Australia's wealthy are funding a fragmented, failing political right

Jenna Price

Canberra Times

0
06.03.2026

Are all these raging conservatives just throwing bad money after bad?

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In short, the answer is yes. Which is a relief.

News this week that James Packer donated $150,000 to the appalling Advance was dispiriting - and not terribly generous either. For the rest of us that's the equivalent of ten bucks. Sure Advance was effective during the referendum, but its donors would be pissed off with how little the group achieved at the 2025 federal election.

No amount of money can make a difference because Australians are not interested in extremists of any kind. They loathed Clive Palmer. They completely rejected Scott Morrison. They laughed Peter Dutton out of parliamentary existence. And I struggle to believe we could be persuaded by Advance's endless hate project. Hate blacks, hate migrants, hate nature.

The ABC this week reported the Packer donation. It also revealed the lobby group's receipts grew from $2.4 million in 2018-19, when it was established, to $13.5 million last financial year. That covered the last federal election. Sure, the money's slowly flowing in from people like Packer, like Gina Rinehart who has poured in nearly a million bucks; and John Roth, anti-Semitism envoy Jillian Segal's husband (I guess it's OK to hate other groups so long as you don't hate Jews). But I note that some of their petitions have been up for years, actual years; and the petition promoting nuclear energy has barely budged in the five years it's been up - about 5000 at the beginning of 2021 and just under 10,000 now.

What exactly is Advance? I asked Mark Riboldi, an academic at the University of Technology Sydney, who is taking this third-party lobby group seriously. He says it began in 2018 as a conservative counterpoint to progressive advocacy group GetUp!.

My take on this? A bunch of wealthy Australians, including Sam Kennard of Kennards Self Storage, Maurice Newman (former ABC chair and full-time climate change denier) and Simon Fenwick (former fund manager with not much else notable about him except his wealth) put money together to think about ways to protect their interests. Between 2018 and 2022, it barely did a thing. And then along came the Voice referendum and wowza, did all the unpleasant racists put their backs in.

So here we are, two years since Australia voted against giving First Nations people a Voice to Parliament, and Advance and One Nation are again having a go. Riboldi tells me the power base of the right in Australia is being fiercely contested - and that's why the money's flowing in to Advance and to One Nation. Obviously the Liberal Party is a screaming basket case: its right hand didn't know what its other right hand was doing during the election (how is it possible Jane Hume was trying to oppose working from home when Liberal campaign staffers were working from home). Thank heavens Prime Minister Anthony Albanese tabled the Liberal Party review of its failure at the last federal election - we all needed a good laugh.

So if the right is fragmenting in this country, can we identify the various factions? Riboldi is blunt; "When they call themselves centre-right, you know they are way further to the right than that, they protest a little bit too much."

He says you could throw a lasso around Advance and its fellow travellers and you'd find yourself rounding up Andrew Hastie, Angus Taylor, Jacinta Price, Peter Dutton, Tony Abbott. "And you can include in that lasso, One Nation, you can include Hanson, you can include Barnaby Joyce."

And why are Packer, Rinehart et al feeding this beast? Riboldi says they are trying to put bets on who is going to win the contest around the Liberal Party. Bleak. Did all that money make anything meaningful?

Riboldi and Ariadne Vromen, professor at the University of Glasgow and my sainted PhD supervisor, have new research in the next ANU election book on Advance and other third-party lobby groups. What they discovered was this. Advance spent a truckload of money and had a lot of energy out there - but was significantly outcampaigned by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). On TikTok, for example, the union movement's peak body was four times more effective - expanding its audience beyond its traditional vibe. Advance was talking to its own people. In the meantime, Liberals campaigned both for and against nuclear (Liberals Against Nuclear spent $400,000 campaigning against the party's signature policy). What was I saying about its two right hands?

At the same time, most of the left, including the Greens, environmental groups, and conservation groups, coalesced around the idea that Australians shouldn't take the risk on Dutton.

"There's quite a lot of that fragmentation and lack of discipline across the right so even though Advance was out there, campaigning on issues and trying to undermine the Greens and trying to undermine Labor, the votes weren't necessarily going to the Liberal party or the National party."

Next-to-last word to David Pocock: "The last thing our country needs right now is any more fuel poured on the fire of division that groups like Advance feed." Too true - and it doesn't help that the government failed to act to strengthen truth in political advertising laws.

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Australia's wealthy are funding a fragmented, failing political right

Jenna Price

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