Brexit and UK Political Interference by Putin, Russia and Anglo Conservative Allies

Still, there is discussion and analysis of Brexit versus the EU and Trump versus Biden’s Democrat administration, with accusations and allegations being made against Conservative MPs, Ministers, some Labour, media, Anglo right wing grifters, US fossil fueled Atlas – Koch Network think tanks at Tufton, related nativist Tanton Network and Russians, including FSB, diplomats, media and oligarch types.

‘Putin’s Plot Against ‘Great’ Britain – And How He Got Away With It

Peter Jukes tracks Vladimir Putin’s long war against the West and the allies he has found in the pro-Brexit establishment in the plot to derail Britain

Peter Jukes 8 March 2022

The outline of Vladimir Putin’s long war against the West has been brought into stark, almost apocalyptic relief by his brutal invasion of Ukraine, and his mass bombardment of Ukrainian civilians. The Kremlin’s plan to recreate a new Russian Empire has been noted for years in various think tanks and publications, though very few believed it.

Thanks to Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr we know this is partly due to a ‘Great Information War’, using the fifth battlespace of propaganda and non-linear lies to deceive and distract. But after FBI investigations, congressional intelligence reports and dozens of journalistic investigations, we have confirmation from the US Army itself that Brexit was the first step in Putin’s ‘information blitzkrieg’. 

But why has it taken so long to realise we were under attack? Why was there so little preparation for the biggest war in Europe in 77 years? And why did Britain do so little to counter it? The failure to do so will be seen as a bigger intelligence failure than 9/11. But was there more than wilful blindness in our (in)ability to see and predict the plans of the Kremlin? 

For an answer to that, we have to go back to 2017, and the revelations of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who was tasked to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election. But before we do so, it’s worth sketching out, in brief, Putin’s now obvious ambition to remove Britain from the EU and derail the transatlantic alliance at the heart of NATO. 

The Plot to Derail Britain

Auseful starting point for Putin’s attack on the weak spots of British democracy is the appointment of Alexander Yakovenko to the role of Ambassador to the United Kingdom in January 2011. Three years earlier, Putin had stepped down to allow Dmytry Medvedev to replace him as President of Russia – an apparently smooth democratic succession based on a promise of modernisation and anti-corruption….

….In the summer of 2012, Sergey Nalobin, a senior diplomat, whose father was an FSB general and whose brother also worked for the Russian intelligence agency, hosted a party at the Russian Embassy establishing the Conservative Friends of Russia. For three years, as donations from Russian oligarchs increased, he befriended senior Conservatives and their contacts, and particularly those associated with what would become the official Vote Leave campaign to exit the EU, including Boris Johnson, John Whittingdale and Matthew Elliott. 

It was Ambassador Yakovenko himself who first made overtures to the burgeoning UK Independence Party. The Ambassador was photographed meeting Nigel Farage in the Russian Embassy 2013, after which Farage was regularly featured on state-sponsored RT (formerly Russia Today) not only as a studio guest, but also in the news segments that covered Farage’s speeches in the European Parliament. 

Two events soon spurred the Russian influence operation into combat mode. In 2014, the bloody Maidan revolution, ousting Viktor Yanukovych as Ukrainian President and derailing Putin’s plans to create a Eurasian Union to match the EU, marked the real beginning of the war in Ukraine.

Putin was now wedded to any strategy that would weaken both the transatlantic alliance and the European Union which opposed his land grab. He began funding Eurosceptic and far-right parties across Europe, in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The Internet Research Agency, run by the oligarch who also funded Putin’s mercenary Wagner group army, began to spend $50 million a year supporting Donald Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton. 

Meanwhile, David Cameron’s promise to allow a referendum on EU membership during his successful 2015 election campaign presented an opportunity against the US’s major ally. Brexit would become a strategic blow against the EU, separating one of its most powerful economies from the rest of Europe. 

Another Russian Embassy official in London, Counsellor Alexander Udod, a familiar presence at British army and university functions celebrating wartime alliances with the Soviet Union, was tasked with infiltrating the other key Brexit player, UKIP. 

Udod approached two linchpins of the movement, Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore, at the 2015 UKIP conference in Doncaster, when they were planning their Leave.EU campaign. For the next year, from November 2015 through to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, there were multiple meetings with Leave.EU officials and Russian embassy staff, in which preferential access to state monopolies in Russian gold and diamond deals were discussed….

……Given this clear campaign of espionage and infiltration, designed to cause destruction to Britain’s prestige and international effectiveness, why did the security services or the UK Government fail to counter it? And what was the role of Brexit and its senior figures in enabling the country’s self-sabotage? 

Johnson and the Oligarchs

The role of rich UK-based oligarchs, either out of fear or favour, acting on behalf of Putin as a proxy or backchannel, has become a major focus since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. London and the UK was the favoured hub for a rich Russian diaspora, with Soviet-born oligarchs such as Dmytro Firtash, Alexander Lebedev, Oleg Deripaska, Roman Abramovich, and Boris Berezovsky becoming key parts of the commercial, political and cultural scene, and the City of London a major investment and trading hub for Russian companies.

We now know more about the extensive funding of the Conservative Party by Russian oligarchs and their high-level access to politicians. Other senior business figures, who have funded either the Leave campaigns or Brexit think tanks, made their millions in Russia or have major investments there. But, to many, this didn’t seem abnormal. As the influential left-wing commentator Owen Jones once told me: Russian oligarchs had no more impact on Brexit than the non-domiciled media moguls who dominate our newspaper industry

Good point. Except, the owners of the Evening Standard and the Independent are both Russian oligarchs and media moguls, and they have influenced Johnson’s political career.

The London daily, owned by Alexander Lebedev – a former KGB agent in Britain – and his son Evgeny, had an important role to play in promoting Boris Johnson during his time as Mayor. Johnson valued their contribution so highly that he elevated Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords as Baron of Hampton and Siberia (requiring Putin’s permission for the title), against security advice.

But did they have any impact on his decision to back Putin’s Brexit plot?

As reported by Catherine Belton, another Soviet-born oligarch and major Conservative donor, Alexander Temerko, claimed that Johnson was finally persuaded to back Brexit by a group of ‘eastern European businessmen’. Temerko refused to elaborate when questioned further by Belton, and there are numerous candidates who could be part of that group. But it certainly looks like the Lebedevs were involved.

According to the wife of Johnson’s fellow campaign figurehead, Michael Gove, Johnson made the final momentous decision to join the Leave campaign at a dinner with Evgeny Lebedev. And though the shock 2016 result did not lead to his assumption of the leadership of the Conservative Party, Johnson did – according to Temerko – spend much of his time as Foreign Secretary drinking wine with him and plotting to replace the new Prime Minister, Theresa May….. 

…..Therefore, the huge public interest question is: how did then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson react to early revelations of Putin’s great information war?

All the evidence suggests that he engaged in a systematic cover-up.  

Suppressing the Russia Story

I first became personally involved in this story in November 2017. The first Mueller indictment had landed, prosecuting Trump foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos for lying about meeting a purported ‘Russian agent’ in London who had ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton and her emails during the presidential campaign of 2016 – the supposed agent being a Maltese professor called Joseph Mifsud. Mifsud claimed to have connections with the Russian Ambassador, Alexander Yakovenko. 

A few weeks later, a source revealed to me that Mifsud had been planning to meet Boris Johnson for a dinner and to talk about Brexit. After protracted discussions with a Foreign Office spokesperson about whether the dinner had actually happened and whether the then Foreign Secretary had met with a person the FBI alleged was a Russian spy, I co-published the revelation with Carole Cadwalladr at the Observer on 4 November 2017. A week later, a picture emerged of Boris Johnson and Joseph Mifsud at a Conservative event in Reading.

Although information from MI6 and intelligence from GCHQ about Russian interference had already been passed on to US authorities at this point – and both those agencies nominally reported to the Foreign Secretary – Johnson told Labour MP Chris Bryant during a select committee hearing in early November 2017, a few weeks after meeting Mifsud, that he’d seen “not a sausage” of Russian interference in British politics. 

And here begins another more damning twist in the cover-up saga. On the day after Johnson’s “not a sausage” remark at the select committee, former Chief Whip Gavin Williamson was appointed Defence Secretary to replace Michael Fallon. In evidence heard in the Royal Courts of Justice in the libel trial of Arron Banks versus Carole Cadwalladr earlier this year, the new Defence Secretary was very well aware of Russian interference in UK elections.

According to Cadwalladr’s sworn testimony, it was Williamson who contacted Richard Tice, the co-chair of the Leave.EU campaign, in November 2017 with warnings about the connections between Russia and his former co-chair Arron Banks…..

The Great Brexit Kompromat

Putin has been in a violent kinetic war with Ukraine since 2014, and launched a more subtle but just as effective hybrid war with the UK, US and Europe since at least then, using online operations, subversion, character assassination and sometimes murder.

All the historic documents show that many in the intelligence community knew this. The Department of Culture, Media and Sport produced a report, ‘Disinformation and Fake News’, which confirmed those suspicions in 2019. Despite the Prime Minister’s attempts to suppress its publication for many months, the ‘Russia Report’ by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee also confirmed it. And still nobody did anything about it. 

The Russia Report also noted, starkly, that none of Britain’s intelligence agencies had been tasked to look at, let alone protect us from, Putin’s Information Blitzkrieg. Any National Crime Agency and Metropolitan Police investigations have been granted limited remits. Meanwhile, the current Government is planning to remove the autonomy and powers of the Electoral Commission.

At the very time when our defences should have been raised, they have been deliberately dropped. Why?

From their current positions in firm support of Ukraine, it’s clear that most of the current Conservative Government is not pro-Putin, no matter how many roubles he has placed in their campaign coffers through proxies. Some no doubt are compromised personally and financially by the prospect of embarrassing revelations from the Russian security services. But as the sad story above makes clear: Brexit was the great kompromat. 

So many in the political-media class put Britain’s hard exit from the EU above all else, that they were willing to ignore another enemy advancing in their waters. They wanted to own Brexit for themselves, disregarding foreign interference and, like shipwrecked mariners, were still clinging to the rocks that wrecked them. They had created their ultimate villain – the European Union – and Putin’s form of strong-man authoritarianism, replete with ‘anti-woke’ values of family, macho masculinity, and hints of white racial superiority, may have chimed more closely with their own political predilections. 

Meanwhile, for at least five years, Vladimir Putin has been given a free hand to launch a war in Europe with little opposition, amid signals from the British establishment that he could only have taken as compliance and surrender. We waved a white flag. And though we are currently arming the Ukrainians with anti-tank missiles, and promising strong sanctions (which are always behind the rest), we effectively abandoned them during their eight-year-long struggle to hold back the dark Putinist tide of state terror and violence. And now they are paying the price for our appeasement.’

For more blogs and articles on Ageing Democracy, Conservative, EU European Union, Media, Political Strategy and Russia click through:

Radical Right in the West – Fossil Fuel Atlas Koch Network – Nativist Tanton Network – Murdoch Media – Putin’s Russia – Brexit – Trump

Posted on March 6, 2024

Radical right in Anglosphere and Europe is cited here by Scott in Politico, including the ‘great replacement’ and Renaud Camus, climate science and Covid 19 scepticism. 

Symptoms of fossil fuels, oligarchs and <1% supporting corrupt nativist authoritarianism found around (mostly) right wing parties with ageing and low info constituents, informed by talking points prompted by mainstream media, social media and influencers.

Russia Report – Anglo Conservatives Compromised by Russian Interference on EU and Brexit

Return to questions over the U.K. Russia Report, former PM Johnson, Brexit, Conservative government, Russian oligarchs and influence on elections including the EU referendum..

Written by Peter Jukes and originally published January 2023 by ByLine Times, asking questions that are not only unresolved, but actively avoided by the Tories, media and supporters for the advantage of Putin’s Russia and oligarchs, both east and west?

Putin’s Russian Led Corruption of Anglosphere and European Radical Right, Conservatives and Christians

Posted on March 4, 2024

Some years ago Putin and Russia attracted much attention and sympathy from Anglo and European ultra conservative Christians, radical right and free market libertarians for Russia’s corrupt nativist authoritarianism with antipathy towards liberal democracy, the EU and open society.

These phenomena can be observed through visitors and liaisons, but more so by shared talking points and values.  These include family values, pro-life, Christianity, patriarchy, misogyny, white supremacy, traditionalism, dominionism, Evangelicals, anti-LGBT, anti-woke,  anti-elite, anti-gay marriage, traditional wives etc. and corruption, promoted by right wing parties, media, ultra conservative influencers, think tanks and NGOs.

Alexander Downer – Donald Trump aide George Papadopoulos – Russian Influence?

Posted on March 3, 2024

Alexander Downer, former Australian Foreign Minister in Conservative LNP coalition, Australia’s UK High Commissioner till 2018, visitor to Koch Network Heritage Foundation linked Hungarian Danube Institute (with former PM, now GWPF, UK Trade Advisor and Murdochs’ new Fox Board member Tony Abbott), and source for claims by Trump related people of DNC emails stolen by Russians i.e. George Papadopoulos.

‘Just a diplomat doing his job? A new book puts the spotlight back on Australia, Russia and interference in the US election.’

Historical Influence and Links Between Russia and the US Christian Right

Posted on November 6, 2023

We observe in the Anglosphere resurgence in conservative Christian nationalism of the right, becoming a central issue in ageing electorates, more in the US, Russia and Central Europe; both an electoral and policy strategy, plus supporting beliefs.

Some of the Anglo links are former Australian PM and now UK Trade Advisor Tony Abbott with the ADF Alliance Defending Freedom, Donald Trump gaining support of Evangelical and ‘pro-life’ Christians, the fossil fueled Atlas or Koch Network and their influence on the conservative Christian CNP Council for National Policy, Koch influenced Federalist Society promoting ‘pro-life’ choices for SCOTUS on Roe vs. Wade, then sharing similar values with Orban et al. in Central Europe, and Putin in Russia too?

Monbiot – Radical Right Libertarians – Fossil Fuel Think Tanks – Koch & Tanton Networks

Good overview via Argentina by George Monbiot in The Guardian ‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies’ and concerning dynamics around national politics, media, think tanks and governance.

The ‘junk tanks’ he talks of, observed in Anglosphere and globally are Atlas – Koch Network and another that shares donors in the US, Tanton Network. The former does low tax, low regulation and small government while the latter is faux environmental via demographics, population and migration ‘research’.

However, both and often jointly, have direct access to right wing media, influencers and policy makers to slow or stymie any progress especially on Brexit, with allegations of Russian help, to avoid EU regulation on minimum labour, environmental, financial, consumer and other areas; backgrounded by nativist noise or dog whistling of EU, Europe, refugees, immigration and population growth.

In fact both networks, policies and proxies mask the influencers in the background i.e. Koch’s muse James Buchanan who promoted radical right economics, known in some circles as ‘segregation’ or ‘deep south planter’ economics, also behind the Chile experiment of Pinochet.  

On Tanton, he was at fossil fueled Rockefeller Bros. Fund seeded ZPG Zero Population Growth with Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich and was called out by the ‘Cafe con leche Republicans’ as a supporter of eugenics; exemplified by Nigel Farage in the UK and Steve Bannon in the U.S.

With ageing demographics and democracy being gamed to vote for retro policies of the 19th century to support elites or the 1% corrupt and nativist authoritarianism?

The Guardian article follows:

‘What links Rishi Sunak, Javier Milei and Donald Trump? The shadowy network behind their policies

George Monbiot

There are elements of fascism, elements borrowed from the Chinese state and elements that reflect Argentina’s history of dictatorship. But most of the programme for government announced by Javier Milei, the demagogic new Argentinian president, feels eerily familiar, here in the northern hemisphere.

A crash programme of massive cuts; demolishing public services; privatising public assets; centralising political power; sacking civil servants; sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs; destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world; supporting landlords against tenants; criminalising peaceful protest; restricting the right to strike. Anything ring a bell?

Milei is attempting, with a vast “emergency” decree and a monster “reform bill”, what the Conservatives have done in the UK over 45 years. The crash programme bears striking similarities to Liz Truss’s “mini” (maxi) budget, which trashed the prospects of many poor and middle-class people and exacerbated the turmoil that now dominates public life.

Coincidence? Not at all. Milei’s programme was heavily influenced by Argentinian neoliberal think tanks belonging to something called the Atlas Network, a global coordinating body that promotes broadly the same political and economic package everywhere it operates. It was founded in 1981 by a UK citizen, Antony Fisher. Fisher was also the founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), one of the first members of the Atlas Network.

The IEA created, to a remarkable degree, Liz Truss’s political platform. In a video conversation on the day of her “mini” budget with another member of the institute, its then director general, Mark Littlewood, observed: “We’re on the hook for it now. If it doesn’t work it’s your fault and mine.” It didn’t work – in fact, it crashed spectacularly, at great cost to us all – but, thanks to the UK’s media, the BBC included, which continue to treat these fanatical corporate lobbyists as purveyors of holy writ, they’re off the hook.

Last year, the IEA was platformed on British media an average of 14 times a day: even more often than before the disaster it helped inflict on the UK. Scarcely ever was it challenged about who funds it or whom it represents. The three peers nominated by Truss in her resignation honours list have all worked for or with organisations belonging to the Atlas Network (Matthew Elliott, TaxPayers’ Alliance; Ruth Porter, IEA and Policy Exchange; Jon Moynihan, IEA). Now, like US supreme court justices, they have been granted lifelong powers to shape our lives, without democratic consent. Truss also put forward Littlewood, but his reward for wrecking people’s lives was blocked by the House of Lords appointments commission.

Nothing has been learned: these corporate lobby groups still mould our politics. Policy Exchange, which, as Rishi Sunak has admitted, “helped us draft” the UK’s vicious new anti-protest laws, is also a member of the Atlas Network. We might describe certain policies as being Milei’s or Bolsonaro’s, or Truss’s or Johnson’s or Sunak’s, but they’re all variations on the same themes, hatched and honed by junktanks belonging to the same network. Those presidents and prime ministers are just the faces the programme wears.

And who, in turn, are the junk tanks? Many refuse to divulge who funds them, but as information has trickled out we have discovered that the Atlas Network itself and many of its members have taken money from funding networks set up by the Koch brothers and other rightwing billionaires, and from oil, coal and tobacco companies and other life-defying interests. 

The junk tanks are merely the intermediaries. They go into battle on behalf of their donors, in the class war waged by the rich against the poor. When a government responds to the demands of the network, it responds, in reality, to the money that funds it.

The dark-money junk tanks, and the Atlas Network, are a highly effective means of disguising and aggregating power. They are the channel through which billionaires and corporations influence politics without showing their hands, learn the most effective policies and tactics for overcoming resistance to their agenda, and then spread these policies and tactics around the world. This is how nominal democracies become new aristocracies.

They also seem to be adept at shaping public opinion. For example, around the world, neoliberal junktanks have not only lobbied for extreme anti-protest measures, but have successfully demonised environmental protesters as “extremists” and “terrorists”. This might help to explain why peaceful environmental campaigners blocking a road are routinely punched, kicked and spat upon, and in some places run over or threatened with guns, by other citizens, while farmers or truckers blocking a road are not. It might also explain why there is scarcely a murmur of media coverage or public concern when extreme penalties are imposed: such as the six-month prison sentence handed in December to the climate campaigner Stephen Gingell for slow-marching along a London street.

But the worst is yet to come. Donald Trump has never developed a coherent platform of his own. He doesn’t have to. His policies have been written for him, in a 900-page Mandate for Leadership produced by a group of think tanks led by the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is – you got there before me – a member of the Atlas Network. Many of the proposals in the “mandate” are, frankly, terrifying. They have nothing to do with public demands and everything to do with the demands of capital.

When Friedrich Hayek and others first formulated the principles of neoliberalism, they believed it would defend the world from tyranny. But as the big money poured in, and an international network of neoliberal thinktanks was created to develop and articulate its demands, the programme that was supposed to liberate us became a new source of oppression.

In Argentina, where Milei has stepped into the vacuum left by the gross misrule of his predecessors and is able to impose, in true shock doctrine fashion, policies that would otherwise be fiercely resisted, the poor and middle classes are about to pay a terrible price. How do we know? Because very similar programmes have been dumped on other countries, beginning with Argentina’s neighbour Chile, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup in 1973.

These junk tanks are like the spike proteins on a virus. They are the means by which plutocratic power invades the cells of public life and takes over. It’s time we developed an immune system.’

For more related blog and articles on Economics, Environment, Eugenics, Evangelical Christianity, Immigration, Koch Network, Libertarian Economics,  Populist Politics, Tanton Network and white nationalism click through

Anglosphere Oligarchs – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

We have heard much of supposed ‘libertarian’ think tanks or PR outfits in the Anglosphere influencing policy, especially of the right, via media and lobbying, euphemistically known as ‘Koch Network’ or the ‘Kochtopus’ with a fondness for fossil fuels and climate science denial.

New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer investigated several years ago for her book ‘Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right’ (2017) which included insight into oligarch donors Mellon-Scaife, Olin, Bradley, DeVos and Coors.

Rishi Sunak and US Radical Right Libertarians in UK – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

Wheels within wheels, following is an excerpt from Guardian article on Rishi Sunak’s links to the radical right, also found via Tufton Street think tanks, which have influenced many on Brexit and Tory MPs including Liz Truss, who has presented at Koch’s Heritage Foundation in the US. 

The euphemistically described ‘Kochtopus’ has strong presence in the Anglosphere and globally through Atlas Network promoting radical right libertarian ‘public choice theory’ or ‘segregation’ economics of James Buchanan, climate science denialism, with white nativism of Tanton Network NGOs promoting restrictions of refugees and immigrants due to population growth i.e. eugenics.

Australia – Indigenous Voice Referendum – Atlas – Koch Network – CIS – IPA – Murdoch

Australia has had its Brexit or Trump moment on the indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, being usurped by a proxy election campaign, with outcomes being divided society, communities and no real solutions.

Further, the ‘architecture of influence’ and modus operandi are the same as Brexit and Trump including Koch Network think tanks at Tufton St. London and Washington, Tanton Network’s NGOs promoting former ZPG Zero Population Growth nativist tropes versus the ‘other’, whether refugee, immigrant, ethnic minority including native and population growth, with Murdoch right wing led media and related social media campaigns, targeting older voters. 

Environment – Fossil Fuels – Climate Science Denial – Populationism – Anti-Immigration – Far Right – Tanton Network

Jeff Sparrow in Overland rebuts a counter critique of his book ‘Crimes Against Nature’ by a faux expert Edward Smith who appears to be au faire with faux environmental and anti-immigrant arguments promoted by the US Tanton Network linked NGO Sustainable Population Australia.

One would not bother using high level analysis to rebut low level faux science nativist agitprop inspired by former ZPG Zero Population Growth types, namely deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton whose colleague was Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich, with support from the Rockefeller Bros., ‘limits to growth’ PR constructs promoted by Club of Rome and drawing on Malthus, Galton and Madison Grant.

Immigration Restriction – Population Control – Tanton Network

Below are excerpts from an article by Brooke Binkowski in Unicorn Riot outlining the history of the population control movement of Tanton Network which informs immigration in the Anglosphere and parts of Europe.

Eugenics, Border Wars & Population Control: The Tanton Network

Nativist Conservative MPs for Fossil Fuels versus Science, Education, Research, Analysis & Society

Interesting article from a science journalist at The Guardian on comments made about ‘woke’ science by the Tories in the UK at the Conservative Conference in  ‘Science hasn’t gone ‘woke’ – the only people meddling with it are the Tories’ by Philip Ball.

However, this is neither unique to the UK Conservatives nor dissimilar elsewhere, but it is a long game strategy against grounded science, research and analysis, like Trojan horses to disrupt curricula and universities, why? 

It’s both protection for fossil fuels and avoiding climate science (Covid too) while denigrating centre right through left moderate attitudes and policies as e.g. ‘woke’, to energise older right (and too many left) voters including Brexit, Trump and now in Australia ‘The Voice’ Referendum on Aboriginal recognition.

The fulcrum globally is Koch Network think tanks found at Tufton St. London, of course the US, Australia and other parts including links via Atlas Network and in Hungary, Heritage Foundation partnered with Danubius Institute, sharing anti-EU and pro fossil fuels sentiments, shared with Putin’s Russia and fossil fuels oligarchs, also includes the EU’s regulation for environment and financial transparency.

Overall, like Covid and climate science denial, denigration of experts, analysis and universities, with the nativist Tanton Network that shares donors with Koch in the US, is used to deflect from climate science by highlighting immigrants and population growth as environmental hygiene issues.

The end game is more alarming with their and e.g. Murdoch media support for corrupt nativist authoritarian leaders and governments who deny climate science and humanity?

‘Science hasn’t gone ‘woke’ – the only people meddling with it are the Tories

Michelle Donelan’s plan to “depoliticise” science with new guidelines on sex and gender research is a chilling move

The science secretary, Michelle Donelan, told the Conservative party conference this week that the Tories are “depoliticising science”. Or as a Conservative party announcement later put it, in case you didn’t get the culture-war reference, they are “kicking woke ideology out of science”, thereby “safeguarding scientific research from the denial of biology and the steady creep of political correctness”.

Scientists do not seem too delighted to be defended in this manner. “As a scientist, I really don’t know what this means,” tweeted Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, professor of psychology and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. “This is totally shocking and is something I never thought I would see in the UK,” said Buzz Baum, a molecular cell biologist for the Medical Research Council.

What exactly does Donelan think science needs protecting from? What is this woke threat? At the conference, she expanded on that. “Scientists are told by university bureaucrats that they cannot ask legitimate research questions about biological sex,” she claimed, adding that Keir Starmer thinks the “legitimate concerns of the scientific community” on these issues of sex and gender “don’t matter”. She said she will launch a review of the use of gender and sex questions in scientific research, apparently to be led by Alice Sullivan, a professor of sociology at University College London, which will be used to formulate guidance.

You would need to have been hiding under a rock not to appreciate that questions of sex and gender have become controversial, bordering on incendiary, in some areas of academia. As a recent exchange by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and professor of humanities Jacqueline Rose in the New Statesman revealed, academics are often talking at cross-purposes: Dawkins defended the binary nature of human sexes from an evolutionary angle, Rose the socially constructed aspects of gender identity. On top of that, there are the complications of developmental and cognitive biology, which, among other things, can produce intersex individuals and conditions where, say, people with a Y chromosome can be anatomically female.

But one doesn’t need to take a strong stand about rights or wrongs in these debates to recognise that they are difficult and subtle – and to acknowledge it is proper that they be rigorously discussed. Arguably, this is an area where science can’t supply definitive answers to all the germane societal questions.

This is not a case of academic research being trammelled by an imposed ideology, but rather, of a range of differing views among academics themselves. Besides, rather than await clarification, Donelan has evidently formed her opinion already: she called guidance that data on sex should only be collected in exceptional circumstances “utter nonsense” and a “denial of biology”. What is the point of a review if you have decided already what it must say?

More to the point, why is the government getting involved in the first place? What chills Baum is the idea of “politicians telling scientists about the nature of biology”. Some scientists can’t help thinking of previous instances where governments imposed their views on the subject: the spurious “race science” of the Nazis and the anti-Darwinian denialism of Stalin’s regime. While that might sound a slightly hyperbolic response to a transparently desperate ploy to stoke culture-wars division, the principle is the same: a government deciding an approved position on science and demanding that academics toe the line.

Much as Donelan tries to position herself as a champion of the objectivity and freedom of science, this intervention supplies more evidence of the government’s distrust of academics in general and scientists in particular – it’s of a piece with Rishi Sunak’s assertion that scientists were given too much power during the pandemic. Witness the disturbing way this policy direction is framed. However contested and emotive this particular issue, it is hardly relevant to the large-scale practice of science – yet Donelan is seeking to leverage it to imply that all of science somehow stands at risk from “woke ideology”, as if the integrity of truth itself were at stake.

That is perhaps the most ominous aspect of this announcement. The creation of a fictitious, ubiquitous enemy to scare the population is indeed straight out of the fascist playbook. It was thoughtful of the Conservatives to drive this point home with the spectacle of party member Andrew Boff, chair of the London Assembly, being escorted from the conference hall by police on Tuesday when he voiced protest at Suella Braverman’s criticism of the term “gender ideology”.

The notion that science can be “depoliticised” at all, let alone by an agenda-driven political party, is understood to be nonsensical by those who study the interactions of science and society. Of course political agendas should never dictate research results. But the questions asked, priorities decided and societal implications of advances made absolutely make science inextricably tangled with the political landscape – not least in a controversial area like sex and gender. That entanglement can get messy, but no true democracy tries to control the narrative.’

• Philip Ball is a science writer and the author of the forthcoming book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

For more related blogs and articles on Climate Change, Conservatives, Environment, EU European Union, Fossil Fuels, Koch Network, Media, Science Literacy, Tanton Network and University Teaching Skills click through

Conspiracy of Denial – COVID-19 and Climate Science

Anglosphere Oligarchs – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

BBC: 55 Tufton Street London – Libertarian Think Tanks – Koch Network

Rishi Sunak and US Radical Right Libertarians in UK – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

Koch Industries: How to Influence Politics, Avoid Fossil Fuel Emission Control and Environmental Protections

Climate Change Science Attitudes Australia and Koch in USA

Trojan Horses – Ultra Conservatives Disrupting Education Curricula to Influence Youth

Critical Thinking or Analysis: Importance for Education, Media and Empowered Citizens

Anglosphere Oligarchs – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

We have heard much of supposed ‘libertarian’ think tanks or PR outfits in the Anglosphere influencing policy, especially of the right, via media and lobbying, euphemistically known as ‘Koch Network’ or the ‘Kochtopus’ with a fondness for fossil fuels and climate science denial.

New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer investigated several years ago for her book ‘Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right’ (2017) which included insight into oligarch donors Mellon-Scaife, Olin, Bradley, DeVos and Coors. 

Further, historian Nancy MacLean in researching her book ‘Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America’ (2017) she stumbled across the economic muse of Kochs, ‘segregation economist’ James Buchanan.

Not only does this network exist in the US, it’s global via the ‘Atlas Network’ of think tanks especially influential in Canada, UK and Australia. On the latter ‘charity’  i.e. IPA Institute of Public Affairs Australia, both US Bradley & Olin Foundations had been funders in the ‘80s and ‘90s, while a key funder now is mining magnate & heiress Gina Rhinehart.

Further, in the UK journalists have researched similar links centred near and around Tufton St. think tanks influencing Conservative Party policies and behind Brexit, including Taxpayers’ Alliance, IEA Institute of Economics Affairs, Global Warming Policy Foundation or Net Zero Watch, Policy Exchange etc. and a ‘Tanton Network’ anti-immigrant NGO Migration Watch. The ByLine Times published an article several years ago describing ‘Brexit & Climate Science Denial: The Tufton Street Network’ (2019)

Following are key excerpts from an excellent DeSmog article outlining not just Kochs, but the invisible donors in the background: 

‘Beyond Koch: Meet the Other Right-Wing Oligarchs Featured in Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money”’

By Steve Horn on Jan 21, 2016 @ 03:58 PST

The shenanigans of the “Kochtopus” have garnered most of the headlines — including here — pertaining to reviews of New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer’s new book, Dark Money.

But the Koch Brothers and Koch Industries’ right-wing family foundation network are far from the only big money influencers featured in the must-read book which has jumped to #4 on the Best Sellers list at Amazon.com.

Enter the Scaife, Olin and Bradley family fortunes, all three of which have served as key nodes through which the right-wing have tried to reshape the public policy landscape within (and beyond) the U.S. in the years following the Cold War until present day. If those family names sound familiar to DeSmog readers, they should: we have a profile in our database for Scaife and have written fairly extensively about Olin and Bradley…..

Scaife, “League to Save Carthage” and ALEC

In 1964, Richard Scaife — namesake of the Scaife Family Foundations, whose money came largely from the Gulf Oil fortune — helped create a group called the League to Save Carthage, harkening back to the city conquered and colonized by the Roman Empire now situated as a suburb of Tunis, Tunisia. 

“This little-heralded group was just the first small step in what would become an improbably successful effort by one of the richest men in the country, along with a few other extraordinarily wealthy conservative benefactors, to cast themselves as field generals…in a strategic war of ideas aimed at sacking American politics,” Mayer wrote. 

Eventually, the Scaifes would call one tentacle of their Scaife Family Foundations the Carthage Foundation. But its origins in the League to Save Carthage are crucial if, for no other reason, than how one of its members, Lewis Powell, became a future U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

Before joining the Supreme Court bench, Powell penned the so-called Powell Memo which, at the time, was marked confidential. Written on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and officially titled, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” Powell’s treatise called for Big Business to pour money into universities, the media, think-tanks, the conventional political apparatus and other key institutions as a means to fend off what Powell described as the ongoing onslaught against the free enterprise system.

Among other key pieces of political infrastructure funded by Scaife, he was one of the first major foundation funders of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Mayer cites a historical letter by ALEC founder Paul Weyrich’s aide in her book, in which the aide thanks Scaife for his support of the corporate bill mill for the statehouses.

“ALEC is well on its way to fulfilling the dream of those who started the organization thanks wholly to your confidence and the tremendous generosity of the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts,” wrote the aide in 1976, a few years after ALEC got off the ground in 1973, according to the letter cited by Mayer. 

Olin & Law and Economics

Another influential family fortune featured in “Dark Money” is that of the Olins and in particular John M. Olin.

Jaded by his experience as a student at Cornell University, Olin believed universities served as brainwashing centers for liberals and the Left. So, Olin made it his life mission to spread conservative ideology onto U.S. college campuses.

Like Scaife and Gulf Oil, Olin made his bucks in part from the fossil fuel industry via the Olin Corporation, which manufactured blasting powder for coal mining companies. Olin Corporation found itself embroiled in a DDT production pollution scandal in the 1970’s, culminating in the federal government forcing the company to shut down its DDT unit.

In documenting several other environmental catastrophes that Olin Corporation perpetrated, Mayer suggests that the regulatory crackdown that occurred due to these incidents may have influenced the self-interested anti-regulatory posture taken by Olin and the foundation he created, , from a business point of view. Former Olin officials denied to Mayer this was the case.

Olin would move to endow the still-influential “Law and Economics” curriculum in law schools nationwide, which calls for a system of jurisprudence in which judges and lawyers incorporate free market economic analysis into their legal decisions and arguments.

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

Though covered in less depth than other families, the Bradley Foundation also earned a section in “Dark Money.” Just as Olin Foundation shuttered its operations, its Executive Director, Michael Joyce, was hired by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which had enjoyed a huge financial boost resulting from a corporate merger that catapulted the Bradley Foundation into the top 20 largest foundations in the U.S. 

The foundation also gives big donations to a fellow midwest-headquartered climate change denial organization: the Chicago-based Heartland Institute. 

Harry Bradley, was one of the founding members of the John Birch Society alongside the Koch Brothers’ father, Fred Koch. According to a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel investigation, between 2001 and 2009 the Bradley Foundation “doled out nearly as much money as the seven Koch and Scaife foundations combined.”

A recently published paper titled “The Koch Effect”, by Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol and Harvard government and social policy PhD student Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, describes the impact these family foundations, and in the case of their paper, the Kochs in particular have had on public policy in the U.S.

“In a disciplined way, the Koch network operates as a force field to the right of the Republican Party, exerting a strong gravitational pull on many GOP candidates and officeholders,” they wrote. “The overall effect is to re-set the range of issues and policy alternatives to which candidates and officeholders are responsive.”

Another case in point: the Kochs formerly funded (and some of its executives served on the Board of Trustees of) the Democratic Leadership Council, a think-tank and advocacy group pinpointed as pushing the Democratic Party rightward under President Bill Clinton.

Clinton formerly served as chairman of the DLC, and those who agree with the DLC‘s free market ideology, such as President Barack Obama, now call themselves New Democrats.

If anything, this rightward “force field” created by the influence of big money, serves as the genius and long-lasting impact of the Koch-Scaife-Olin-Bradley oligarch network’s donations and advocacy.’

For more related blogs and articles on Economics, Environment, Koch Network, Libertarian Economics, Political Strategy and Tanton Network, click through

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

James Buchanan – Economist – Koch Influencer – Radical Right Libertarian – Anglo Conservatives

Anglosphere – Radical Right Libertarian Socioeconomics and Authoritarianism

Brexit, Conservatives, Nativism, Libertarian Strategy, Single Market and the European Union

Anglosphere Nativist Libertarian Social Economic Policies or Return of Eugenics?

Anglosphere Nativist Libertarian Social Economic Policies or Return of Eugenics?

In the past decade we have witnessed a political shift to the nativist and libertarian right in the Anglosphere, but described as ‘conservative’, appealing to the important above median age voter, less educated, more socially conservative, obedient and monocultural, but e.g. in UK leading to austerity measures?

Most of these ideas come from the classical or liberal economists of the past including Calvin, Smith, Ricardo et al. and also includes old eugenics based ideas of dour Christian men like Malthus on population, Galton on social Darwinism or eugenics, and worse, Madison Grant in the US who influenced Hitler.

What we observe now are attempts to implement these restrictive and regressive policies by ‘conservative’ parties, but it’s very chaotic, and destructive to parties e.g. hollowing out with fewer informed members.  However, their policies are mostly unpalatable to thinking citizens e.g. Brexit, Trump, pro fossil fuels, anti climate science, demands for significant cuts to government spending with tax cuts for the 1-10%, ongoing attacks on ‘elites’, ‘wokeness’, women, minorities, education and science for a disempowered society.

This reflects influence of Koch Network ‘radical right libertarian’ Atlas think tanks which are now global but especially influential in the US, Tufton Street UK e.g. IEA Institute of Economic Affairs and equivalents IPA (founding partner was Murdoch’s father) and CIS in Australia, with opaque funding sources and donors. These think tanks actually do more PR or lobbying of policies versus informed research and seem to run protection for media oligopolies themselves, right wing governments, fossil fuels and big (global) business; with a clear crossover to John Tanton Network white nativism or eugenics, masquerading as environmental ‘hygiene’ round refugees, immigrants, population growth, minorities and the ‘great replacement’.

Now pro bono UK trade advisor and former Australian LNP conservative PM Tony Abbott, was given suggestions by the Koch linked think tank IPA in Melbourne, for a potential new government in 2012.  In fact seventy five suggestions, below the article excerpts, give a clear indication of antipathy towards government, taxes, budgets, public spending, social security, health care, climate measures, environmental management etc.

Any informed media and journalists need to be aware as they may challenge MPs, think tankers etc. but with neither deep insight nor analysis of causes, does not inform anyone? 

If one uses an Australianism, that’s just ‘too easy’ and comfortable while retaining access to decision makers, with the latter given too much unearned respect for old ideas masquerading as moden policies.

Be Like Gough: 75 Radical Ideas To Transform Australia

Written by John Roskam, Chris Berg and James Paterson

5 August 2012

If Tony Abbott wants to leave a lasting impact – and secure his place in history – he needs to take his inspiration from Australia’s most left-wing prime minister.

No prime minister changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam. The key is that he did it in less than three years. In a flurry of frantic activity, Whitlam established universal healthcare, effectively nationalised higher education with free tuition, and massively increased public sector salaries. He more than doubled the size of cabinet from 12 ministers to 27.

He enacted an ambitious cultural agenda that continues to shape Australia to this day. In just three years, Australia was given a new national anthem, ditched the British honours system, and abolished the death penalty and national service. He was the first Australian prime minister to visit communist China and he granted independence to Papua New Guinea. Whitlam also passed the Racial Discrimination Act. He introduced no-fault divorce.

Perhaps his most lasting legacy has been the increase in the size of government he bequeathed to Australia. When Whitlam took office in 1972, government spending as a percentage of GDP was just 19 per cent. When he left office it had soared to almost 24 per cent.

Virtually none of Whitlam’s signature reforms were repealed by the Fraser government. The size of the federal government never fell back to what it was before Whitlam. Medicare remains. The Racial Discrimination Act – rightly described by the Liberal Senator Ivor Greenwood in 1975 as ‘repugnant to the rule of law and to freedom of speech’ – remains.

It wasn’t as if this was because they were uncontroversial. The Liberal opposition bitterly fought many of Whitlam’s proposals. And it wasn’t as if the Fraser government lacked a mandate or a majority to repeal them. After the 1975 election, in which he earned a 7.4 per cent two-party preferred swing, Fraser held 91 seats out of 127 in the House of Representatives and a Senate majority.

When Mark Steyn visited Australia recently he described political culture as a pendulum. Left-wing governments swing the pendulum to the left. Right of centre governments swing the pendulum to the right. But left-wing governments do so with greater force. The pendulum always pushes further left.

And the public’s bias towards the status quo has a habit of making even the most radical policy (like Medicare, or restrictions on freedom of speech) seem normal over time. Despite the many obvious problems of socialised health care, no government now would challenge the foundations of Medicare as the Coalition did before it was implemented.

Every single opinion poll says that Tony Abbott will be Australia’s next prime minister. He might not even have to wait until the current term of parliament expires in late 2013. The Gillard government threatens to collapse at any moment. Abbott could well be in the Lodge before Christmas this year.

Abbott could also have a Fraser-esque majority after the next election. Even if he doesn’t control the Senate, the new prime minister is likely to have an intimidating mandate from the Australian people. The conditions will suit a reformer: although Australia’s economy has proven remarkably resilient, global events demonstrate how fragile it is. The global financial crisis, far from proving to be a crisis of capitalism, has instead demonstrated the limits of the state. Europe’s bloated and debt-ridden governments provide ample evidence of the dangers of big government.

Australia’s ageing population means the generous welfare safety net provided to current generations will be simply unsustainable in the future. As the Intergenerational Report produced by the federal Treasury shows, there were 7.5 workers in the economy for every non-worker aged over 65 in 1970. In 2010 that figure was 5. In 2050 it will be 2.7. Government spending that might have made sense in 1970 would cripple the economy in 2050. Change is inevitable.

But if Abbott is going to lead that change he only has a tiny window of opportunity to do so. If he hasn’t changed Australia in his first year as prime minister, he probably never will.

Why just one year? Whitlam’s vigour in government came as a shock to Australian politics. The Coalition was adjusting to the opposition benches. Outside of parliament, the potential opponents of Whitlam reforms had yet to get organised. The general goodwill voters offer new governments gives more than enough cover for radical action. But that cover is only temporary. The support of voters drains. Oppositions organise. Scandals accumulate. The clear air for major reform becomes smoggy.

Worse, governments acclimatise to being in government. A government is full of energy in its first year. By the second year, even very promising ministers can get lazy. The business of government overtakes. MPs start thinking of the next election. But for the Coalition, the purpose of winning office cannot be merely to attain the status of being ‘in government’. It must be to make Australians freer and more prosperous. From his social democratic perspective, Whitlam understood this point well. Labor in the 1970s knew that it wanted to reshape the country and it began doing so immediately.

The time pressure on a new government – if it is to successfully implant its vision – is immense. The vast Commonwealth bureaucracies and the polished and politically-savvy senior public servants have their own agendas, their own list of priorities, and the skill to ensure those priorities become their ministers’ priorities. The recent experience of the state Coalition governments is instructive. Fresh-faced ministers who do not have a fixed idea of what they want to do with their new power are invariably captured by their departments.

Take, for instance, the Gillard government’s National Curriculum. Opposing this policy ought to be a matter of faith for state Liberals. The National Curriculum centralises education power in Canberra, and will push a distinctly left-wing view of the world onto all Australian students. But it has been met with acceptance – even support – by the Coalition’s state education ministers. This is because a single National Curriculum has been an article of faith within the education bureaucracy for decades; an obsession of education unions and academics, who want education to ‘shape’ Australia’s future. (No prize for guessing what that shape might look like.) A small-target election strategy has the unfortunate side-effect of allowing ministerial aspirants to avoid thinking too deeply about major areas in their portfolio.

So when, in the first week as minister, they are presented with a list of policy priorities by their department, it is easier to accept what the bureaucracy considers important, rather than what is right. The only way to avoid such departmental capture is to have a clear idea of what to do with government once you have it.

Only radical change that shifts the entire political spectrum, like Gough Whitlam did, has any chance of effecting lasting change. Of course, you don’t have to be from the left of politics to leave lasting change on the political spectrum.

Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan proved conservatives can leave a paradigm-shifting legacy. Though Thatcher’s own party strayed from her strongly free-market philosophy, one of the major reasons the British Labour Party finally removed socialism from their party platform under Tony Blair was because of Margaret Thatcher.

Ronald Reagan not only presided over pro-market deregulation and tax cuts during eight years in the White House, but also provided the ideological fuel for the 1994 Republican revolution in the House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich, which enacted far-reaching welfare reform.

Here we provide a list of 75 policies that would make Australia richer and more free. It’s a deliberately radical list. There’s no way Tony Abbott could implement all of them, or even a majority. But he doesn’t have to implement them all to dramatically change Australia. If he was able to implement just a handful of these recommendations, Abbott would be a transformative figure in Australian political history. He would do more to shift the political spectrum than any prime minister since Whitlam.

We do not mean for this list to be exhaustive, and in many ways no list could do justice to the challenges the Abbott government would face. Whitlam changed the political culture. We are still feeling the consequences of that change today. So the policies we suggest adopting, the bureaucracies we suggest abolishing, the laws we suggest revoking should be seen as symptoms, rather than the source, of the problem.

Conservative governments have a very narrow idea of what the ‘culture wars’ consists of.  The culture of government that threatens our liberty is not just ensconced in the ABC studios, or among a group of well-connected and publicly funded academics. ABC bias is not the only problem. It is the spiralling expansion of bureaucracies and regulators that is the real problem.

We should be more concerned about the Australian National Preventive Health Agency – a new Commonwealth bureaucracy dedicated to lobbying other arms of government to introduce Nanny State measures – than about bias at the ABC. We should be more concerned about the cottage industry of consultancies and grants handed out by the public service to environmental groups. We should be more concerned that senior public servants shape policy more than elected politicians do. And conservative governments should be more concerned than they are at the growth of the state’s interest in every aspect of society.

If he wins government, Abbott faces a clear choice. He could simply overturn one or two symbolic Gillard-era policies like the carbon tax, and govern moderately. He would not offend any interest groups. In doing so, he’d probably secure a couple of terms in office for himself and the Liberal Party. But would this be a successful government? We don’t believe so. The remorseless drift to bigger government and less freedom would not halt, and it would resume with vigour when the Coalition eventually loses office. We hope he grasps the opportunity to fundamentally reshape the political culture and stem the assault on individual liberty.

1 Repeal the carbon tax, and don’t replace it. It will be one thing to remove the burden of the carbon tax from the Australian economy. But if it is just replaced by another costly scheme, most of the benefits will be undone.

2 Abolish the Department of Climate Change

3 Abolish the Clean Energy Fund

4 Repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act

5 Abandon Australia’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council

6 Repeal the renewable energy target

7 Return income taxing powers to the states

8 Abolish the Commonwealth Grants Commission

9 Abolish the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

10 Withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol

11 Introduce fee competition to Australian universities

12 Repeal the National Curriculum

13 Introduce competing private secondary school curriculums

14 Abolish the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)

15 Eliminate laws that require radio and television broadcasters to be ‘balanced’

16 Abolish television spectrum licensing and devolve spectrum management to the common law

17 End local content requirements for Australian television stations

18 Eliminate family tax benefits

19 Abandon the paid parental leave scheme

20 Means-test Medicare

21 End all corporate welfare and subsidies by closing the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education

22 Introduce voluntary voting

23 End mandatory disclosures on political donations

24 End media blackout in final days of election campaigns

25 End public funding to political parties

26 Remove anti-dumping laws

27 Eliminate media ownership restrictions

28 Abolish the Foreign Investment Review Board

29 Eliminate the National Preventative Health Agency

30 Cease subsidising the car industry

31 Formalise a one-in, one-out approach to regulatory reduction

32 Rule out federal funding for 2018 Commonwealth Games

33 Deregulate the parallel importation of books

34 End preferences for Industry Super Funds in workplace relations laws

35 Legislate a cap on government spending and tax as a percentage of GDP

36 Legislate a balanced budget amendment which strictly limits the size of budget deficits and the period the federal government can be in deficit

37 Force government agencies to put all of their spending online in a searchable database

38 Repeal plain packaging for cigarettes and rule it out for all other products, including alcohol and fast food

39 Reintroduce voluntary student unionism at universities

40 Introduce a voucher scheme for secondary schools

41 Repeal the alcopops tax

42 Introduce a special economic zone in the north of Australia including:

a) Lower personal income tax for residents

b) Significantly expanded 457 Visa programs for workers

c) Encourage the construction of dams

43 Repeal the mining tax

44 Devolve environmental approvals for major projects to the states

45 Introduce a single rate of income tax with a generous tax-free threshold

46 Cut company tax to an internationally competitive rate of 25 per cent

47 Cease funding the Australia Network

48 Privatise Australia Post

49 Privatise Medibank

50 Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function

51 Privatise SBS

52 Reduce the size of the public service from current levels of more than 260,000 to at least the 2001 low of 212,784

53 Repeal the Fair Work Act

54 Allow individuals and employers to negotiate directly terms of employment that suit them

55 Encourage independent contracting by overturning new regulations designed to punish contractors

56 Abolish the Baby Bonus

57 Abolish the First Home Owners’ Grant

58 Allow the Northern Territory to become a state

59 Halve the size of the Coalition front bench from 32 to 16

60 Remove all remaining tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade

61 Slash top public servant salaries to much lower international standards, like in the United States

62 End all public subsidies to sport and the arts

63 Privatise the Australian Institute of Sport

64 End all hidden protectionist measures, such as preferences for local manufacturers in government tendering

65 Abolish the Office for Film and Literature Classification

66 Rule out any government-supported or mandated internet censorship

67 Means test tertiary student loans

68 Allow people to opt out of superannuation in exchange for promising to forgo any government income support in retirement

69 Immediately halt construction of the National Broadband Network and privatise any sections that have already been built

70 End all government funded Nanny State advertising

71 Reject proposals for compulsory food and alcohol labelling

72 Privatise the CSIRO

73 Defund Harmony Day

74 Close the Office for Youth

75 Privatise the Snowy-Hydro Scheme

For more related blog and articles on Australian Politics, Climate Change, Conservative, Economics, Fossil Fuel Pollution, Global Trade, Libertarian Economics, Media, Political Strategy, Radical Right Libertarian, Science Literacy, Taxation and WTO click through here and below:

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

BBC: 55 Tufton Street London – Libertarian Think Tanks – Koch Network

Libertarian Nativist Lobbying Against EV Electric Vehicles in Support of Fossil Fuels

Immigration Restriction – Population Control – Tanton Network

Rishi Sunak and US Radical Right Libertarians in UK – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

Russian Dark Money – Influencing British Politics, the Conservative Party, the GOP and European Right

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists