“Who Funds You?” — the question junktanks were tired of before NZ even started asking it

ACT’s association with Atlas think tanks continues.

This government is significant.

It is David Seymour’s first government for which he ran a campaign as Party Leader. It is Stephen Joyce’s National Party as selected by the individual interests he enabled when he removed control of candidate selection from the rank and file. It is our first right-wing government to have the support of the full NZ Atlas Network as it exists in the 2020s, strengthened strategically by Jordan Williams’ and David Farrar’s decade of hard work.

How do you reckon they’re doing?

For those who have forgotten the 2014 election, Jamie Whyte was the brief leader of the ACT Party between Rodney Hyde and David Seymour. He had a short-lived stint as leader while he campaigned for the 2014 election, but resigned his role when David Seymour won the party’s only seat.

With ACT securing only 0.69% of the vote, Jamie Whyte stepped down and allowed Seymour to lead the party as ACT’s sole MP.

The result of Seymour’s tenure has been an utter triumph for ACT. But it would incorrect and unjust to give Seymour all the credit; he had many people, parties and junktanks spinning his success behind the scenes. The Taxpayer’s Union had formed only a year before in October 2013 — and that was far too broad.

Everyone hates tax, right?

If Seymour wanted to create an appetite for his agenda, he’d need a lot more influence over the minute matters of public opinion.

So he and his friends got to work. Fortunately, work creates jobs, and jobs mean your former unelected, unpopular leader of the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers Party can still materially contribute to your representation of your “consumers and taxpayers”.

Naturally, as all Parliamentary representatives of consumers do in New Zealand, Jamie Whyte entered the private sector and joined the Institute of Economic Affairs, a Hyek-chasing UK junktank that outputs much of the research the global right rely on to justify their polices and spread their economic propaganda.

The Good Law Project in the UK was established in part to watchdog this think tank’s influence on politics, and has tracked £35 million funding being funnelled into right wing think tanks via charities, including to the IEA.

Our interweaving of right wing organisations isn’t unique; New Zealand’s far right political party (posing as centrists) were only following the tried and true handbook of undermining democracy that the Atlas network has written, mimicking down to the names the sorts of groups and research outfits needed to seed the economic and social discontent that we are seeing the results of right now.

Where we have the Taxpayers Union, Britain already had the Taxpayer’s Alliance. Where Britain had the Institute of Economic Affairs, we created the New Zealand Institute (now the New Zealand Initiative). As a nation, we now share in Atlas’s network of 550 think tanks spread across the globe.

How wonderful.

And in just five short years, New Zealand would be returning the favour, with the UK copying our recently-created Free Speech Union in 2019 — including copying their technique of making it a registered union, a tricksy change Farrar and Williams made to the “Free Speech Association” in order to smuggle Don Brash onto university campuses.

(Read my previous piece on the formation of the FSU)

While Britain may have perfected the think tank, New Zealand has perfected the pressure group, identifying many key movements on which to launch lasting platforms to sow social discord, including Groundswell and Hobson’s Pledge.

Many of the original junktanks flew relatively under the radar. While there was a flurry of worry in 2017, with news articles listing nearly 100 parliament lobbyists who then had their access reviewed and raising potential issues with these groups’ new legal ability to launch attack ads, most voters were still unconcerned and unaware of the heavy presence of lobbyists, pressure groups, and junktanks in New Zealand’s politics.

This remained the case for six years years. The COVID election passed us by with a lot of discussion of important, topical issues like pandemics and vaccines, and key to quietly creating this furore were many of the pressure groups started by ACT’s busy bees, some in response to the social upheaval the scientifically and statistically correct lockdown mandates created. Taking advantage of the grey areas of disaster government, where restrictions were carried on too long or where vaccine targets overly impeded bodily autonomy, ACT’s libertarian party shot up in seats with seemingly little effort.

But unseen were all the workings behind the scenes, already well set in motion.

The media had tried to raise awareness of pressure groups in 2017. It caught on a little — we can see the role they played at the time through the right-wing government’s response, reviewing and removing lobbyists (a decision they didn’t repeat last year when the election was in their distant past rather than in their near future.)

But alarm doesn’t last long without overt threat, and six years of leftist government made us soft and very sure of ourselves, overconfident in our electoral and constitutional integrity. We did not pursue the warnings Stuff gave us any further. We continued to ignore Geoffrey Palmer’s Bernie-like insistence that the mechanisms protecting our democracy are too weak.

So it came as quite a surprise to New Zealand when Mountain Tui, amongst others like the Democracy Project, began sounding the alarm about Atlas on Reddit.

Most kiwis — even the politically aware ones — had not heard of think tanks, let alone were aware of the extent of the insidious network operating quietly behind the curtains. The ones that were, like myself, had looked away, accepting them as inevitable and unfightable.

But it turns out that people do care about democracy. When the threat is visible, when it is loud, when it manages to take their attention, people will react and respond.

I think it might be the most wrong I’ve ever been.

Mountain Tui’s signal-boosting of Atlas in 2023 was well-timed; better timed than Stuff in 2017, who laid the important groundwork for all us political enthusiasts by setting the trail of facts and figures for us to find seven years later, to put together into a cohesive picture of corruption and for us to share, sourced and researched, with each other.

This is news. This is democracy.

(This is a lot of work to do when it wasn’t actually your job or profession start with — go support Mountain Tui with a read or a follow!)

The junktanks would like you to forget that this happened. They would like you to forget that the right ever framed our alarm over think tanks as a “conspiracy” (they’re just totally normal organisations who don’t reveal their supposedly charitable income sources and they never pretended Mountain Tui was crazy for saying otherwise). They’d like you to forget these organisations ever tried to hide in the shadows (they still are hiding, and still won’t reveal their funding sources).

And they’d also really like you to forget when it happened the first time.

Jamie Whyte left ACT and not long after he led ACT to its worst defeat ever, and took a job at the Institute for Economic Affairs, where he continued to contribute to ACT’s politics by disseminating exactly the sort of rhetoric and research that would boost their platform in the 2020 and 2023 elections. Apparently for the year he worked there, he was asked endless questions about where these organisations got their money from and was hit with accusation after accusation of being “the kind of person who works at a think tank”.

Eight years later, we have a pretty good idea of the kind of person who works for think tanks and what motivates them: a mistaken belief that their economic argument is right, mixed with a lack of empathy and care for their fellow citizens. This proportion may vary in the amount ignorance contributing to their position, but it is, ultimately, their position.

Whyte also missed the mark as to the issues we have with funding. It almost wouldn’t matter if think tanks were staffed entirely by leftists (though it would matter because, as we can see, the right-wing political network is a revolving door of well-paid personnel). It is the unknown agenda of the think tank itself, and thus of all the people and companies it has solicited money from, that is the danger to our democracy.

That is why Helen Clark’s think tank, which focusses on solving drug addiction currently, is a registered charity with publicly available accounts.

Atlas junktanks, funnily enough, never are.

Though charities might donate to junktanks (the only funding we can track), junktanks themselves are never charities because of their inherent need to operate in the shadows. Their funding sources must remain secret and their agenda unrevealed; if you knew who was buying your public policies, it might defeat the purpose of their subversiveness.

You might even vote against it.

The threat to our politics is not really from “the right”, or from overseas media, or from China or Russia or Trump.

But the sabotage that has got us here is deliberate.

It’s coming from inside the House.

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