Friday, 30 November 2018

A not so new lobbyist on the block - just tired, old Lib-Nats supporters in a poor disguise



www.advanceaustralia.org.au

ABC News, 21 November 2018:

Australia has a new conservative lobby group that wants to knock on your door, get in your ear and ultimately swing your vote.

Advance Australia's named with a nod to our anthem and the hope it can rival the powerful left-wing lobby Get Up!

It has some prominent backers and a bold mission — but can it succeed?

The group's financially and ideologically backed by a group of prominent business leaders including storage king Sam Kennard, businessman and former ABC chairman Maurice Newman and the Australian Jewish Association's Dr David Adler.

Its national director is Gerard Benedet, who was the chief of staff to former Queensland LNP Treasurer Tim Nicholls in a previous life.

"We're not aligned to any political party," he told 7.30.

"We're an independent movement of mainstream Australians, who are determined to protect, advance and defend mainstream values and freedoms."

Get Up! National Director Paul Oosting says that's rubbish.

"Advance Australia is a group of rich white men on a campaign to make themselves richer," he said.

"They want to work on issues that are in their own self-interest, that are the vested interests of the corporate lobby they represent."

The Monthly, 26 November 2018:

The quest for a right-wing opponent to GetUp has been going on for almost as long as the quest for a right-wing Phillip Adams at the ABC – and with about as much success.

The latest wizard wheeze come from a stratospherically elite clique of rich, bored men looking for a hobby. It includes men like Maurice Newman, who preaches that climate science is a fraudulent conspiracy ensuring the establishment of a totalitarian socialist dictatorship under the United Nations, and James Power, currently fighting to prevent women from becoming members of Brisbane’s Tattersall’s Club.

After diligent market research, they have settled on the unoriginal name of Advance Australia, which is not only plagiarism but deeply misleading – the only way they want Australia to advance is either jogging on the spot, or, preferably, stumbling backwards.

They claim to be protecting mainstream Australian values, but just about the only ones they have come up with thus far are maintaining superannuation tax lurks for the rich, keeping tax deductions for those who have not paid tax in the first place, and not moving Australia Day from January 26. To date, mainstream Australia has resisted the urge to storm the barricades on their behalf.

The organisation’s oligarchs are predicting that they will have a million members in time for the federal election, but are coy about how they plan to recruit these hordes.

Perhaps they are assuming that sheer weight of money, of which they have plenty, will suffice, much in the way that Malcolm Turnbull bought his Wentworth preselection and, before then, Kerry Packer bought Australian cricket.

But mass campaigning does not work that way; buying up a rent-a-crowd is hardly likely to move swinging voters. You need a grassroots movement of enthusiasts and idealists, and for that you need not a top-heavy pyramid, but a bottom-up structure based on volunteers – like GetUp.

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