How American Dark Money and Mining Billionaires Are Buying the Liberals’ Climate Surrender
The Liberal Party meets this week to decide whether to dump its Net Zero pledge. Drama over a decision the average ten-year-old could tell them is simply not an option. Our media love a bit of climate chaos, but this is more than another overhyped factional squabble. Look closer and you find a deeper rot: a festering wen of billionaires and fossil fuel backers infecting the body politic, poisoning the health of established democratic process to protect their extortionate profits.
The puppet master? A mob called Advance. If you hadn’t heard of them, that’s the idea.
The Fake Grassroots Machine
Advance claims to speak for “mainstream Australians” fighting city elites. It says it has 330,000 members and an average donation of $160. Sounds plausible? Battlers defending the Australian way of life?
Follow the money and the story collapses.
In 2023–24 alone, Advance pulled in $15.5 million. Hedge fund manager Simon Fenwick has tipped in over $400,000 through his family trust. Storage billionaire Sam Kennard, worth $2.6 billion, added $165,000. Then there’s the big one: the Cormack Foundation, the Liberal Party’s own investment vehicle, kicked in half a million dollars.
And who funds Cormack? Commonwealth Bank ($1.18 million), Rio Tinto ($555,000), National Australia Bank ($542,000), Wesfarmers ($533,000), and BHP ($430,000). The usual suspects: mining giants and big banks with billions riding on weak climate policy.
The money flows through obscurely named holding companies; Paslibdan Pty Ltd, Henroth Investments, deliberately hiding the source. Dark money, Australian style. And it works because we built a democracy with no truth in advertising laws and disclosure thresholds you could drive a coal train through.
Imported Tactics
Advance didn’t invent its playbook. It imported it.
The group works with RJ Dunham and Co, a Texas PR outfit specializing in conservative religious groups and right-wing faith movements. The kind of operation that helped build America’s culture war machine. Founding director Simon Fenwick openly welcomed comparisons to Trump and the “war on woke.”
Academics call Advance’s strategy “flooding the zone with shit”—a phrase from Trump strategist Steve Bannon. Unleash such a fire hose of disinformation that people give up trying to sort truth from lies.
During the Voice referendum, they ran contradictory micro-campaigns designed to sow confusion. “If you don’t know, vote No” wasn’t a slogan; it was the strategy. Polling dropped from 60 percent support to 40 percent as their media offensive kicked in.
Advance distributed digitally altered flyers depicting independent candidates as Greens when they weren’t. Their lies about Alex Dyson, a popular, local independent for Wannon were in my letter-box.
Dyson lost to the wood-duck party Liberal apparatchik, dynastic Dan Tehan, son of the late Marie, 1990s still remembered for an era from which Victoria’s never really recovered: more “market-style” funding, contracting, and private involvement in public health.
Dan is a pro-coal blow-in, on the nose with locals. Olympic swimmer Emily Seebohm’s image was used without permission for transphobic billboards. Advance produced children’s books denying climate science and tried getting them into classrooms until the NSW Education Department banned them.
All of it perfectly legal. Yet calculated to exploit our naïveté and trust.
The Atlas Connection
The deeper network is global. Advance’s DNA flows from the Atlas Network, a Virginia-based consortium linking over 500 conservative think tanks in 100 countries, founded to “litter the world with free-market think tanks.”
Its Australian partners? The Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies—both founded with money from Santos, Shell, BHP, Rio Tinto and Western Mining.
UTS researcher Jeremy Walker has documented how Advance emerged from these fossil-funded think tanks with one mission: delay climate action long enough for coal and gas to extract maximum profit. The Voice referendum wasn’t about Indigenous recognition. It was about preventing First Nations people from having constitutional standing to challenge mining projects on their land.
Maurice Newman—the climate denier who founded the Centre for Independent Studies with fossil fuel money and later chaired the ABC—was an early Advance backer. It’s the same daisy chain every time: mining money funds think tanks, think tanks spawn lobby groups, lobby groups capture political parties.
The Net Zero Retreat
Which brings us to this week. The Nationals already rolled over. Senator Matt Canavan declared “No more net zero!” back in January. Now the Liberals are deciding whether to follow.
Advance has been hammering one message: “Net Zero is a climate crusade, a wealth transfer from hardworking taxpayers to green-energy oligarchs.”
The projection is breathtaking. The actual wealth transfer is happening right now—from taxpayers to fossil fuel corporations via the mob buying up political influence.
And it’s working. The party is split. Moderate Andrew Bragg is threatening to quit if they abandon the Paris Agreement. But the pressure from Advance, amplified through the Murdoch press, backed by mining money, advised by American culture war specialists, is proving too much.
If the Liberals dump Net Zero, fossil fuel interests will have successfully rigged our climate policy for another decade. The planet will cook. Floods will intensify. Fires will worsen. And a handful of billionaires will have bought themselves a few more years of profit.
How They Get Away With It
Two regulatory black holes make this possible.
First, Australia has no federal truth in political advertising laws. South Australia and the ACT have had them for decades. They work—electoral commissioners can order retractions, courts can levy fines, democracy functions better when lying carries consequences.
But federally? You can say whatever you like in political advertising. Doesn’t matter if it’s false, misleading or demonstrably harmful. It’s all legal.
Advance was the highest-spending lobby group in the 2025 election, dropping $1.76 million on advertising. Much of it was lies. None of it was actionable.
Second, we’ve got dark money opacity that would embarrass a money laundering operation. Only donations over $15,000 require disclosure, and even then you can route them through corporate structures designed to hide the source.
What Needs To Change
Eighty-seven percent of Australians support truth in advertising laws. The fixes are known:
Legislative reform—Truth in political advertising laws based on the South Australian model. Lower the disclosure threshold to $1,000 with real-time reporting. Ban foreign entities from advising Australian campaigns. Force think tanks to declare their fossil fuel sponsors.
Relentless exposure—Every time Advance runs a campaign, name the billionaires funding it. Name Simon Fenwick. Name Sam Kennard. Name the mining companies behind the Cormack Foundation. Make the public understand this isn’t grassroots—it’s astroturf laid down by the wealthy to protect their wealth.
Political pressure—Make the Liberals choose between Advance and credibility. Force them to declare whether they take advice from American-funded culture warriors. Make them explain why they’re letting Texas PR firms dictate Australian climate policy.
Media literacy—The AEC’s “Stop and Consider” campaign needs to become a megaphone, not a whisper. Inoculate the public against disinformation by showing them the tactics before they’re deployed.
The Stakes
This isn’t about policy differences or legitimate political debate. This is corporate capture of democracy. It’s what happens when we let the rules get so loose that money can buy not just elections but entire policy frameworks.
The Liberal Party’s decision this week will tell us whether Australian democracy still belongs to Australians or whether we’ve handed the keys to fossil fuel billionaires and their American consultants.
Advance Australia? More like Advance the Interests of Mining Capital While the Planet Burns.
Time to ask which future we’re advancing towards. And time to demand our politicians choose democracy over their donors.
Urban Wronski Writes 
Firstly I believe we need to look at Environmental Degradation in it’s entirety and secondly, “Advance” is in reality Australia.
Fact, without mining our country would be dead in the water, mining provides the bulk of our income. For years we rode on the sheep’s back, now we’re ridding on mining.
Until such times as Australia widens it’s horizons and becomes more than a supplier of raw materials, nothing we do will change.
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Jonangel: It’s precisely because environmental degradation must be looked at in its entirety that mining cannot be excused as Australia’s lifeboat. Mining may currently contribute significantly to export income, but it also drives the very degradation you say we must consider. To claim the nation would be “dead in the water” without it is to ignore the costs borne by ecosystems, communities, and future generations. A country that survives by eroding its own foundations is not alive—it’s cannibalising itself.
Yes, we once “rode on the sheep’s back,” but that metaphor is telling: the wool boom collapsed when markets shifted, and the environmental toll of overgrazing scarred landscapes for decades. Mining is simply another saddle on the same tired horse—short-term extraction dressed up as prosperity. The lesson from history is not that we should cling to the next commodity, but that we must diversify and innovate.
Australia is not condemned to be “just a supplier of raw materials.” In fact, the fastest-growing sectors—renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, digital services, regenerative agriculture—are already proving that our horizons can widen. Mining companies themselves are investing in renewables, not out of altruism, but because they see the writing on the wall: global markets are shifting, and raw extraction alone is unsustainable.
To say “nothing we do will change” until we widen our horizons is defeatist. The truth is, everything we do now—policy choices, investment in education, support for clean industries—is the widening of horizons. Mining is not Australia’s destiny; it’s a chapter. The question is whether we keep rereading it until the book falls apart, or whether we start writing the next one.
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I agree with just about everything you have posted, a “defeatist” I am not. I have tried for years to point an opposite view to that offered by the mass median in all it’s forms.
Now at least twenty years too late, we are endorsing sola, I had solar just on twenty years ago, we have had a conscience (misplaced) embargo for many years on nuclear based on what?
We are governed by weak kneed politicians who lie to a gullible electorate.
What does our future hold? Unless we (the collective we) get up of our asses we don’t have a future.
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Thanks for this. And no, you’re not defeatist – you’re describing reality as it is, not as the press gallery’s cheer squad prefers it. If anything, you’re one of the few arguing from evidence and lived experience rather than from the theological certainties that pass for “debate” in our politics.
You’re right about the lost decades. Australians were told for years that solar was fringe, flaky, or some kind of inner-city indulgence, while the same people quietly bankrolled it for themselves. You put panels on your roof twenty years ago. Good sense, foresight, responsibility. Meanwhile the political class was still lighting candles for the coal gods.
As for nuclear, the “embargo” you refer to was never about safety or physics. It was about optics. It was about a party terrified of its own shadows, terrified of the Murdoch front page, terrified of having to make a case to voters rather than simply reacting to them. If they’d been honest about the cost curves, the timelines, the liabilities, we could have had a real conversation about risk and reward. Instead, we got slogans and scare campaigns from both sides.
But you’re absolutely right about the core issue: weak-kneed politics propped up by a media ecosystem that prefers theatre to truth. A gullible electorate doesn’t arise naturally – it is cultivated. It’s the harvest of decades of distraction, sensationalism, and deliberate under-education on the structural decisions that actually shape our lives.
What does the future hold? Well – nothing worth having unless people like you keep refusing the script. Political change never begins with majorities; it begins with the stubborn minority who refuse to accept the official story. It begins with the “we” you refer to – the collective that suddenly remembers it has a spine.
The country’s not doomed, but it is drifting. And drift only ends one of two ways: with a crash, or with someone grabbing the wheel.
Your comment shows you’re still in the latter camp. Let’s hope more join you.
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What a wreck of a country Australia has become! Corrupt nearly all the way through!
This is because Australians are doers – not thinkers.
Why should I care when nearly everyone I know just doesn’t think!
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Australia, a vast Natural wonderland with everything except overlaying glaciers and underlying intelligence!
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