Advance Australia are coming after me. They’ve publicly declared they are raising $5 million for the war chest to smash a few hand-picked Greens – and lucky me, I’m one of them!
You might remember Advance from the evil work they did on the ‘No’ campaign at the Voice referendum. They deliberately used racism and misinformation to sway the vote. In an ABC article it’s reported that they asked their volunteers to flat out lie to convince voters to tick ‘No’. They used fear and misinformation as a deliberate tactic. In fact it’s also reported Advance vollies were told, in their calls to voters, not to identify themselves as calling from the ‘No’ campaign. That’s very misleading and we all know how the referendum turned out.
Lobby groups should use all reasonable endeavours to satisfy themselves of the truth and accuracy of all material and information they use. It is undemocratic to knowingly lie and coerce for a political outcome.
Let me remind you who Advance Australia are. A conservative political lobbying group with Tony Abbott as a strategic cheerleader, launched in 2018 to counter progressive lobbying group GetUp. They believe climate change is a hoax. They hate Net Zero. They are big fans of the fossil fuel industry. Ironically they run a narrative about the ‘elites’ but receive funding from the rich and powerful and won’t say where that comes from. It’s the darkest Trumpian money in town. And it’s coming to destroy a democracy near you.
Inferring progressive lobby groups have anywhere near the clout of established lobby groups is just more lies and misinformation. Sadly, our democracy has long been dominated by the interests of lobby groups like The Australian Bankers Association, fossil fuel lobby groups like Minerals Council of Australia and the Australian Petroleum & Exploration Association. And then of course there are the big lobbying firms. We are talking billions of dollars defending industry’s right to continue making billions of dollars – regardless of the social or environmental cost.
Progressive lobby groups like GetUp give people a chance to speak to their values and concerns around issues and decision-making. They remind government that principled people are watching and they care about what and how decisions are made. Groups like Advance don’t like that. They believe it’s destroying freedom. Hmm. Define freedom? Freedom to extract? Freedom to exploit? Freedom to profiteer? I think I understand the ‘freedom’ they talk about and who it belongs to. Clearly not us.
There are already lots of hugely financed conservative lobby groups. So the only role it seems there is for Advance is to seed misinformation, fear and hatred. Stoke up the fires on a culture war. Just like in the US.
And they’re quite open about it. When it comes to their tactics ahead of the next election, Advance were quoted in the Saturday Paper this weekend saying, ‘we’ll use the same sort of techniques we used during the Voice [referendum], where we can geotarget messaging to predominantly target women between 33 and 49 who are persuadable, who do think Greens are doing the right thing about the environment, but don’t know anything else. We think we can persuade quite a lot of them’. Basically they intend to scare women and coerce them with misinformation. That’s perpetrator behaviour. And saying women ‘don’t know anything else’, infers women are stupid. It’s shocking to me that they’ve targeted women as vulnerable to their messaging. That they intend to scare and coerce us. Great. We are already being murdered at the rate of one woman every four days. Now Advance Australia are targeting us too.
Violence really is everywhere.
And who really is Advance? This group committed to misinforming and lying to women? Just a few scared old blokes hiding behind a curtain, holding hands with Tony Abbott, praying to have things the way they used to be. Just lingering dark shadows.
We need to bring them into the light.
Because they aren’t lobbying government. They are ‘lobbying’ us.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
