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| 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.
