One of the key strategies used by the transnational authoritarian Right to subvert democratic projects is “playing the refs.” Their strategists work to discredit journalists and media platforms that hold them to account. They tarnish academics, civil servants, agencies and charities that are expert in their inconvenient fields. Fact-checkers are made to look partisan, so nobody is left to call out lies. One target in America and Australia is the judiciary which they disparage with the label “activist judges”.
By teaching the public to disdain the ABC as “socialist” or “leftist” or “woke”, the Australian Right has aimed to undermine any reporting that holds them to account. Their base is now inoculated from any courage the ABC musters to expose disingenuous or deceitful pronouncements.
This kind of playing the refs is a feature of the US Right. Recently, judges, as the primary bulwark against unconstitutional and illegal actions by Trump’s executive, were targeted. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, discounted accusations of a constitutional crisis with 70 cases challenging illegal activity. Instead, she declared, the “real crisis is taking place within our judiciary, where activist judges are abusing their power to unilaterally block the president’s basic executive authority and thwart the will of the people”.
This appears to forecast that Trump’s team intends to escalate its disregard for judicial decisions. District Court Judge John McConnell found that the government had “disobeyed a court order” to stop its budget funding freeze.
Monarch-CEO Elon Musk and Vice-President JD Vance have dared the president to show the courts how powerless they are.
Trump’s team is well integrated with both the Atlas Network junktanks, about which Senator Peter Whish-Wilson spoke so eloquently in the Australian parliament recently. They are also affiliated with junktanks of inter-related organisations such as the theocratic Council for National Policy and the Conservative Partnership Institute. Together these networks shaped Project 2025, the latest iteration of the Heritage Foundation playbook for Republican presidents.
The body that created the Atlas Network, the Mont Pelerin Society, worked over decades to manipulate the law to allow corporations to dictate its impact. Leonard Leo, the machiavel leading the Atlas/CNP junktank, the Federalist Society, was motivated by a distaste for “activist judges” from the 1980s. The Federalist Society has now turned the Supreme Court of the US into a Trump-supporting “imperial juristocracy“. The Claremont Institute, one of the elite Atlas brands, has a former law professor and law school dean who drove the illegal playbook for Trump’s 2021 insurrection.
The trope of “judicial activism” has been promoted in Australia since the Wik Native Title decision in 1997, with the intent of undermining judges’ decisions, in particular on resource extraction and climate. The impact is also to intimidate judges away from making decisions the Right will reject. It is not surprising that those promoting it are affiliated with the same junktanks who worked so hard to discredit the Voice to parliament: the mining sector has long obstructed First Peoples’ and environmental claims bolstering each other.
Foundational Austrian School MPS economists such as Friedrich von Hayek were funded by fossil fuel even before the MPS first met in 1947. Fossil fuel money with affiliated interests in finance and consulting have been among the most important interest groups, using the now 580 junktanks in the network to influence climate denial and delay.
The campaign is transnational. In New Zealand, for example, Deputy Prime Minister and careerist Atlas Network affiliate, David Seymour, is decrying “activist judges and bureaucrats” too in his attempt to take rights from Maōri people. The Atlas Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) used the trope in its submission opposing the Voice. In fact, the Australian Financial Review’s legal editor found most of the submissions against the Voice use the trope of “activist judges”.
Australia’s importance to international resource extraction corporations is marked by the over-representation of Australian miners, journalists, politicians, policy strategists and academics on the MPS. Forty-two Australians were listed in 2013. They include John Howard (MPS 2010).
Maurice Newman was invited onto the secretive MPS in 1976. He was later chair of Deutsche Bank, one of the largest funders of fossil fuel projects. He was placed on the ABC board from 2000, and chair from 2007-2012. Newman has been a noted “climate sceptic”. He, with the IPA and Murdoch’s The Australian, have promoted a “fever swamp of climate denial” attacking the Bureau of Meteorology.
Newman is one of the backers of the Atlas-affiliated astroturf group, Advance. It has spread disinformation against the Voice and is also fighting renewables as well as working to discredit the Climate 200-supported independents, alongside new Atlas-like junktank Australians for Prosperity. That body is heavily coal-funded and, like Advance, linked closely to the Liberal Party.
Grim reports have emerged from volunteers at Victoria’s recent by-elections regarding disturbing behaviour by Advance’s people around booths.
Janet Albrechtsen was revealed to be a member of the MPS from 2011 on rare leaked membership lists. She was also the director and chair of the IPA between 2016 and 2020. Her invitation followed her influential work on the ABC board from 2005-10.
Albrechtsen has been the leader of the spurious fight against “judicial activism” in Australia for decades, although she praises “conservative” activist judges. This work appears particularly in the pages of The Australian. Albrechtsen’s employer, Rupert Murdoch, has a lifelong connection to the Atlas junktanks, in particular the IPA. Isabelle Reinecke, who wrote Courting Power: law, democracy and the public interest in Australia has recounted the nature of the insidious campaign.
Miner Ron Manners (MPS 1998) regularly illustrates the connections between Australian junktanks, the international circuit and the MPS in his newsletters. His Mannkal junktank profile boasts that he is “an active board member of the Mont Pelerin Society and is on the Advisory Council of the Atlas Network (Washington, DC)”.
Mannkal sends West Australian “conservative” students to Atlas Network junktanks around the world on scholarship, and the Atlas head office itself. It sends scholars to the Samuel Griffith Society conference. In her report back to Mannkal, one of the youthful 2023 scholars regretted the uniform argument for “No” in the Voice referendum featured at that older forum.
Hugh Morgan became chief executive of Western Mining at 36 in 1976. In 1979, he mustered the financial support, largely from mining corporations, to turn the hobby of Greg Lindsay (MPS 1982) — the Centre for Independent Studies — into a full-time job. Morgan was treasurer of the Institute of Public Affairs from 1982. The Australian Institute of Public Policy was set up with support from Morgan as well as seed funding from Atlas itself in 1983. (It merged with the IPA in 1991.) Morgan co-founded the HR Nicholls society to break labour strength.
Morgan’s speechwriter and Western Mining executive officer Ray Evans (MPS from 1988) explained: “My role was to engage in the culture wars and provide [Morgan] with feedback.” Evans was secretary of the Bennelong Society which worked to manage the Aboriginal problem for mining. Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price Nampijinpa mother, Bess, received a medal from the Bennelong Society for their work. Mundine works with the CIS now. Evans was also president of HR Nicholls. He was also secretary of Lavoisier which fought climate science.
In 1992, the Samuel Griffith Society was founded, as a conservative legal body. Its founders were Hugh Morgan, John Stone (MPS from 2008), Greg Craven and Chief Justice Sir Harry Gibbs. Ray Evans was the body’s secretary.
The founders’ intent doesn’t necessarily shape these bodies permanently. Employees and “fellows” may well not know the original intent and connections. MPS members, however, continue to meet, where one might mix with “a mining magnate, the chairman of a prominent think-tank, a famous TV presenter and an ex-CIA agent”. It’s worth inspecting membership lists to see which academics, particularly legal in this context, are affiliated.
Samuel Griffith Society intends to maintain freedom for the states in a federalised system. This is so that mining-dependent states can maintain their independence from Canberra. As our climate catastrophe escalates, our captive politicians seem unable to act; the Griffith goal will be to prevent climate litigation such as Sharma making law around those golden handcuffs.
In 2024, Albrechtsen celebrated the efforts by Xavier Boffa to transform the Samuel Griffiths Society into Australia’s Federalist Society. She notes that he is actively working with the body that has done so much to create Donald Trump’s “white collar coup.” (“US-style legal conservatism is needed here” The Australian 26 October)
When Albrechtsen and her colleagues attack courts for unwelcome decisions as “activist judges,” the American example of a legal system on the brink of losing its authority — both with illiberal leaders and a disgusted public — must be viewed as a dire warning.
The New York prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, just resigned on being instructed to drop corruption charges against a Trump ally. She was both a member of the “conservative” Atlas operation, the Federalist Society, and was a former clerk for a judicial icon for the Right (including for Albrechtsen who labelled him a “conservative intellectual gladiator”), Justice Scalia.
It is near impossible to control the trajectory of such system-breaking once it is unleashed.
This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
Lucy Hamilton is a Melbourne writer with degrees from the University of Melbourne and Monash University. She is a doctoral student at the University of Technology Sydney.