Australian Government spends $500 million per year on NGOs to push left wing views and make you feel fringe and marginal. By Jordan Abou-Zeid at the Institute of Public Affairs.
From the 2021 financial year to the 2025 financial year, Australian governments spent a cumulative $2.24 billion on 100 selected NGOs significantly engaged in
- “diversity and multiculturalism advocacy” ($1.04 bn),
- “public health and nanny state advocacy” ($622.2m),
- “welfare state advocacy and lawfare” ($309.6m),
- “indigenous co-governance advocacy” ($96.7m), and
- “green advocacy” ($169.8m).
Democracy means nothing if not the ability to have a free and fair debate, but bureaucrats are blatantly distorting this debate by giving their weight and billions of taxpayer dollars to favour one side.
When governments provide extraordinary financial support lobbying itself on diversity, nanny state, co-governance, and green policies, it generates a false perception that debate on these issues is settled.
Australians who hold mainstream views are made to feel they are more fringe or marginal than they really are.
The analysis finds persistent government funding of left-leaning advocacy, with no examples of funding support for the other side of the political spectrum.
The analysis highlights that this spending is not ‘waste’ — it is deliberate and intended to achieve a particular objective of stacking the deck of public debat.
Mainstream Australians who feel that the political system and political class does not represent them can hardly be blamed given they are routinely locked out of equal participation in the debates that concern them.
Full report here.