The Atlas Network links in Australia

Why think tanks are hard to track, and what this page does about it

In most Australian jurisdictions, donations to political parties or candidates are disclosed because electoral law requires it. In some jurisdictions, meetings between lobbyists and politicians appear in registers too, because ministers' offices are required to keep diaries. Not every jurisdiction has these requirements, but at least some records exist.

No equivalent requirement exists for think tanks. Publishing a report, briefing a journalist or appointing a former minister to the board requires no public documentation at all. That gap can be a legitimate protection for organisations doing genuine advocacy work, but in Australia the lack of transparency it produces has been taken to an extreme. A 2015 global audit by Transparify visited the websites of twenty leading Australian think tanks and found that nine gave no information at all about who funds them, rating the group the least transparent of any country it assessed.

Influence Tracker brings the separate public registers that do exist into a single, structured, searchable database. That makes it possible to follow one organisation across all of them at once, and to trace its connections to global networks such as the Atlas Network, which is where this page starts.

A network of think tanks across almost 100 countries

Atlas Network is a Washington DC based nonprofit, founded in 1981 by British entrepreneur Antony Fisher, who had already built one free market think tank in London, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and wanted to replicate it everywhere. Atlas doesn't do policy work itself. It funds, trains and networks the think tanks that do, a model Atlas itself describes as being "a think tank that creates think tanks". It now counts close to 600 partner organisations in around 100 countries, bound together by a shared commitment to free markets and small government rather than by formal ownership or control.

Some partners have gone on to shape national politics directly. Reporting has traced Atlas links into both New Zealand's ACT Party and Australia's Coalition. Atlas's own 2018 annual review separately names the Australian Taxpayers' Alliance as a partner, independent of the DeSmog-sourced partner list this page otherwise draws on.

Because Atlas is a funder and convenor rather than a publisher, its own record of who belongs to the network is thin, and getting thinner. The partner directory this page draws on was taken offline and survives only in DeSmog's archive. What follows is everything Influence Tracker separately holds on the ten Australian organisations that directory named, cross-matched against Australian public registers that capture those ten organisations' own activity, not Atlas Network's, which has no direct Australian presence and no known disclosure obligations here.

That network is overwhelmingly American. 12,856 of the 22,458 archived Atlas records sit in the United States, more than every other country combined, so the chart below excludes the US to keep the rest of the network legible. Country is the location recorded against the record, which for an individual is where that person is based rather than where their organisation sits.

Counted by record rather than by organisation, the order after the United States runs Canada 1,037, the United Kingdom 746, Argentina 609, Brazil 553, Spain 394, Chile 392, Belgium 307, Germany 221 and Switzerland 210. Australia is 15th on 182 records. The records are spread across 128 countries in all. Counted by organisation instead of by record, the archived directory names 1,157 separate partner organisations.

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

Every country the archived Atlas directory places a partner organisation in, grouped under the region Atlas filed it under. A dot is a country and its size is how many separate partner organisations are listed there. Region comes from the archived address of the directory page each listing was taken from, not a category added here. Hover a country for the organisations listed in it.

Who sits on whose board

The map above shows where the network is, and it cannot show what connects it, because nothing in the archived directory links one partner to another. Every listing links an organisation to Atlas. The officer datasheets carry a link of that kind, though only indirectly: of the 8,998 people recorded in a board, advisory board or chief executive role, 791 hold such a role at more than one organisation. Following those people from one board to the next produces 1,400 ties between 309 organisations, which is a network in the ordinary sense of the word rather than a list filed under a single name.

The graph below draws the 60 organisations joined by the strongest of those ties, 314 of them. It is a selection and not the whole set: the remaining ties are thinner, and drawing every one of them produces a mat rather than a picture. The heaviest single tie is Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Philadelphia Society, who share 20 board members between them.

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

Organisations joined by the people who sit on both their boards. This is the only link in the Atlas records that runs between two organisations: a directory listing links an organisation to Atlas, and an officer record links a person to an employer. Line thickness is how many people the two share. Built on merged spellings, so that one organisation written two ways cannot appear as two.

Scale and reach are one thing; what the network has actually funded and coordinated is another, and it's the second question that has drawn scrutiny to Atlas specifically. Think tanks exist to do a particular job: gather researchers, produce reports, and get new ideas in front of journalists and policymakers before those ideas are otherwise part of the public conversation. That function, on its own, is neither good nor bad; sharing ideas and shifting norms is core to how open societies work.

What has drawn scrutiny to Atlas is what it has funded and coordinated while doing that job. SourceWatch has described Atlas as "the Johnny Appleseed of antiregulation groups", and Philadelphia Magazine called the network "noted for its refutation of climate change and defense of the tobacco industry". DeSmog reporting, based on internal documents, describes Exxon funding Atlas Network activity intended to "amplify diplomatic tensions ahead of climate treaty summits", with Kert Davies of the Center for Climate Integrity, who reviewed the documents, calling it "a pretty ugly history" (same source). A study published in the International Journal of Health Planning and Management found Atlas "channeled funding from tobacco corporations to think tank actors" who produced material favourable to the industry.

Closer to home, University of Technology Sydney researcher Dr Jeremy Walker has traced what he calls a "fossil fuelled" campaign by Atlas Network's Australian partners against the 2023 Voice referendum, arguing it was driven partly by concern that a stronger Indigenous voice in policy could constrain fossil fuel projects.

None of this means every idea an Atlas partner promotes is compromised, or that industry funding automatically taints research. But it's why the same two questions keep being asked of organisations like these: who funds the ideas being put in front of Australian politicians, and what do those funders want in return. The rest of this page turns to the ten Australian organisations the Atlas directory names, and to what can and can't be answered about them.

The ten Australian organisations

Beyond the archived directory itself, each organisation's Atlas connection is documented separately, and in varying detail. The transparency database LittleSis lists the Institute of Public Affairs, the Centre for Independent Studies, the Australian Taxpayers' Alliance, the Australian Institute for Progress and the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation each as an Atlas partner or member.

Some of that connection runs through named individuals rather than the organisation as a whole. LittleSis records a senior Australian Institute for Progress staff member as the organisation's contact point on Atlas's own partner listings from 2017. Mannkal's founder, Ron Manners, joined Atlas Network's Advisory Council in 2010 and received the organisation's Sir Antony Fisher Achievement Award in 2020, and Mannkal has continued to send scholars to intern directly at Atlas Network's Arlington, Virginia office.

Asked directly by the ABC about the nature of their Atlas relationship, the two most prominent organisations on this list gave different answers. The Institute of Public Affairs did not respond to the ABC's questions about its Atlas Network partnership. The Centre for Independent Studies said some of its staff had received Atlas Network training, but described no formal relationship beyond that.

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

The ten Australian organisations named in the archived Atlas partner directory. Line thickness is the number of archived years each was listed, so the thick spokes were listed year after year and the hairlines appear once or twice. The star shape itself is not a finding: the directory only records who belongs to Atlas, never who deals with whom.

The database holds 2,948 records across all ten, naming 1,435 people, but they are not equally documented. Five of the ten carry substantial records beyond the directory listing itself; the other five appear in the directory and almost nowhere else, which is a finding in its own right: being listed by Atlas is not the same as leaving a public trail. LibertyWorks, despite being a comparatively minor entry in the directory itself, is more active in the wider database than several of the other nine:

• LibertyWorks Inc. is listed 2017 to 2020. Its president Andrew Cooper also runs the Conservative Political Action Conference in Australia, and Warren Mundine and Steve Baxter are both recorded as working for it.
• The Australian Libertarian Society is listed 2014 to 2016. It is the only organisation with a direct recorded link to another on this list: the Australian Taxpayers' Alliance is recorded as its Partner Organisation. Its founder, John Humphreys, also sits on LibertyWorks' advisory board.
• The H R Nicholls Society is listed once, in 2018, and its own website names it an Atlas partner in the same year. Formed in the mid-1980s to campaign for the deregulation of industrial relations, its recorded founders are Hugh Morgan, who also sat on the boards of the Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public Affairs, Ray Evans, John Stone and Peter Costello, later federal Treasurer. Tim Andrews, founder of the Australian Taxpayers' Alliance, is recorded on its board from 2007, and the Lavoisier Group is recorded as sharing its contact details: the same small circle of names, again.
• The Bert Kelly Research Centre and the Education Standards Institute are listed three times each, between 2012 and 2015, and appear nowhere else in the database at all.

Here is what Influence Tracker separately holds on each of the ten, beyond the directory listing itself:

Two of the ten have been in the network almost as long as the directory has existed. The Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies were both listed as Atlas partners in 2003 and were still listed in 2021, nineteen years later, and the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation has been there since 2010. That is the difference the chart below is drawing: not how big an organisation is or how much it spends, but how long it has been part of this network. A body inside the network for 19 years has had every one of them to take up the network's arguments, send people to its conferences and apply for its grants.

The rest of the list is a different story, and it is worth reading as one. Five of the ten appear for four years or less, and three of those five stop before 2017. Membership of the Atlas network is not a single thing that either applies to an organisation or does not: for two of these bodies it has been the better part of two decades, and for others it was a few years that ended.

One caution before reading the bars. Atlas has never published a membership list, and it rewrites its partner directory in place rather than keeping it as a record, so what can be reconstructed is only what happened to be preserved. Every figure here is a floor. An organisation may have joined before the first year it appears and may have stayed on after the last, and a year missing from a bar is far more likely to mean the directory went unrecorded that year than that the organisation had left. The broad picture, that two of these bodies have been in the network for the better part of two decades while others passed through, is not in doubt. The exact number of years is the most that can be shown, not a claim about when each relationship began or ended.

Where the money is visible, and where it is not

Knowing which organisations are listed by Atlas is one thing. Knowing who pays for them is another, and for nine of the ten, the trail runs cold.

Donations matter because they show who has a stake in an organisation's arguments. A think tank funded by a coal company and a think tank funded by ten thousand small individual donors might publish the same report, but a reader can only weigh that report properly if they know which one wrote it. That is the entire logic behind donation disclosure law: not that funded research is automatically wrong, but that readers and politicians deserve to know who is paying before they decide how much weight to give it.

Atlas Network itself discloses little. Wikipedia's summary of its public filings lists the Charles Koch Foundation, Donors Trust, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation and the Lilly Endowment among its donors, alongside the Exxon funding already documented above. Asked directly by the ABC where Atlas Network's own money came from, executive vice president Tom Palmer said only, "The interests are people who favour liberty".

In Australia, the founding funders of two of the ten organisations on this page are on the public record. SourceWatch, citing journalist Paul Kelly's account of the period, names the Centre for Independent Studies' founding corporate backers as Western Mining Corporation, CRA, BHP, Shell, Santos and Rupert Murdoch's Adelaide Advertiser. SourceWatch's profile of the Institute of Public Affairs names BHP Billiton and Western Mining Corporation among its disclosed funders, and the ABC reported that Australia's richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, has funded the IPA through Hancock Prospecting, a fact that surfaced through court documents rather than voluntary disclosure.

SourceWatch also records both the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies receiving regular tobacco industry grants from the 1980s, including an annual $10,000 grant from Philip Morris that CIS founder Greg Lindsay brought with him when he established the organisation in 1976. What has changed since is the industry doing the funding, not the practice: these organisations still do not publish their funders, and the one place money becomes visible now is when a recipient is registered with an electoral commission that requires disclosure.

One of the ten is the exception, and only because of where its money landed. The Australian Institute for Progress registered with the Queensland electoral commission, which obliged it to file returns, and those returns are now the single window onto any of these organisations' funding. They record 17 declared donations totalling $711,600, filed with the Electoral Commission of Queensland.

What those returns show is concentration: four of the 17 declared donations come from one donor, the coal industry group Coal Australia, and together account for $613,500 of the $711,600 declared, 86 per cent of it. The rest is made up of much smaller gifts from named individuals. The same total has been reported publicly, traced to money given in the months before the 2024 Queensland state election. The Guardian separately reported the same Coal Australia total, linking it to anti-Greens election advertising.

That is what a disclosure rule buys a reader. Anyone reading an Australian Institute for Progress paper on resources policy can now weigh it knowing which industry supplied most of the organisation's declared income, and decide for themselves what that is worth. The judgement stays with the reader; the rule only makes it possible. Nothing comparable is visible for the other nine organisations. That absence isn't evidence that no such funding exists. It simply reflects that a think tank which doesn't register with an electoral commission never has to name a donor. Several of the ten are registered charities and file annual figures with the ACNC, but those are totals by category, not who gave what.

Who in public office is connected to these organisations

Money is one form of connection, and mostly an invisible one. Formal roles and recorded meetings are another, and they are far better documented: 103 people or bodies in politics or government hold a relationship with one of these ten organisations that is recorded in a public document, some as formal positions and some as recorded meetings.

Tony Abbott is recorded as a Distinguished Fellow and later a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs. Tim Wilson is recorded as its Director of Climate Change Policy in 2013, before entering parliament. Amanda Stoker is recorded as a Director of the Australian Institute for Progress. The Australian Taxpayers' Alliance is recorded as a Partner Organisation of the Liberal Democratic Party.

Others are meetings rather than roles. Between 2016 and 2025, released diaries record 15 meetings between these organisations and ministers or their offices, including the Premier of New South Wales meeting the Centre for Independent Studies in 2022 and again in 2025, and the Deputy Premier and Minister for Education meeting it in 2024.

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

Every person or body in politics or government directly connected to one of the ten organisations. Node colour is the entity type recorded in the database.

Beyond those direct relationships, a further 402 politicians and government bodies are connected through somebody who is. That figure is deliberately conservative, and the methodology explains what it leaves out. What remains is a set of connections that run through named individuals rather than through a single busy diary.

What the ministerial diaries actually record

Released ministerial and chief-of-staff diaries record 15 meetings between these organisations and ministers or their offices, between 2016 and 2025. The diaries also record what each meeting was about, which is more informative than the fact of the meeting itself: the Institute of Public Affairs on red tape reduction, the Centre for Independent Studies on the Aboriginal Procurement Policy, on intergenerational policy, and on education.

One limitation is worth stating plainly, because it looks like missing data and isn't. New South Wales publishes several ministerial diaries by office rather than by name, so 11 of these 15 entries read "Premier", "Treasurer" or a portfolio title with no person attached. The database records the office as the diary wrote it and does not infer the individual. The office and the exact date together identify the person from public record, and the linked diary names them. Queensland, by contrast, publishes by name, which is why Jarrod Bleijie and Christian Rowan appear directly.

One note on the two 7 September 2016 entries: they are two separate diary lines on the same day, one on the Social Innovation Council and one on the innovation portfolio, not a duplicate. The second is recorded in the source with a typo, "innovat ion", which has been left as the diary wrote it.

The people who aren't in politics

Politicians and government bodies are one part of this dataset; most of the 1,435 individuals it names aren't in politics at all. 1,179 of them are recorded only as "Contributor", pulled from the Centre for Independent Studies' own list of published authors on its website, meaning they've written something for the organisation, not that they've worked for it. That distinction matters: appearing in this dataset isn't evidence of a close relationship, and treating a contributor as an insider would badly misread it. The remaining 256 hold more formal positions: board members, directors, research fellows and staff.

A small number of people hold several roles across the dataset at once. Jennifer Marohasy was a Senior Fellow at the IPA from 2003 to 2009 and again from 2015 to 2025, and co-authored a paper arguing that most recent warming is due to natural causes; climate scientists disputed the finding. She is recorded 52 times across the dataset. Michael Chaney, a former director of the Centre for Independent Studies, was chairman of Wesfarmers, Woodside Petroleum and National Australia Bank; he is recorded 24 times. Chris Berg was an IPA policy analyst and editor of the IPA Review from 2004 to 2017; he is now a professor at RMIT's Blockchain Innovation Hub and remains an Adjunct Fellow of the IPA and an Academic Fellow of the Australian Taxpayers' Alliance, recorded 23 times.

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

The most connected individuals recorded around the ten organisations. Names are not merged across organisations, so two nodes sharing a name are two records rather than a confirmed single person. Download the dataset to check each entity against its source.

Where these organisations meet, and where they meet Advance

For all the individual connections above, the ten organisations are barely connected to each other as institutions. Across the whole database there are only two direct records linking any pair of them, and both involve the Australian Taxpayers' Alliance: it is recorded as a Partner Organisation of the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation, and as a Partner Organisation of the Australian Libertarian Society. No other pair of the ten has a single direct link, and none of the ten has a direct link to Advance or to One Nation.

One step out, the picture changes. The Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies are connected by 45 different paths one intermediate step apart, almost all of them individuals who hold or have held a role at both organisations. (Paths through the diaries of individual ministers are excluded as routes.) Eleven further pairs of the ten organisations are connected the same way, including the Centre for Independent Studies to the Australian Libertarian Society (five paths) and to the H R Nicholls Society (four), and LibertyWorks to four of the other nine.

The same method connects four of the ten organisations to Advance, the campaign group, within one step: the Institute of Public Affairs, the Centre for Independent Studies, the Australian Taxpayers' Alliance and the Australian Institute for Progress. The other six, including LibertyWorks and the Australian Libertarian Society, have no path to Advance at any degree. Advance is not an Atlas Network member and holds no directory records at all; it appears in this database through electoral disclosures and archived campaign pages. The connection running to it is shared personnel, not membership.

People and organisations connecting the think tanks to Advance

Tony Abbott and Sam Kennard each bridge two of the think tanks to Advance rather than one. Coal Australia Limited is the only financial connection: it is recorded donating both to the Australian Institute for Progress and to Advance.

One Nation, by contrast, is almost absent. Across the whole set there is a single two-step path: Malcolm Roberts is recorded as a contributor to the Centre for Independent Studies and as a Senator for One Nation. Advance and One Nation are themselves connected only through shared donors in electoral returns, not through people: Angus Aitken, and Sixmilebridge Pty Ltd on two separate returns.

The Australian Taxpayers' Alliance partner list

The Australian Taxpayers' Alliance is one of the two organisations on this page linked to another Atlas partner directly (see above, on Mannkal and the Australian Libertarian Society). Its full partner list, recorded by DeSmog, runs to twelve organisations, of which two are in the Atlas directory: the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation and the Australian Libertarian Society. The other ten are the Liberal Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Party, the Democratic Labor Party, the Federal Young Liberal Movement, the Australian Liberal Students' Federation, Menzies House, the Institute for Private Enterprise, the Consumers and Taxpayers Association, CAN do, and the Australia Tea Party.

Five of the twelve are political parties, or the youth and student wings of parties, rather than think tanks or advocacy groups. That matters for how the Australian Taxpayers' Alliance presents itself: an organisation describing itself as an independent taxpayer watchdog is recorded here in a direct, formal relationship with party structures, which is not the arm's-length position the word "independent" implies. The partner list is recorded on DeSmog's profile of the organisation and again on its profile of Jim Lakely; each of the twelve appears once on each page, so the database holds 24 rows for these 12 relationships. The Alliance is separately named as a partner of Atlas Network itself in Atlas's own 2018 annual review.

Taken together, these connections describe a set of organisations that are, institutionally, mostly separate from each other, and almost entirely separate from Advance and One Nation, but personally intertwined, with the same names recurring as directors, contributors, donors and spokespeople across several of them at once. Atlas Network's own role in that picture is harder to pin down than any individual relationship is: it is the common thread running through all ten, named in an archived directory that records who was listed but never what being listed actually involved. What can be said with confidence is narrower, and it's set out below: the funders who can be named, the meetings that were logged, and the roles that were formally declared.

What this case study shows

The first thing the records show is a small world rather than a bloc. As institutions, the ten organisations named in the archived Atlas directory are barely connected to each other: across the whole database there are only two direct records linking any pair of them, and none linking any of them to Advance or One Nation. One step out, the same names recur. The Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies are joined by 45 different paths, almost all of them people who have held a role at both; four of the ten reach Advance through shared directors, fellows, donors and spokespeople, among them Tony Abbott, Gina Rinehart, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Sam Kennard; and Coal Australia is the one money path, recorded donating to both the Australian Institute for Progress and Advance. Atlas Network is the thread running through all ten, but its own directory records only who was listed, never what being listed involved.

The second is how close these organisations sit to public office. 103 politicians and government bodies hold a recorded relationship with one of the ten, and 402 more sit one step beyond. A former prime minister held fellowships at the Institute of Public Affairs; a future member of parliament was its Director of Climate Change Policy; a former senator is a director of the Australian Institute for Progress; and the Australian Taxpayers' Alliance, which describes itself as an independent watchdog, is recorded as a formal partner of the Liberal Democratic Party and four other party bodies. Released diaries record 15 meetings with ministers or their offices between 2016 and 2025, including the Premier of New South Wales twice, on subjects that range from red tape to education and the Aboriginal Procurement Policy.

The third is what the records cannot show, which is the money. Australian think tanks are not required to disclose their donors, and a global audit rated them the least transparent of any country it assessed. The single window is the Australian Institute for Progress, which registered with the Queensland electoral commission and so had to file returns: 17 declared donations totalling $711,600, of which $613,500, 86 per cent, came from the coal industry group Coal Australia in the months before the 2024 state election. For the other nine the trail runs cold, and what is known of their funding comes from court documents or from decades-old accounts of founding backers in mining, oil and tobacco. That gap is the point. These organisations exist to put ideas in front of politicians and the public, so who pays for those ideas, and what they want in return, is exactly what a reader needs to weigh them, and it is the one thing the law leaves almost entirely unanswered. What the public record does settle is set out below: the funders who can be named, the meetings that were logged and the roles that were formally declared, each linked to its source.

Notes and further reading

Atlas Network's own description, quoted in DeSmog's profile of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation: "over 500 wholly independent, nonprofit organizations spanning almost 100 countries around the globe".

Transparify, 2015 Report: How Transparent are Think Tanks about Who Funds Them?, reported in On Think Tanks, "Australian think tanks least transparent in the world, new data shows" (2015): of twenty leading Australian think tanks assessed, nine gave no information at all about who funds them, and the group averaged 1.2 out of 5 stars, the lowest of any country surveyed.

Further reading: Clark, E., "How Atlas Network amassed a global network of free market think tanks and reached into Australia and New Zealand", ABC News, 24 April 2025.