ATLAS - how a right-wing global network is building influence in Aotearoa

By Torfrida Orme, Pathway to Survival, 19 April 2024

Over the last six months it’s become so much clearer what we’re up against.   

Whether we’re fighting for Te Tiriti or against new coal mines, for tax reform and fair pay, to protect Te Taiao or even just to keep NZ’s stop-smoking programme on track – we all face the same well-funded and well-organised ideological opposition.     

As we plunge into fight-back, it’s worth spending some time to find out more about this opposition, why it seems to have appeared now and how it functions.   

There's been a flood of informed commentaries.   In this blog we summarise key points in some that we’ve found most helpful.   

We hope it’s a useful resource.  We welcome your feedback and debate in the comments section below.

“Trick or Treaty - indigenous rights, referendums and the Treaty of Waitangi”

Last December this 1News doco was the first that many of us had heard of the Atlas Network.  This short video is the single most important watch for every New Zealander.  

Mihingarangi Forbes interviews campaigners in Australia’s recent referendum that decided whether or not Aboriginal people should have an advisory Voice in parliament.  

The vote swung from an expected 75% Yes to a final national outcome of 60% saying No.  This swing was the direct result of an intense media campaign led by Advance Australia, generously funded by fossil fuel and mining corporations.  

Aboriginal campaigners warn the same will happen here if the Treaty referendum that ACT is pushing for goes ahead.  We have a government now that is rushing to open the doors to global corporations.  

The Fast Track Approvals Bill, the Treaty Principles Bill and the Treaty referendum are all aimed at removing constraints on the freedom of corporations to operate. 

Te Tiriti and a strong indigenous movement are Aotearoa’s key defence against this.

Advance Australia, which mounted that well-funded and openly racist disinformation  campaign, is a member of the Atlas Network, a global community of right-wing think-tanks.

No, Mr Seymour, Atlas is not a conspiracy fantasy - check Wikipedia

David Seymour jeered when Mihingarangi Forbes asked him about Atlas and he denied his easily-verifiable job stints at two Canadian Atlas-affiliated think tanks. 

This is interesting on two counts -

1. The Atlas Network of well-funded think tanks is not secret.  It’s all over Wikipedia and its members are prolific in the media, academia and government lobbies around the world - wherever money can buy influence over decisions.  

2. Yet as Max Harris and others point out, the libertarian philosophy they promote is not popular with the general public.  Austerity, public service cuts, climate denial, tobacco support, deregulation and open slather on Nature may benefit corporate investors but they are rarely welcomed by the average citizen.   

This is why, when the more extreme free-marketeers set up Atlas Network in the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s, they chose the form of a network of ostensibly independent and respectable “think tanks” - researchers, journalists, pundits.  

Their job was to sell / manipulate / drive through an unpopular ideology that nevertheless freed up the world for the deregulation and globalisation of production and markets.  

This is highly profitable project, especially for extractive and energy corporations, for whom it is well worth spending big money to influence governments to adopt their policies to achieve it.

The advocates of deregulation and globalisation often point to the flood of consumer goods and wealth that resulted from freeing up corporations to roam the world with no accountability to anyone other than their shareholders.   

Indeed many countries in the Global South did experience economic growth and some groups within them have become wealthy.  But as Jason Hickel shows in “The Divide”, the profits from globalisation were largely captured by the rich Global North countries.  

These nations used their control of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to force poorer countries into debt and require them to adopt policies of austerity and de-regulation that allow freer operation for global corporations whose profits mostly go back to the rich countries. 

As a result, income inequality between the rich countries of Europe and North America and the  poor ones of Africa, Asia, and South America continued to deepen since 1980.   

This is now exacerbated by the climate crisis which, as Hickel shows, is hitting the Global South disproportionately - shown for instance in the loss of usable farmland leading to mass migrations (eg Bangladesh, Pacific, South America, North Africa).

The continued global expansion of production and markets, which is inherent in any version of capitalism let alone the turbo-charged libertarian model, has for some time now also been slamming into physical planetary boundaries and the predicted Limits to Growth.  And is producing catastrophic global warming.   

 Rachel Donald has described our global predicament as “Heading towards the cliff in a driverless car” and advises “Shoot out the tyres!”.  

The current discussions about the Atlas Network’s role in driving this ideology certainly seem to get us a bit closer to locating the tyres.  

So let’s look at this network in more detail.  Here's a comprehensive backgrounder:

“The Atlas Network - big oil, climate disinformation and constitutional democracy” 

In this UTS Sydney webinar, a panel of researchers give a detailed and often chilling account of the think tanks and how they operate.  It’s long (2 hours) and fascinating.  

If you lack time, at least listen to Nancy McLean (34 mins in) - she has the most immediate warnings for Aotearoa on the tactics of this network.

 Jeremy Walker maps the links between big oil, neoliberal ideology and government climate policies, and gives the global history, operation and funding of this network.    

Nancy McLean researches the influence of the hyper-rich (eg Koch family) on democracy.  This influence now operates worldwide and increasingly includes disinformation and support for the alt-right.  Examples - Brexit, Bolsonaro’s election, support for Trump, pressure on governments worldwide to prevent regulation, workers’ rights, climate action or anything that constrains the freedom of private corporations.

Timmons Roberts (52 mins), a researcher on the politics of climate change, describes in detail the disinformation used by Atlas think tanks to defeat wind energy projects in US.  

 What’s happening in Aotearoa?

In a Guardian piece on the Atlas Network in January, George Monbiot described the following emergency decrees being rushed through by the new Argentinian president: 

“A crash programme of massive cuts; demolishing public services; privatising public assets; centralising political power; sacking civil servants; sweeping away constraints on corporations…; destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world; supporting landlords against tenants; criminalising peaceful protest; restricting the right to strike. Anything ring a bell?”

It rang a bell for NZ Fabian Society who in March held a public forum where Greg Presland and Max Harris looked at NZ’s new coalition government’s rush to:

• Cut public services. 

• Privatise public assets – private/public partnerships for motorways/school builds.

• Remove constraints on corporates that protect workers – fair pay agreements, 90-day trials. 

• Support landlords against tenants - no-cause evictions, landlord subsidy.

• Destroy protection of the living world – freshwater and RMA regulations, 3 Waters, transport policies, Ministerial power to fast track consents. 

• Reduce the power of Te Tiriti and Te Ao Maori - Treaty Principles Bill, te reo downgrade, abolition of Maori Health Authority.

• Stop NZ’s world-ranking smoking cessation programme.  

This last, bizarrely retro policy is less odd when one knows that libertarian think tanks have long worked for and been funded by the tobacco industry - in 2006 Monbiot noted the same academics who pushed climate change denial had also denied tobacco harm.

Greg maps the surge in funding for the three coalition partners before election 2023 and ACT’S links to the well-funded Taxpayers Union and the NZ Initiative think tank, both members of the Atlas Network.

Max warns against treating the Atlas Network as a conspiracy or shady cabal. 

As the PSA notes:  

“Atlas and its associates are open about their aims and influences. Its website and annual report show the network has a deliberate, organised approach to building and maintaining influence….  

A useful way of looking at the Atlas Network is as a guide to how right-wing interests build and maintain their influence and power.”  

Max maps the deregulated free market changes cemented into New Zealand society from the 1980s – tax cuts for the rich, privatising publicly owned assets, making government departments compete, unions weakened by Employment Contracts Act, the wealthiest whites appointed to positions of power, Public Finance Act requiring low public debt, the shift from universal benefits to means-testing and the punitive state.  

These “Rogernomics” policies were first introduced by Roger Douglas under a Labour government.  From then on the NZ Labour Party, like centre-left parties in UK, US and other Western nations, took up a softer variant of the neoliberal ideology than National and its associated parties.  

Over the past 40 years academics and the media have been used to justify this ideology. Gradually it has become the dominant mainstream narrative, so that now new cohorts of young people just assume There Is No Alternative to an economy focused on private profit, privatised public assets, competition and endless “economic growth”.   

And now what a clever triple act we have – Seymour bringing in the hard-right libertarian corporate global agenda, while Peters dog-whistles to the racists and Luxon bumbles around pretending that Nats don’t really want to do this but…

So what can we do?   It takes a network to defeat a network

There are things we can learn from this right-wing libertarian movement that will help us combat it.   Facing up to it can make us more deeply aware of our own values in contrast to theirs and make us reach out to our allies.  We can learn from their self-assured confidence in making the world in their own image, and it's useful to know they fear the light.  

Let’s grab these lessons and go forth….

• Shine a light on libertarian ideology - understand it, name it, publicise it

Libertarian ideas are deeply unpopular with most people.  Austerity, climate denial and ‘lets go to war’ are not concepts that easily sell themselves.   

It’s useful to know that Mr Seymour was rattled enough by Mihi’s questioning to tell such an easily discoverable lie about his past.  Calling them out is useful - it draws this secrecy to people’s attention.

• Name and live our alternative values and vision  

The very harshness of this government brings into greater focus what the majority of people have in common - desire for fairness, cooperation, peacefulness and a society that cares for all people and the living world.    

So many people in Aotearoa are working for this and we will not stop.  Te reo will continue to spread, people will continue to work for food security and land regeneration, regional councils will continue to protect their freshwater… Let’s amplify and celebrate this resistance and defiance!     

Let’s keep creating the world we want together, with energy and confidence.   

Yes, they have money, but we have people.   They are few and we are many. 

• Fund, strengthen and treasure our intellectual and activist taonga  

This swing to the right also shows more clearly where our own repositories of expertise and resistance lie.  

Let’s map them, publicise and build on them, support and fund them - create our own network of resistance and liberation think-tanks!    

Here are a few to explore:

• Te Kuaka (formerly NZ Alternative) - an independent organisation promoting a progressive role for Aotearoa in the world.

• E-Tangata - Māori and Pacific Sunday online magazine since 2014, part of a movement to strengthen Māori and Pacific voices in the media since the 1980s. 

• Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) - for 40+ years steadily mapping in detail who owns what in Aotearoa and where the power lies.  CAFCA’s 3-monthly online journal Watchdog carries useful info and commentary from around the motu and is a public archive.

• NZ Fabian Society - a long-standing independent membership-based policy forum that aims to provide an open, pluralist and progressive forum for education and debate on policy.   Holds excellent talks that are often live-streamed, archived and digitally available. 

• Come together to fight back!

In all our varied campaigns we are up against the same powerful groups trying to keep hold of their resources.   It’s in their interest that we are fragmented.  

Let’s spend this time in whakawhanaungatanga - building relationships.  Name our common values and visions (as Matike Mai asks us to do).  

Work together on campaigns that connect the issues – like School Strike 4 Climate, Fast Track Bill, Toitū te Tiriti – use them to build networks of trust and resistance.

Kia tapatahi!