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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

While they’re far from a household name, almost all Australians have now heard the political messages they craft.

Advance, a right wing campaigning group, has gained enormous ground in the past few years, and played a crucial role in defeating the Voice referendum.

So, who are they? And what are they after next?

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Mike Seccombe, on how a mysterious, once joked-about group has become a powerful political force.

It’s Monday, November 6th.

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Audio excerpt – Matthew Sheahan:

“So what about our campaign? Well, since last year, we have been doing the research, designing the strategy and executing the plan to defeat the Voice and defend our Constitution.”

ANGE:

Mike. People might be aware of this group called Advance after they were really instrumental in campaigning for the “No” vote in the referendum. But it's not exactly clear who they are or where they've come from. You've been looking into them. So who is Advance?

MIKE:

Basically Advance, it used to be called Advance Australia and it's a right-wing campaigning organisation. It started back in 2018 and it was flagged at the time as being a deliberate attempt at setting up a right-wing answer to the left-wing campaigning organisation. Getup, Getup, being very progressive. It's running numerous campaigns in Australia trying to change policy on things like the environment, human rights, and has also campaigned directly politically against the more right-wing elements of the coalition parties. So, Advance wanted to be a counterweight to that.

Audio excerpt – Unknown:

“So far Getup has forced up electricity prices, pushed the teaching of radical gender theories into our children's classrooms. They are attacking freedom of speech and have promoted political correctness to extremes.”

MIKE:

And when they started off, frankly, though, they were saying that's a bit of a joke. They weren't taken seriously at all. They didn't have much more than a website and a few thousand emails going out and the odd video and a bit of on ground campaigning.

But they've gained momentum over the past few years and have to say so much so that their current executive director was invited to speak at the CPAC. That's Conservative Political Action Committee this year.

Audio excerpt – Speaker:

“Great line up here at CPAC 2023. Next up from Advance Australia. Give it up for Matthew Sheahan.”

MIKE:

It's a big conservative conference on a model that started in America a couple of decades ago, and we now have one in Australia.

Audio excerpt – Matthew Sheahan:

“Good morning, everyone, and thanks for being here. Many of you will have heard of Advance.”

MIKE:

So anyway, to answer your question who they are, if you listen to the head, Matthew Sheahan, when he was on stage speaking at CPAC, they're just an independent grassroots movement, not affiliated with any political party.

Audio excerpt – Matthew Sheahan:

“They're an independent grassroots movement and we’re not affiliated or connected to any political party. We fight for principles and policies.”

MIKE:

I think it becomes pretty obvious when you dig into the types of campaigns they run, who they choose to target, who funds them. That really couldn't be further from the truth.

ANGE:

Right. Can you tell me more about the campaigns that Advance has run and how they've gone?

MIKE:

Right. Well, the 2019 election was their first big project, I guess you'd say. Their target was Zali Steggall, former Olympian running as an independent campaign against Tony Abbott in a very blue ribbon Liberal seat, Warringah in Sydney.

Audio excerpt – Reporter:

“Reporter David Sparks is in Manly, which is right in the heart of the hotly contested electorate of Warringah, where former Prime Minister Tony Abbott is fighting for his political survival against the independent Zali Steggall.”

MIKE:

And they campaigned very hard there for Abbott, but more particularly against Steggall. And it was pretty wild strategy that they ran, quite frankly. They came up with a character called Captain GetUp!, who was, I think, a paid actor. But anyway, he was wearing a superhero suit with Captain GetUp! Written on it, who followed Steggall around doing various inane things. The insinuation of the campaign was that she was a puppet of GetUp! Or like the Labor Party.

Audio excerpt – Unknown:

“Zali Steggall has a secret. She's not really independent. Steggall is working with Bill Shorten and Labor. Same union donors, same left wing agenda, higher taxes, a weaker economy.”

MIKE:

They actually at one stage put out a terribly vulgar video of Captain GetUp! Sort of gyrating and rubbing himself suggestively up against a poster of Zali Steggall. That video was then ordered eventually to be taken down after a lot of outrage. So I guess you can see why people didn't really take them that seriously.

And of course, Zali Steggall won that campaign. She romped it in against Tony Abbott despite Advances, best efforts, or maybe even partly because of Advances, best efforts.

But they're not just against Teal indepenedents, of course. They've campaigned on things like banning trans women from playing sports with women. They want to, quote, save Australia Day. They hate the idea of climate action. They've campaigned in support of nuclear power and they want the government to spend more on the military. The interesting thing is, very often their campaigns appear to be very closely coordinated with what the official Liberal Party is doing at the same time.

They campaign against Steggall again in the 2022 election. The interesting thing also in that campaign was that Steggall was running against the anti-trans activist liberal candidate Katherine Deves. An advance campaigned for her with a mobile billboard featuring images of several Australian women Olympic swimmers, with a caption underneath saying women's sport is not for men.

The interesting thing about that, I guess, is that the picture of the athletes was used without getting permission from the Australian Olympic Committee or Swimming Australia or the swimmers themselves. And two of their swimmers, Emily Seebohm and Dawn Fraser, made their outrage very public.

Audio excerpt – Speaker:

“Thanks for your time, Emily, just with that billboard. How did you feel when you saw your image on it?”

Audio excerpt – Emily Seebohm:

“Okay, First of all, I want to say I have no idea who Advance Australia is, but they've just lost a voter for sure because I don't want my photo next to something saying transphobic.”

MIKE:

An Advance also had to withdraw that one. And during the election there were campaigns that appeared all across the country featuring a Photoshopped image of the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, apparently dropping his vote for the ALP into a ballot box with the caption under underneath, saying CCP says vote Labor. And of course, at the same time the Coalition were using some of the same lines in the Parliament, including Peter Dutton.

Audio excerpt – Peter Dutton:

“That the Chinese Communist Party, The Chinese government has also made a decision about who they're going to back in the next federal election. Mr. Speaker, they're not open. They told me as…”

MIKE:

I guess in summary, there are two points here. One is that Advance uses pretty underhanded tactics. And number two, while it is notionally independent, Advance is closely associated with the Liberal National Party and coordinates its campaign strategies, in particular with the hard right elements of those parties.

ANGE:

And obviously those campaigns didn't turn out to be very successful. As you said, Zali Steggall was re-elected and Labor won the election. So how did Advance go from those failures to playing a crucial role in The Voice?

MIKE:

Well, you're right. They did look like failures. But Advance Australia was relatively new, especially in the Captain Getup! days, and those half by campaigns helped them to build up a network of supporters and donors and high profile advisors.

So by the time we got to the campaign against the Voice to Parliament, they were very well-practised in following the playbook of Donald Trump and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, a brand of politics that Bannon once famously summarised as, “flood the zone with shit”.

Meaning just put so much false and misleading information out there that eventually, you know, people drown in it, essentially.

ANGE:

Coming up after the break - who are the high profile Liberal politicians linked to Advance?

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ANGE:

So, Mike, we're talking about the right wing campaign group Advance and how they've gone from not being taken very seriously to being a key driver of the “No” campaign for the Voice referendum. Can you tell me a bit more about who is behind Advance?

MIKE:

Well, this is another thing that sort of draws the links between Advance and the Liberal national parties.

So, Tony Abbott, former Liberal Prime Minister, is now on the advisory board. And of course, as we've already established, Advance campaigned very hard to try and keep him in politics.

Jacinta Price, now shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs, worked as Advance spokesperson up until 2020 before she entered Federal Parliament.

Vicki Dunne, who was a Liberal member of the ACT Legislative Assembly for 20 years, is one of Advance’s three directors.

Matthew Sheahan, The guy we've been talking about, his background is a bit mysterious. He seems to have had no social media profile at all before taking over about two years ago, and his previous CV is shrouded in mystery. I tried to interview him, but Advance declined the request on his behalf and then didn't respond to follow up emails asking for more detail on his background and where their funding came from and so on. I don't know why they're so secretive about that, but they are.

And Advance is also, of course, secretive about who backs it. But some of its big donors have revealed themselves. So three weeks ago, one of them, a very wealthy former frontbencher by the name of Simon Fenwick, gave an interview to The Australian newspaper saying he'd been a supporter of Advance since its establishment five years ago and revealed how much he donated. He apparently gave them $1,000,000 in 2020 and he gave them another $750,000 to fund the Anti Voice campaign. So, you know, these are not the signs of a grassroots organisation. I think you'd say they have a significant number of smaller donors. They claim about 23,000 individuals, but there's really no transparency about who those people are.

Audio excerpt – Matthew Sheahan:

“We've built from the ground up a supporter base of over 275,000 people with over 23,000 donors.”

MIKE:

And it appears that with all that money, they've now built a pretty significant infrastructure. Sheahan boasted about it at CPAC.

Audio excerpt – Matthew Sheahan:

“Our capabilities now include communication strategy, digital campaign infrastructure, including website building and social media. We built from the ground up field operations that allow us to organise people for letterbox dropping, door knocking and volunteers election booths. I'm now confident that Advance’s infrastructure can now reach more Australians than any centre-right political party in this country.”

MIKE:

So it's pretty big and I think the success of the “No” campaign showed that.

ANGE:

Yes, So the building influences, gathering a lot of powerful people to help them push their conservative agenda. But how are they actually running their campaigns now? What strategies are they using to try and cut through?

MIKE:

Well, as I said, the basis of it is the “flood the zone with shit” model. I spoke about this with Ed Kopa. He's the CEO of a progressive communications outfit called Populaires and he's been a pretty close observer. He's highly critical of Advance and what they do. But, you know, even someone like him acknowledges how powerful they're becoming.

And what that playbook is, the way it works is you say something outrageous and then you wait for the mainstream media to report it. And then the mainstream media, of course, goes to the other side and the other side tries to debunk it and a fight ensues over who's right. And that's the whole point. The point is to stir controversy. It doesn't matter whether what you say is accurate. In fact, it's better if it's not, because that just heats people up.

And so from there, the claims move on to social media whose algorithms elevate conflict and then they move out through all these disinformation networks, whose job it is to spread the message far and wide. That was Kopa's take on it.

And this strategy was very effective during the Voice campaign. The negative campaign sort of left supporters of the Voice in a no win situation. You know, they could not let these outrageous claims go unchallenged. But in challenging them, they only cemented the perception of division. And so the central claim of the “No” campaign that the Voice would be divisive actually became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

ANGE:

Right. And if this is a group that appears to be building quite effective campaigns by intentionally lying, how can they be held accountable? Because, as you say, debunking lies is actually woven into their strategy and helps them sew doubt and fear.

MIKE:

Absolutely right. And it's a very tricky thing to do. There is a push. Zali Steggall, unsurprisingly, I guess, given her personal history, is very prominent in it, and this push would tighten up the rules around misinformation and lies and political advertising, to stop them being generated in the first place.

So she introduced a Stop the Lies Bill, which would put the same constraints around political advertising as applies to commercial advertising. You know, you can't tell lies about what your product will do. She would like to see a similar thing happen there, and ultimately it would be left up to the electoral commission, you know, an independent body. And then ultimately the courts also, independent of politics, to decide the truth of particular pronouncements. Steggall has a bill up. Labor is proposing a sort of omnibus bill of electoral reform in the near future with something in there as well. We're not quite sure what yet.

And so, oddly enough, having helped defeat the Voice referendum, Advance has now moved on and found its next target. And it's begun sending emails out to its supporters. Identifying its next target and its next target is opposition to the proposal for truth in advertising.

It actually has a claim up on its website says quote. Labor, the Greens and the titles are planning a new law to let the government decide what's true and what's not. And they are calling it the Ministry of Truth, which is of course not true. It would not let the government decide. There will be no ministry of Truth. So it's yet another lie, which is to say, of course we're in the ironic position that we're now seeing disinformation being spread about plans to curtail disinformation. It's all kind of worrying, frankly.

ANGE:

Mike, thanks so much for your time today.

MIKE:

Thank you.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today,

Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah used a speech over the weekend to threaten escalation in the conflict with Israel in the weeks and months to come.

Nasrallah said Hezbollah fighters inside Lebanon were targeting Israeli Defence Force bases in the North of Israel with small-arms fire, but suggested Hezbollah was willing to escalate attacks if the ground invasion of Gaza continued.

The Health Ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza said on Saturday that around 9 and a half thousand Palestinians, including 3,900 children, have been killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza since 7 October.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back again tomorrow.

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