insightful and analytical as it gets. At least they have one fan on here.
I am often bemused by the use of Marxist as a term of dark foreboding. It would be interesting indeed to see a what a mob like Advance Australia, or the IPA actually mean by it. Are they talking about the 1844 Manuscripts? the Manifesto? The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte? (a cracking good piece of political analysis that one), the Critique of the Gotha Program? Capital? What?
How does one identify a Marxist? Is there a distinguishing tattoo? Do they suddenly burst out with Abolish the proletariat – actualise philosophy while in the freezer section at the supermarket? Do they speak in dialectics?
How does one become a Marxist? Is there an exam or can just announce you have accepted Marx into your heart? Are there grades of Marxist? For example, does your basic Marxist just know the ten point program in the Manifesto, while your advanced Marxist can recite the entire Grundrisse in German, backwards?
Obviously, as a bogey person Marx must send delicious thrills of fear and revulsion through members of those organisations (and through their members too no doubt), but I wonder if it means anything to the average punter.
I have a t-shirt with a photo of Marx, under the photo isMarx saying I told you I was right