Twiggy Forrest spends millions pushing for Big Government censorship. By Joanne Nova.

Michael Shellenberger has connected some dots which Australian journalists don’t seem to have. While they were busy writing about Gina Rinehart buying Pauline Hanson a plane, they didn’t notice that there is a whole web of connections, loosely in the order of $10 million in funding, between Andrew Forrest and groups which promote the Digital Duty of Care Act (DDoC) and other online harms and regulation which is so obviously designed to censor us.

Andrew Forrest even gave Julie Inman Grant — our eSafety Commissioner — an all-expenses paid AI policy summit with 30 government, academic and technology leaders at Forrests’s Minderoo Station. She forgot to mention the $5,000 worth of hospitality in the official gifts register. Five days after the summit Mindaroo messaged everyone there about developing their ideas into a strategy. What looks, acts and smells like it thinks it is a government policy unit? It almost looks like a pet project of Andrew Forrest?

Forrest also helped fund an ABC series, “The State of Man,” which whipped up a scare campaign about young men online tripping over, the horror, a Joe Rogan podcast. This is the scary “manosphere”. Conveniently, it came out two days before the Minister announced the new Digital Duty of Care bill in Parliament. Handy eh?

All-purpose censorship:

The legislation threatens to fine publishers as much as $109 million dollars. So the fear is not just the direct censorship this would bring but the preemptive extra censorship that would be likely when a publisher couldn’t be sure what was permitted. The government would pretend they weren’t censoring anyone, but the companies would censor anyway “just in case”.

Furthermore, people criticizing “Net Zero” could have been deemed a risk to public health under the original vague definitions, and thus the DDoC could, in theory, have been used to squelch skeptical opinions, and Andrew Forrest probably doesn’t want Australians to talk about what a waste of money wind and solar power, or hydrogen power is. It would directly threaten his funding stream, wouldn’t it? …

How his money talks:

The web of funding is extensive: The Minderoo Foundation gave $7.5 million to an activist group called “Our Watch” and an undisclosed sum to another activist group called “Teach Us Consent”. Mindaroo also funded the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (Julia Gillard). the Australia Institute, the Tech Policy Design Institute, and others. One of the groups he funded was the Cambridge University Centre for Technology and Democracy, in the UK. He gave them £3 million pounds and they are advocating similar laws in Britain. Apologies to the UK. …

Who benefits? Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, among others.

Not only is Andrew Forrest dependent on Australian government subsidies and potentially earning convenient favours at home, but he is also dependent on Chinese funding. Not only is China his major customer, but he has also arranged a $2b loan for his decarbonization plans from the Bank of China and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

We have to ask whether he might also be earning some favors with President Xi?

After all, the DDoC censorship laws would make Australia less competitive, and a little bit more like China. Given our patsy role buying Chinese goods to ‘control’ the weather, presumably President Xi would also prefer to negotiate with big-spending left-leaning Australian governments. Anything that suppresses right wing critics in Australia is nicer for the CCP on so many levels. ..

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Forrest has worked hand-in-hand with the Australian government in China, to the point where commentators said it looked like he had a “Ministerial Role”.

Shellenberger doesn’t suggest that China might be using Forrest as a political lever, and nor is there any evidence that this is happening. But we know Forrest is vulnerable, and China’s commercial leverage over his company, Fortescue, is real. We also know Forrest’s access to senior Chinese political and financial figures is well documented. That raises a question worth asking: could these relationships provide an avenue for political influence, whether or not anybody has used it?

In another article Shellenberger lays out the precarious position Andrew Forrest is in. His green delusions have cost him (and us) a fortune, and when China came knocking for cheaper iron ore, Forrest’s competition could lower their prices, but Andrew Forrest did not, and his iron ore is right now, piling up on ships in Chinese ports.

Useful idiot? I can’t see Twiggy Forest as a George Soros or Klaus Schwab, masterminding and funding the globalists and undermining the West. Forest just isn’t at their level:

• George Soros lived in China. In the 1980s, he established a branch of the Open Society Institute in Beijing, which was shut down in May 1989 due to political pressure and accusations from the Chinese state security establishment.
• Klaus Schwab visited China multiple times but did not live there. He first traveled to China in 1979 with a delegation of European CEOs and later established the World Economic Forum’s Beijing office in 2006, but he resides in Cologny, Switzerland.