The Enviromental Defenders Office’s foreign funders are undermining Australia’s economy

The Environmental Defenders Office is using foreign funding to harm Australia’s economy, undermine Indigenous communities, and pursue controversial green agendas.

The Environmental Defenders Office is engaged in a sophisticated and foreign funded campaign to severely damage Australia’s economy, divert tens of billions of dollars of investment away from our country, and destroy tens of thousands of our blue-collar jobs, says Saul Kavonic.

The Environmental Defenders Office is engaged in a sophisticated and foreign-funded campaign to severely damage Australia’s economy, divert tens of billions of dollars of investment away from our country, and destroy tens of thousands of our blue-collar jobs.

Worse, they have burdened Indigenous people across the country and undermined Indigenous communities in furtherance of their ulterior environmental agenda. They have confected evidence, had their clients lied to, and distorted Indigenous culture, according to the Federal Court. The EDO’s activities amount to economic terrorism according to Senator Susan McDonald.

Who is funding this assault against our economy and Indigenous communities?

Foreign organisations fund much of the EDO’s work, with limited transparency regarding their identity, agenda or motives. This presents a national security risk in addition to an economic one. Competing commercial interests, or hostile foreign actors, could be deliberately trying to harm our economy. There is precedent for having real concerns. For example, NATO and the US have warned for a decade that Russia has funded environmental organisations in Europe and the US with the aim of jeopardising their energy security and leaving them more dependent on Russia. While there is no indication such a hostile actor is funding the EDO, there isn’t enough transparency over the funding sources of such organisations to really know.

Twenty-eight per cent of the EDO’s budget in 2023 came from overseas sources, according to the EDO’s FY23 report. Foreign funding may well be even higher given much of the rest of the funding the EDO receives may originate from overseas and just be ‘re-granted’ via an Australian organisation with little transparency.

The EDO highlights funding from nine organisations that remain anonymous. Why would they want their identity kept secret, and might they have ulterior motives?

Senator David Pocock. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Some of the foreign funders that can be identified raise reason for concern. The US-based Oceans 5 funds the EDO as part of a campaign explicitly aimed at “ultimately stopping … altogether” one of Australia’s largest export earners – our offshore oil and gas sector.

The Danish KR Foundation funds the EDO while also funding Frontrunners, a charity co-founded by Australian Senator David Pocock and run by his wife.

Senator Pocock advocates for policy that would be damaging to Australia’s oil and gas sector, while his wife’s charity receives funding from a foreign organisation with an agenda against Australia’s oil and gas sector.

One wouldn’t dream of suggesting the senator has a conflict of interest here; just as the Prime Minister couldn’t possibly be conflicted by receiving flight upgrades from Qantas while also regulating them.

The colourful mix of other foreign funders of the EDO includes the US Waverley Street Foundation linked to Steve Jobs’ widow, the US Dropbox Foundation (who appear to pay more in fees to their directors than they give away in grants), the US Patagonia Fund linked to the clothing brand of the same name, the European Climate Foundation and the Rainforest Foundation of Norway.

One wonders why such American and European organisations can’t focus on their own oil and gas industry at home, rather than come hurt our industry here in Australia.

In Australia, the EDO is funded by Boundless Earth, the charity of Mike Cannon-Brookes. The EDO’s campaigns just happen to restrict gas supply and drive up our energy prices that may benefit Cannon-Brookes’ commercial interest in AGL.

The EDO is also funded by the Bob Brown Foundation, which is linked to the former Greens leader, and the Graeme Wood Foundation, founded by Graeme Wood who also funds the Guardian.

Tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes. Picture: Getty Images/AFP

Of course, many of the EDO’s funders may have good – even if perhaps misguided – intentions to help the environment, and be quite unaware of the unscrupulous tactics the EDO would deploy with their donations. One suspects they may be reconsidering the allocation of their funds following the Federal Court case that highlighted the EDO’s appalling behaviour (and that may leave a lot of their funds flowing to Santos to cover the court’s costs award).

The most disturbing source of funds for the EDO that is publicly known about are the funds that come from the Australian government itself under Labor, who are fully aware of the EDOs behaviour.

Beholden to radical green factions, Labor are funding activist litigation against the government’s own regulators. They have funded the distortion and abuse of the sacred Indigenous connection to country. They are funding an organisation whose anti-fossil fuel ideological ends have seen them engage in unsavoury means, including misrepresenting Indigenous culture, increasing Australians’ energy costs, destroying Australian jobs, supporting those who trespass onto company executive’s private homes (it is reported the EDO provides legal support to an activist accused of doing so), and putting workers’ safety needlessly in danger as they wait in boats out at sea amid hazardous conditions caused by deliberate legal delays brought by the EDO.

Labor was supposed to choose the side of our jobs, our economy, and our Indigenous people. Instead, they have chosen to join sides with fringe green factions in support of a foreign- funded agenda aimed at hurting our country and our people.

Saul Kavonic is head of energy research at MST Marquee

Originally published as The Enviromental Defenders Office’s foreign funders are undermining Australia’s economy