‘Copied the MAGA model’: The ‘grassroots’ lobby group funded by some of Australia’s richest

This story is part of the April 19 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

Advance has become a force on the far right, a lavishly resourced team of partisan political warriors, focused on destroying progressive opponents. Credit: Digital illustration by Ollie Towning

For two days in August 2023, amid the gloomy downlights and stain-disguising carpet of Sydney’s Star Casino, some of Australia’s biggest and boldest conservative thinkers gathered at CPAC Australia to save the free world.

A spin-off of the US-based CPAC – short for Conservative Political Action Conference – the Sydney-based outfit described itself as a “values-based” organisation that “espouses the best of Howard, Reagan and Thatcher while exploring new ideas and themes for the coming generations”. Guests at the August event included One Nation senator Pauline Hanson, Michelle Pearse, the CEO of the Australian Christian Lobby, and broadcaster and soon-to-be alleged sex offender, Alan Jones. Overseas talent included Jay Aeba, chairman of the Japanese Conservative Union and Heather Wilson, mother of six and co-founder of GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding network which has helped raise money for neo-Nazis and anti-vaxxers.

Despite the promise of “new ideas”, the conference’s themes were derived almost exclusively from intellectual and cultural prehistory, inevitably returning, in some form or another, to the neoliberal Holy Trinity of smaller government, lower taxes and property rights. The only concession to the 21st century was the word “woke”, which the attendees seemed to have only just discovered and which copped a predictable flogging.

Whatever else CPAC Australia is, it’s no place for shrinking violets. Events like these are sponsored by wealthy benefactors, but their animating forces are ego and grievance. But one speaker stood out for his humility. His name was Matthew Sheahan, and he was the executive director of a right-wing organisation called Advance. Speaking haltingly from notes and with a slight lisp, Sheahan described Advance as an “independent grassroots movement, not affiliated or connected to any political party”.

The group’s mission, he said, was “to fight for principles and policies that promote freedom, security and prosperity”, and, in doing so, put the interests of everyday Australians “front and centre of the national debate”.

Advance’s Matthew Sheahan: ‘We are happy to go underestimated.’Credit: AAPIMAGE

Sheahan described how, since its launch in 2018, Advance had built, from the ground up, a sophisticated, permanent campaign infrastructure comprising communications strategists, digital platforms and field operations, together with a supporter base of some 275,000 people. The organisation didn’t depend on big corporations or business, Sheahan said, but an army of 23,000 ordinary Australians giving “grassroots contributions”. The immediate goal, he stated, was to defeat the Voice to Parliament, but there were “many battles ahead”. He added “we need people committed to the cause, who will go all the way to the end, to win”.

There was much of Sheahan’s speech that was patently false, beginning with the bit about not being connected to any political party. Advance’s leadership has always been largely composed of former Liberal Party operatives and retired Liberal Party MPs. The group would, just months later, receive $500,000 from the Cormack Foundation, an investment fund established by the Liberal Party of Victoria, and had as a member of its advisory board one Tony Abbott, best known as a former Liberal prime minister of Australia.

The idea that it grew out of nowhere from “grassroots contributions” is also laughable, given the bulk of its declared funding comes from a handful of Australia’s richest people, including winemakers, investment bankers and at least one billionaire coal baron.

But Sheahan’s description of his group’s campaign apparatus was certainly accurate. Advance has indeed become a formidable force on the far right, a lavishly resourced team of partisan political warriors, monomaniacally focused on destroying their progressive opponents, whether they be Labor, the Greens, teals, moderate Liberals, left-leaning academics, the ABC or climate-change activists.

Then, as now, the group’s tactics – satirical superheroes, racist attack ads – are often derided as stunts. But Advance is inured to ridicule. Indeed, it’s a force multiplier for them, distracting from the organisation’s energy, ambition and capacity to influence debate.

“The media tend to think we are some fringe group, and that suits us just fine,” as Sheahan put it in his CPAC Australia address. “We are happy to go underestimated.”

Copying the MAGA model

Advance, the word, denotes going forward; but Advance, the group, seems committed to going backwards. It’s all about returning – returning, for example, to mainstream values and “common sense”; returning to a Judeo-Christian consensus, to a time before gender politics and turmeric lattes. And importantly, to a time before political advocacy group GetUp!

Launched in 2005, GetUp! became best known for its campaigns on progressive issues, catalysing community activism around the internet, then still a relatively optimistic space. For a long time, conservatives attempted to do a similar thing but failed to move the masses.

Then, in 2018, investment banker and long-time climate conspiracist Maurice Newman, billionaire storage king Sam Kennard, and David Adler, of the far-right Australian Jewish Association, got together to form Advance Australia. Money was no problem: hedge fund manager and Liberal Party donor Simon Fenwick tipped in $190,000; a further $400,000 came from Sydney establishment couple Rodney and Judith O’Neil, and the Taylor winemaking family.

Advance pitched itself as a champion of the silent majority – Howard’s battlers 2.0. But its real concerns were better expressed by another early backer, hotelier James Power, who was then engaged in a battle to prevent women from becoming members of Brisbane’s Tattersall’s Club. As journalist Mungo MacCallum said at the time, this was “a stratospherically elite clique of rich, bored men looking for a hobby”.

Advance’s initial forays – a push to scrap compulsory superannuation (a long-time goal of big business) and protecting franking credits, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy – sank without trace. Advance then set its sights on the 2019 federal election, producing short videos featuring a bright orange mascot called Captain GetUp! The campaign was monumentally ill conceived: a clip of Captain GetUp! humping a poster of independent Zali Steggall, then running against Tony Abbott, had to be withdrawn. (Steggall won and Captain GetUp! was retired.)

Other initiatives were similarly ham-fisted. In 2020, Advance was caught targeting primary-school children with classroom resources designed to counter what it called the “climate-change hoax”. NSW banned the material. Victoria’s then education minister James Merlino said most principals would “put this rubbish where it belongs – in the bin”.

By early 2022, the group had taken on two strategic advisories. The first was Dunham + Company, a faith-based public relations outfit headquartered in Texas, whose clients include fundamentalist churches and pro-life organisations. The other was Whitestone Strategic, a Sydney firm headed by ex-Liberal staffer, Stephen Doyle, which describes itself as “Australia’s conservative campaign consultancy”.

Despite this, Advance’s tactics didn’t initially change. In the 2022 federal election, it again relied on stunts, most noticeably its billboard trucks, one of which depicted David Pocock, then running as an independent for the ACT Senate, as an undercover Greens candidate. The billboards, which featured a digitally altered Pocock ripping open his shirt to reveal the Greens logo underneath, were not only misleading (the Australian Electoral Commission ruled that Advance stop using them) but also stupid, since Pocock needed to appeal to Greens voters to win the seat. Which he did.

“Conservatives used to be hopeless at campaigning effectively in the social media era,” says Ed Coper, a digital communications expert who has worked in progressive politics, including for GetUp!. “In the ‘stunt’ age, you can get the attention of mainstream media pretty cheaply. But that doesn’t translate to social media, which requires a more integrated strategy that is loud, emotional and always ‘on’.”

Advance was floundering, but then, in 2023, came the Voice to Parliament. The Voice aimed to give First Nations peoples a constitutionally enshrined body to advise the Australian Parliament on matters affecting them. Both the Liberal Party and by extension, Advance, opposed it, but their tactics differed markedly. While the Liberals talked about the Voice being legally risky or bemoaned a “lack of detail”, Advance went for the jugular, unleashing a veritable firehose of disinformation.

Advance ran multiple campaigns opposing the Voice to Parliament.Credit: Ben Plant

Working across no fewer than seven social media channels, the group launched a slew of contradictory campaigns, including The Voice Is Not Enough, which claimed that the Voice would be powerless and short-change Indigenous people, and Fair Australia, which claimed the Voice went too far and was run by radical activists. There was also a handbook, One Together, not Two Divided, which warned that the Voice would divide Australians by race, and Christians for Equality, which claimed the Voice would “embed Indigenous spirituality” in the constitution. As the vote approached, Advance’s phone campaigners called thousands of households, suggesting that, among other things, the organisers behind the Voice wanted to abolish Australia Day.

According to Advance’s website, the referendum was “just the first step”: next would come a “treaty that will redistribute land, money and power to Indigenous activists”, a change to the Australian flag and national anthem, and even, perhaps, “the removal of every statue of Captain James Cook”. For confused voters, of which there were an increasing number, Advance ran Referendum News, a supposedly neutral online news source which just happened to publish exclusively negative content.

“They essentially copied the MAGA model,” says Coper, “which is, as Donald Trump’s ex-adviser Steven Bannon said, ‘to flood the zone with shit.’ ”

‘We’ve never seen a disinformation campaign on that scale in Australia.’

Ed Coper on the Voice vote

Advance was by no means alone, but its third-party status afforded it extraordinary latitude. As Stephen Doyle later boasted: “Some of the decisions we made, the Liberal Party would not have done in a million years.”

Advance’s messaging became openly racist: co-founder David Adler repeatedly questioned Yes advocate Stan Grant’s Aboriginality, even suggesting he had artificially darkened his skin. The group then ran a full-page advertisement in The Australian Financial Review depicting Indigenous man Thomas Mayo, a prominent “Yes” campaigner, as a boy wearing shorts and a hammer and sickle T-shirt, capering at the feet of a white man holding a wad of cash. Then NSW Liberal Party MP Matt Kean described it as “a throwback to the Jim Crow era of the Deep South”. (Nine Media, owner of the AFR and this masthead, later apologised.)

Ultimately, of course, the No vote prevailed. Depending on your politics, it was a low point for race relations or a victory for common sense. Either way, it was a signal moment for Australian democracy. “We’ve never seen a disinformation campaign on that scale in Australia,” says Coper. “For many Australians, it was the first time they experienced in their own feed what they had read about from afar in the US elections.”

As Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce put it: “There’s a new type of politics in Australia, and it’s a little bit Trumpian.”

Yes supporters react to the news that the referendum had been defeated.Credit: Wolter Peeters

Ties to American conservative think tanks

To the extent that it registered at all with the public, Advance appeared at first to be an anomaly. But it is perhaps best understood as one part of a much larger ecosystem, an international web of neoliberal think tanks centred around an American non-profit organisation called the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

Based in Arlington, Virginia, Atlas was founded in 1981 by British businessman Antony Fisher. Born into a wealthy mining family, Fisher attended Eton and Cambridge before serving as a fighter pilot during World War II. After the war, he considered entering politics, but was dissuaded by author FA Hayek, father of neoliberal economics, who urged him instead to engage in a “war of ideas” by targeting the intellectual class.

In 1955, Fisher established what is regarded as the world’s first free-market think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), in London. He then travelled widely, establishing or co-founding a number of what he called “IEA clones”, including the Fraser Institute in Canada, and the Manhattan Institute in New York.

Five years later, Fisher set up the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. As Fisher’s successor, Atlas president John Blundell, put it, the foundation’s mission was “to litter the world with free-market think tanks”. From the very beginning, this network was bankrolled largely by fossil fuel interests, including Shell, ExxonMobil and Rio Tinto, as well as tobacco companies Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds. The foundation now oversees some 600 affiliate organisations in 100 countries, seven of which are in Australia, including the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS).

Atlas claims to be a non-partisan organisation devoted to free enterprise and individual rights. “We have a record of supporting pro-liberty think tanks and civil society organisations for nearly half a century,” says Adam Weinberg, Atlas’ director of marketing and communications. “I’ve personally been involved in our team’s process of assisting local leaders who have founded a classical liberal think tank in Syria after the fall of Assad, and we have for many years supported courageous freedom advocates in Afghanistan, even after the return of the Taliban.”

But the foundation and its global network have for decades been accused of widespread climate denialism, seeding doubt wherever possible about the science of global warming, while at the same time crafting laws, running coordinated disinformation campaigns and taking legal action in a bid to promote fossil fuels.

The cover of an Advance e-book. Credit:

“Atlas is a transnational influence network, a front for fossil fuel corporations and their investors, among other multinational businesses,” says Dr Jeremy Walker, a senior lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, and author of More Heat than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy, and Economics. “Around the world, it and its affiliates have done everything in their power to defeat effective national climate policies and the UN climate treaty, and to stall the roll-out of clean energy, including promoting fake anti-renewable grassroots groups, all so they can keep oil, coal and gas on the grid for as long as possible. Advance is just another part of the same machine.”

Weinberg denies that Atlas has any connection to Advance. But given that Advance was founded by senior members of the IPA and CIS – both part of the Atlas network – his claim seems specious, to say the least.

He also asserts that Atlas has never provided the group with funding. But then it wouldn’t have to. Advance has always been good at raising its own money. From 2018 to 2024, the group collected more than $30 million. Advance co-founder Simon Fenwick, a retired fund manager who, together with his wife, has given Advance $2.3 million, has said that most of the organisation’s money comes from everyday Australians donating an average of $160. This is impossible to prove or disprove, since donations of less than $16,900 currently don’t need to be declared. (These funds are often referred to, in aggregate, as “dark money”.)

Sheahan, who declined to talk to Good Weekend, and Fenwick, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, both use these figures to make the case that Advance is fighting for mainstream Aussies against self-interested elites. According to investigative journalist Anthony Klan, however, it’s exactly the opposite. “Advance is a fake grassroots campaign run by fake ordinary Australians on behalf of extremely rich people.”

‘Advance are a bunch of billionaires who want to pursue their own interests while pretending to be the underdogs.’

Independent journalist Anthony Klan

Tall and scruffy, Klan, who is 45, spent 14 years at The Australian, where he won a Walkley Award for business journalism. He now publishes an independent online newspaper called The Klaxon, which he runs out of his garage in a rental house in Byron Bay. “I first became interested in Advance during the Voice referendum. I read one or two stories about them, but they were mostly in the shadows. So I began digging into it.”

For the past few years, Klan has been raking over data from the Australian Electoral Commission. He has now tabled every disclosed donation to Advance since 2018. “It’s pretty clear that most of Advance’s declared donations have come from a small number of extremely wealthy individuals, many of whom have deep ties to fossil fuels and mining,” he says.

These include the O’Neil family, who made their money mining blue metal, former coal baron and nuclear proponent Trevor St Baker, climate-change denier Bryant Macfie, and Lyn Brazil, who is a non-executive director of, and the largest single shareholder in, Aurelia Metals. Other donors included Marius Kloppers, former CEO of mining giant BHP Billiton, plus coal shipping companies, quarry operators, and chemical and machinery suppliers to the mining industry.

“Advance are a bunch of billionaires who want to pursue their own interests while pretending to be the underdogs,” says Klan. “We’ve seen what’s happened in the US when people get detached from facts.”

Advance anti-Greens campaigner (centre) at the Prahran by-election in February. The Liberals regained the seat.Credit:

War on the Greens

After its success with the Voice, Advance declared war on the Greens. In July 2024, they released their Greens Truth campaign, with the tag line “The Greens are not who they used to be”. “They are not about saving the trees,” says the press material. “They are not about caring for animals … They want to pull down our borders, defund our defence forces, increase taxes on working Australians and side with terrorists like Hamas.”

“The Greens are extremists,” Advance’s spokesperson, Sandra Bourke, tells me on the phone. They are driven by “ideology rather than facts”, she says, especially when it comes to renewables, which are being “recklessly rolled out” across regional Australia. Bourke believes Australians need to ask themselves “what is the best way forward for our energy policy, one that includes putting nuclear on the table as a clean and cheap, reliable source of power”.

Advance’s Sandra Bourke: “The Greens are extremists.”Credit:

Advance’s tactics have included roadside billboards claiming “Renewables cost the earth”, and an online attack on Net Zero called Not Zero. (“There is a cost to this madness, and it’s not zero.” ) But the group’s broader strategy was best summed up in a presentation Sheahan gave last year on Facebook, hosted by the Australian Jewish Association.

In the video, Sheahan is articulate and relaxed: no need for notes any more. He describes the Greens’ policies as “diabolical”, “anti-law and order”, and aimed at destroying the “fruits of the Judeo-Christian West”. They are also, he says, “antisemitic”. An important part of exposing them, then, is “to defend our Jewish brothers and sisters”.

Sheahan explains the rationale behind the “They’re not who they used to be” line. “This was the message that tested the best out of the research,” he says. “It gives the voter permission to say, ‘Well, I haven’t changed, they have. And I wasn’t stupid for voting for them because I didn’t know they weren’t who they used to be.’ ”

Advance had come up with some 258 ads that would be pushed out to what Sheahan describes as the most “persuadable” voters – women aged between 33 and 49. “We always want to tell the truth,” he insists. That said, “most people vote on how they feel, not what they know.” If Advance can get a suburban mum to feel that under the Greens her “kids will be encouraged to take hard drugs, and they’re not going to be safe, well, that moves votes”.

Advance would use the same sort of techniques they used during the Voice, geo-targeting voters using their propensity model scoring and databases. Advance only needs to reach a million of them, Sheahan says. “Our target market is so small … If we are going to spend money and get a message to a mum who is 35 in Adelaide and thinking of voting Greens in the next election, if we can get a message to her 16 times … That’s the sort of number that will change her mind.”

An Advance billboard campaigning against the Greens in the federal Melbourne seat of Macnamara.

More recently, Advance has broadened its attack to Labor and the teals. In the months leading up to the election, it has spent as much as $221,000 a week on advertising, mainly on Facebook and YouTube. It is also working with a number of small Jewish organisations, including two Queensland pop-ups, the Minority Impact Coalition and the Queensland Jewish Collective (QJC), and a Melbourne outfit called J-United.

Despite describing themselves as independent grassroots organisations, it has emerged that these groups have received advice and strategic assistance from Advance. The QJC’s billboards claiming that the Greens have “changed for the worse” certainly sound similar to Advance’s material, as do the group’s claims that the Greens support Hezbollah. In turn, Advance has promoted the QJC’s campaign material on its X account.

(Hava Mendelle, co-founder of the QJC and Minority Impact Coalition, denied the groups were part of any astroturfing by Advance but did concede that her wife, Roz, had met with Sheahan. J-United recently admitted that it works closely with Advance, which had supplied the group with strategic advice, as well as flyers, T-shirts, corflutes and money for catering.)

As with so much about Advance and its proxies, it’s hard to discern the means from the end. Do they really believe that climate activists are “commies”? Does Adam Bandt really want to sell ice to your 10-year-old? The group is rogue by nature. But this has wrong-footed even the Liberal Party, which veers from obsequiousness – as when Dutton publicly thanked Sheahan for his work on the No campaign – to disavowal, after Advance suggested, in early 2024, that immigrants in detention were “rapists, paedophiles and murderers”, and that Anthony Albanese had personally “unlocked the doors” and let them loose.

Doubtless Advance is driven, on the ground at least, by genuine conviction. Despite the fact the organisation could not put me in touch with a single supporter – not one out of 320,000 – it’s undeniable that many Australians are struggling, feel alienated by “woke” and grieve for conservative values. This clearly works for Advance, but at the end of the day, it’s immaterial. Advance is as much as anything a model, a collection of interchangeable memes. Labor are communists; refugees are rapists, the Greens want your son to wear a dress to school, and wind farms are coming for your franking credits.

Facts are optional. At one point in my conversation with the group’s spokesperson Sandra Bourke, we discussed Advance’s campaign against renewable energy. Advance posted this year on its social media that “offshore wind farms are killing whales, crabs and birds”.

The whale-murder trope has become common among anti-windfarmers worldwide. Indeed, the exact same messaging, often with identical graphics – cartoon whales speared by wind turbines, dead whales washed up on beaches – have been circulated by anti-windfarm groups from New Jersey to the Illawarra. But it’s false. While there is, in many cases, genuine concern among coastal communities about the effect of turbines, there is zero evidence that they kill whales.

Screenshot from an Advance social media campaign against offshore windfarms. Credit:

When I challenged Advance’s posts about whales and wind farms, Bourke told me, bizarrely, that she had never seen them. I told her it was on Advance’s website. She asked me to send her a screenshot and that she would then make a comment. I emailed her the material, but she never responded.

Flooding the zone

In 2021, shortly after he retired from his long-running show at 2GB radio, broadcaster Alan Jones launched Australian Digital Holdings, together with his old friend Maurice Newman and former town planner Jack Bulfin. ADH, which is run out of Sydney, features libertarian and conservative hosts, and streams for five hours a day, seven days a week. Its “partners” include Atlas member the IPA, and, of course, Advance. After billionaire James Packer invested in the network, ADH bought Channel 7 Tasmania and a host of other regional TV stations. It also entered into a commercial arrangement with the US far-right cable outlet, NewsMax.

In 2023, Jones waxed lovingly about then US presidential candidate Donald Trump, wondering “why there isn’t universal recognition that [he] is the hope of the Western world”.

Two years later, Trump has imposed blanket tariffs that have plunged the global economy into meltdown. Jones, meanwhile, is under arrest and no longer on NewsMax. But other presenters have taken his place. The zone continues to be flooded, every day, without relent, with “independent” news, louder, all the time, and everywhere at once.

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