According to one senior Liberal, Advance has always been a troubling force in right-wing politics. For all the apparent success of the lobby group, he says, the risk was always that “this beast can quickly turn on us”. Now, he suggests, it has. Advance has become “an insidious threat to the party”.
As evidence of that, he refers to a recent email sent by Advance, asking its supporters to kick in money for its campaign against efforts to curb climate change. The email was first revealed in a story in the Nine newspapers last Monday.
In part, the email read:
“Politicians of all sides, from Labor to the climate weaklings in the Liberal Party and Nationals, have come out and thrown their support behind this destructive policy.
“We’re building a NATIONWIDE pressure campaign forcing the politicians in Canberra to LISTEN. Not just Labor. It’s the Net Zero suck-ups in the Liberal Party and Nationals, too.
“Our message is simple: Dump Net Zero, or we dump YOU.”
Although the email mentioned Labor, the Liberal source was in no doubt about Advance’s real target and its broader objective.
“This is something beyond just the net zero debate,” he says. “It’s a proxy battle for the future of the Liberal Party and control of the Liberal Party.”
Last week, this tension was illustrated in the New South Wales parliament. The Labor government there set a trap that was obvious but no less dangerous for that fact.
It was a motion in three parts. The first part noted that the previous Liberal–National state government had adopted a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The second noted that the state’s path to net zero, called the Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap, remained the policy of both Labor and the Coalition. The third – the sting – called for the house to condemn efforts “to undermine this bipartisan position”.
The motion placed members of the Coalition in a difficult position. If they voted for it, they would in effect be condemning their federal colleagues who have recently been agitating to dump net zero. If they voted against, they would open themselves to accusations that they too were walking away from net zero. If some voted for and others voted against, they would be portrayed as a divided rabble.
Hurried consultations ensued, at the end of which the Coalition parties opted for the least worst option and voted for the motion.
“It is not weakness, as suggested by Advance, to support targets to reduce pollution. Rather, it is the true conservative that seeks to reconcile with nature and bequeath a more healthy world to those that will come after us.”
That was on Tuesday last week, but the story did not end there.
The same day the motion was passed, the government introduced legislation to shorten the delivery time for certain infrastructure projects associated with the Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap.
Labor had previously provided the opposition’s energy spokesperson, James Griffin, with a copy of the bill. He thought it so uncontroversial he didn’t even bother to take it to shadow cabinet. The opposition waved it through the lower house without objection or amendment.
When it got to the upper house a couple of days later, the Liberals’ Natalie Ward again affirmed support for the bill, “on behalf of the opposition”, adding: “We remain bipartisan in our support for the intent of the energy transition.”
Indeed she said the opposition was “proud” to support the measure.
Then the façade of Coalition unity shattered, live on the floor of the parliament. A succession of Nationals spoke against the bill. In the end, the Liberals voted with Labor for it and the Nationals voted against. Following that, Wendy Tuckerman, a Liberal representing the rural seat of Goulburn, gave an emotional speech, complaining of having been blindsided by her party’s agreement to the legislation, and quit cabinet.
To make matters worse, a big electoral test is looming: a byelection for the state seat of Kiama, following the conviction of former Liberal turned independent MP Gareth Ward for sex offences.
It will be held on September 13 and the Labor campaign is already focused on division over climate, renewables and net zero.
The shambolic recent events in the NSW parliament are among many indications across the nation of division within the conservative parties over climate action. This is where Advance comes in.
Advance’s early forays into electoral politics were risible. In 2019 it was forced to apologise for a video that featured a character called “Captain GetUp”, kitted out in a kind of superhero outfit, who rubbed himself suggestively against an image of Zali Steggall, the independent candidate who went on to defeat former prime minister Tony Abbott in the blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Warringah.
During the 2022 election Advance produced placards that falsely depicted Steggall and another independent, David Pocock, as Greens candidates. The Australian Electoral Commission ruled this to be in breach of electoral laws.
Ahead of the most recent federal election, Advance similarly used digitally altered flyers to depict yet another independent, Alex Dyson, as a Greens candidate. On this occasion, though, due to what Yee-Fui Ng, an associate professor of Monash University’s faculty of law, called a “gaping hole in Australia’s electoral laws”, the electoral commission found no breach, because the image was circulated before the election was formally called.
In a strongly argued piece for The Conversation, Ng called out Advance as an exemplar of the “urgent need for truth in political advertising laws to prohibit material that lies to voters”.
She also noted that “tentative” efforts had been made by the Albanese government in 2024 to outlaw dishonest material such as used by Advance against Dyson.
“However,” Ng wrote, “the bill was pulled due to a lack of support.”
She did not offer any suggestion as to why the Coalition was opposed to truth in political advertising, but the reason is obvious: it saw political advantage in the lies. In particular, the Coalition parties were happy with Advance’s disinformation campaign ahead of the 2023 referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
As the senior Liberal source notes: during the referendum, the Coalition believed Advance augmented the “No” campaign being run by Peter Dutton. “A lot of people thought that Advance’s role in the referendum worked in sync.”
Advance is nominally a separate entity, but it is closely aligned with the hard right of the Liberals. Tony Abbott has served on its advisory board and staunchly defended it when it spread falsehoods about the Voice referendum, notably the claim in a widely viewed Facebook post that the Voice would provide “one race of people with special rights and privileges”. After independent fact-checkers found this to be untrue, Facebook took it down.
Following the defeat of the referendum, Advance was for a time relatively quiescent. Under the leadership of Dutton, the Coalition papered over its divisions on climate policy by advocating for nuclear energy in lieu of more renewables. That changed after the Coalition’s crushing defeat at the May election.
Dutton lost his seat. In the contest to replace him, Sussan Ley narrowly prevailed over the right-wing candidate Angus Taylor, 29 votes to 25. As ABC political commentator Jacob Greber noted at the time, the narrowness of her win “suggests the games are far from over”.
Ley acknowledged the party had been “smashed” at the election and undertook to review the opposition’s policy positions, which, she said, had been “comprehensively rejected” by voters. She began an address to the National Press Club – a venue Dutton had eschewed – with an Acknowledgement of Country.
The suggestion she would take the opposition in a more moderate direction, says the Liberal source, caused “disquiet” in the ranks. Net zero became a flashpoint, not only in the federal parliament but elsewhere across the country. In NSW, Mark Speakman’s tenuous hold on the leadership has been further weakened by the division on climate. There are suggestions he could be dumped before the end of the year.
In South Australia, the Liberals’ state council passed a motion calling for the national abandonment of net zero.
The hard-right factional powerbroker Alex Antic celebrated the decision in a post on X: “Today the governing body of the South Australian Liberal Party voted to call upon the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party to rescind their policy of Net Zero by 2050. It’s time to scrap Net Zero and Save Australia!”
Just hours later, the SA Liberals’ parliamentary leader, Vincent Tarzia, declared that his state party would stick with the target.
Even The Australian declared that the state Liberals were in “chaos”.
Then, last month, the state Liberal Party in Western Australia passed a motion calling for net zero to be dumped, in defiance of that state’s parliamentary leader, Basil Zempilas.
That decision came with significant national implications, as one of the leaders of the push to abandon the target was the federal opposition’s spokesman for home affairs, Andrew Hastie.
Hastie is ambitious. He subsequently confirmed on Sky News he had leadership aspirations.
In federal parliament, as this paper’s Jason Koutsoukis reported last week, Barnaby Joyce and a handful of his Nationals colleagues are using the issue of net zero in their campaign to remove the party’s leader, David Littleproud.
Suffice to say, things are looking very sticky for the conservative leaders in all these states and in the national parliament.
It’s dumb politics, says Paul Smith, director of public data at YouGov.
“The biggest problem for the Coalition,” says Smith, “is that it’s seen as not being representative of modern Australia. Climate is a big part of that.”
Having a credible climate policy is vital to appealing to an electorate that strongly believes in – and in the case of younger voters overwhelmingly believes in – the need for climate action.
The Labor Party knows this. As evidence, consider the Albanese government’s willingness to indulge Joyce in advancing a private member’s bill that seeks to dump the net zero target.
In the normal course of events, private member’s bills go nowhere. In this case, however, Labor was more than willing to allow Joyce and his four backers to bring the bill on for debate. In fact, they have reserved time for it to be debated every Monday.
The government’s view is that the more the Coalition’s right wingers and their friends at Advance talk about the issue, the better.
As one Labor strategist tells The Saturday Paper: the feedback from the election was that “Advance’s efforts were counterproductive for the Coalition”.
So, too, were the far-right opinions aired on Sky News.
The Coalition, the Labor source says, mistook the noise “from very motivated but quite right-wing people” for the voice of the broader electorate.
“All that noise in the Coalition’s base encouraged Dutton to run a campaign that was focused on cultural questions and was out of touch with where people actually were.”
That is not to say Advance poses no threat. The success of the campaign against the Voice attests to that, the Labor source says.
However, instead of “throwing punches for the Coalition”, he says, “they are throwing punches at the Coalition”.
Furthermore, the issue that dominated the election campaign – the cost of living – now is less of a concern, making other issues such as climate more of a concern.
“It’s a huge policy conundrum, but it doesn’t hold that they can just position themselves, contrary to all the science and all the expert opinion, and just say, ‘Oh, actually, we just don’t need to do this.’ ”
That, of course, is exactly what Barnaby Joyce and Advance would have the country do – as would other fringe political players.
A couple of weeks ago the long-time climate change denier Pauline Hanson brought a motion in the Senate, essentially replicating Joyce’s private member’s bill.
The Coalition response was less than brave. The word went out that senators should abstain from voting.
In the end, two Coalition members, Matt Canavan and Alex Antic, turned up to vote for it. Only two showed up to vote against Hanson’s motion: Jane Hume and Andrew McLachlan.
McLachlan later told The Saturday Paper he did it because he believed the “conservative tradition” required him to “provide for future generations”.
“It is not weakness, as suggested by Advance, to support targets to reduce pollution,” he said.
“Rather, it is the true conservative that seeks to reconcile with nature and bequeath a more healthy world to those that will come after us.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
August 16, 2025 as “The beast that turned”.
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