Image: First public hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy in September 2025.
An attempt by climate denial, anti-renewables and conservative campaign groups to pressure an Australian senate inquiry investigating astroturfing and climate misinformation may have backfired by inadvertently disclosing more information about these groups and how they operate than intended, the committee chair says.
The Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy was formed in July with broad terms of reference to investigate bad faith lobbying that relied on tactics such as astroturfing and the spread of misinformation and disinformation to disrupt efforts to end climate pollution in Australia. To date the inquiry has received over 200 submissions with its first public hearings held in late September.
Committee chair Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, a Greens Senator from Tasmania, said the process has already been targeted by the same kind of campaigns it is seeking to investigate, after Advance, a pressure group closely associated with conservative politics, sought to spam the email accounts of senators serving on the committee. Whish-Wilson said he personally received more than 5000 emails in the space of a weekend and is aware several groups had encouraged their members either to write committee members or make submissions to the process. “I honestly thought the volume of submissions would be a lot higher in terms of numbers,” Whish-Wilson said. “One of the biggest surprises of the inquiry so far is the amount of information we’ve been able to glean from the submissions. I don’t think the pressure campaign has rattled anyone at all. In fact I think it’s provided a fascinating insight in how organizations are using AI to generate submissions and write emails that appear distinct, and public relations firms to coordinate these campaigns.”
The inquiry has only just begun public hearings and has so far published 227 submissions on its website. Drilled – which contributed a submission to the inquiry – sought to analyze this material and found at least 96 submissions, more than 40 percent of submissions, were authored by organizations or people promoting climate denial in some form. A third of submissions were associated with figures promoting “hard climate denial”; the other two thirds – 64 submissions – were considered to display some form of “soft climate denial”. This describes situations where the author does not explicitly challenge climate science or deny human activity was responsible for causing it, but instead attacks efforts to address the problem. Soft climate denial was differentiated from hard climate denial by intent. Whatever the motivations—some may be motivated by genuinely felt concerns about development issues—or ignorance, the result is a de facto defense of the continued production and consumption of oil, gas and coal. An additional two submissions were considered soft climate denial in the Australian context based on their overall message and conclusions even though they appeared to accept, or were ambiguous about, the author’s views on the science of climate change. Those submissions that were wholly irrelevant or unrelated to the overall inquiry, such as those promoting fusion power, were not counted in this group.
Where it was possible to associate a submission or author with a geographic location, at least a third of those engaging in soft-denial could be linked to specific anti-renewables campaigns in Queensland and New South Wales, or allied groups in other parts of the country who appeared to have made contributions in solidarity. These included group submissions on behalf of specific campaigns, and submissions from both the leadership of these groups and members. The combined effect of many of these contributions was an attempt to use the inquiry process to prosecute renewables projects and their developers for alleged misinformation, dishonesty or corruption.
Many submissions in this group were single-page documents that were often incoherent, expressed general anti-government sentiment, attacked the focus of the inquiry, or attempted to prosecute specific renewable energy projects targeted by past campaigns. The two most frequently cited campaigns were those undertaken against a proposed offshore wind project in the Illawarra, New South Wales, and the Chalumbin wind farm project near Ravenshoe, Far North Queensland.
Brown University Professor J. Timmons Roberts, speaking to the committee by video link in late September, described how his team’s research had shown many anti-renewables groups start out organically with genuine concerns but are later co-opted by other organizations or individuals with specific agendas.
“A lot of these concerns are genuinely felt,” Roberts said. “People do care about their places and are willing to fight for them, and I respect that very much.”
“When those fears are whipped up by external interests that have a self-interest which is based on their commercial attempts to do whatever it is, there are other outside interests that want to manipulate these communities, and I think that's deeply problematic.”
This was reflected in some submissions where authors described how they had previously volunteered with small, regional community groups in a volunteer capacity, before they eventually became drawn into larger anti-renewables campaigns. Though far fewer, the inquiry also received submissions from individuals, often anonymous, who said they were residents of these regions and supported renewable energy projects. These submissions expressed frustration at what they believed was widespread misinformation in their communities, and in some cases described examples of harassment, bullying and intimidation. There was also some nuance between anti-renewable submissions. Some contributors, for instance, urged the committee to distinguish criticism of individual energy projects, their developers and broader ecological concerns, from flat anti-renewables sentiment and climate denial. In this instance, Drilled counted apparent “NIMBY” submissions as soft climate denial as many still repeated falsehoods about renewable energy, climate change or the broader energy transition, and ultimately had the effect of preserving the dominance of oil, gas and coal by undermining technologies needed to phase them out.
These were accompanied by more sophisticated attempts to flip the script. In a manner reminiscent of DARVO attacks—an acronym for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender”—some submissions sought to use the inquiry’s terms of reference to indict groups campaigning for action to address climate change and accuse them of being the true astroturfed organisations. One submission from the National Rational Energy Network, an anti-renewables group led by ex-Queensland police officer Katy McCallum, once described by The Guardian AU as “one of the loudest campaigners against Australia’s energy rollout”, involved a 12-page analysis of climate group Farmers For Climate Action. In her submission, McCallum sought to attack the group’s legitimacy as a representative voice for regional people. At the end, McCallum cited both Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg and John Stuart Mill’s 1859 treatise On Liberty as authorities. A long-time McCallum ally, Jim Willmott from Property Rights Australia, also contributed a submission to the inquiry. Another submission by prominent anti-renewables group, Rainforest Reserves Australia was revealed in
to have been written using AI. The group’s submission referred to a nonexistent windfarm and cites scientific articles that don’t exist.
Submissions from more traditional climate deniers offered a who’s who of a previous generation. Historically, public discussions of climate change in Australia have been dominated by networks of typically older men, usually retired professionals or executives, who are well-connected among sections of the media, politics and the corporate world. The 30 submissions Drilled counted as promoting hard climate denial functioned as a self-reported list of who was still operating. Among the prominent figures to contribute was geologist Ian Plimer, perhaps Australia’s most internationally recognizable climate sceptic. Plimer started out as a newspaper columnist who, infamously, sold his house to finance a doomed lawsuit against creationists in the 90s before later turning to climate denial in the following decades. A reporter with The Guardian AU who once challenged Plimer on his ideas during an interview later described him as “one of the most difficult and evasive interviewees I have ever spoken to”. A biographical note attached to Plimer’s submission disclosed that he is currently “a director of various unlisted private Hancock Prospecting iron, energy, research and copper exploration companies.” Hancock Prospecting’s executive chair is Australia’s richest woman, iron ore billionaire Gina Rinehart. Alan Moran, another prominent figure and former employee of Australian think tank the Institute of Public Affairs who has campaigned heavily against any embrace of renewable energy, provided a submission through his organization, Australian Environment Foundation. At least three other submissions directly referred to Moran’s work or were made by people associated with his organization.
Another notable entry was offered by far right One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts who has been compulsively drawn to every significant public forum organized by the Australian government on the subject of climate change. Roberts, a former coal mine manager, infamously encountered the science of climate change while on a holiday with his wife to the Whitsundays where he watched Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth in his hotel room. Roberts was so confronted by the documentary’s message, he responded by attempting to disprove it frame by frame. The culmination of this process was a 300,000 word, 135-page treatise titled CSRIOh!,published in 2013, that even conservative commentator and climate-sceptic Andrew Bolt described as “utterly stupid”. To support his thesis that climate change was an “antihuman” hoax to bring about a socialist New World Order aided by bankers and politicians, Roberts cited Infowars and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories at points. In 2016 he was elected to the federal senate to represent Queensland with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and has been a vocal opponent to any effort to address climate change.
Roberts’ submission was not the only contribution from an explicitly political figure. Unusually, Scott McCamish, an electorate officer for Victorian Senator Ralph Babet, a representative from the right-wing United Australia Party, contributed a six-page submission denying the science of climate change. Ordinarily, political staffers seek to avoid the limelight as they are not democratically elected, and their public activities may interfere with the work of their employer.
The average length of a submission to the inquiry was ten pages, but this was skewed by a number of notable outliers. Conservative pressure group Advance contributed the longest submission at 80 pages, with anti-wind campaign group, Rainforest Reserves Australia contributing a 78-page document and Senator Roberts offering a clipped 71-page thesis. Both Advance and Rainforest Reserves Australia expressed outrage and concern that they were being unfairly labelled astroturf groups under the inquiry’s Terms of Reference. Advance’s submission included a forward by executive director Matthew Sheahan, a figure described by The Saturday Paper as a less-charismatic Australian answer to US right-wing strategist and media personality Steve Bannon. The core part of the document offered a brief response to the terms of reference that criticized the inquiry as a “politically motivated attack on ordinary Australians”, with the rest made up of three attachments that ran to 62 pages, mostly composed of newspaper clippings.
As a point of contrast, a separate submission from the Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society analyzed the political ad spend of Advance with social media company Meta. It found the group had placed 4,443 ads on Meta platforms with a budget between $1m and $1.6m, generating approximately 193m impressions. This level of activity, the submission found, placed Advance in the same league as both dominant political parties in Australia, without the same scrutiny. Its messaging relied on culture war talking points to promote opposition to policies designed to transition the economy and amplify “climate contrarian arguments”.
“By combining high-volume culture-war advertising with persistent anti-renewable and anti-climate organic messaging, Advance is attempting to influence the wider public sphere in ways that rival party campaigns while evading the same levels of scrutiny and accountability,” it said.
As an organization, Advance is officially independent but is closely associated with the hard right of the conservative Liberal National Coalition, with several prominent political figures sitting on its board or involved in its operations in some capacity. A notable figure among the organization’s early supporters was Maurice Newman, a totemic personality on the Australian right wing. As a stockbroker in the 70s, Newman helped organize for Chicago economist Milton Friedman to make two visits to Australia. These visits helped lay the ideological foundation for the financialization of the Australian economy through the 1980s and 1990s. Ironically, Friedman, the godfather of US-style Libertarianism, was himself found in 1946 by the Buchanan Committee to have taken money from the national real estate lobby to give their preferred policy proposals an independent, academic and ideological veneer. The Committee, created to investigate “direct and indirect lobbying”, ended up exposing the first Libertarian think tank, The Federation for Economic Education, as a creation of big business lobbying.
Since this early success, Newman himself has gone on to have a storied career in Australian politics, being appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Australian Stock Exchange. In 2014, Newman served as a political adviser to conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who sits on the board of Advance, at a time when he began a very public campaign against renewable energy through an earlier-generation anti-wind group named “Stop These Things”. In an article published in The Spectator in January 2013, Newman wrote that wind turbines are “grossly inefficient, extremely expensive, socially inequitable, a danger to human health, environmentally harmful, divisive for communities, a blot on the landscape, and don’t even achieve the purpose for which they were designed – namely the reliable generation of electricity and the reduction of CO2 emissions”.
Drilled only counted four explicitly commercial entities making submissions to the enquiry, and four groups that could be considered trade associations, most of which had been invited to participate. These organizations represented both fossil fuel and renewable interests, but at least three submissions were openly associated with the coal industry. One submission by Future Coal, an entity representing a global coal industry alliance that promotes so-called “sustainable coal”, aired frustrations with how Australia’s energy grid was being planned. Another by Nick Jorss, Chair of Queensland metallurgical coal miner Bowen Coking Coal, asked the committee to investigate activist group Sunrise, alleging that it had received “tens of millions of dollars in international funding from major climate philanthropies” to “manufacture fake grassroots movements”. A third submission by the Queensland-based industry association, Coal Australia, called for Australian intelligence agencies to investigate climate activists as foreign actors.
“Coal Australia believes there should be constant vigilance on threats to Australia’s energy security,” Coal Australia’s submission said. “We believe that guarding against climate change and energy misinformation – including through foreign funded and aided environmental activism and climate change and energy misinformation – would be maximized by a regular report to Parliament from those agencies charged with national security, intelligence and oversight of elections.”
Short submissions were received from the Institute of Public Affairs and Centre for Independent Studies, two think tanks that have been associated with The Atlas Network, a global network of more than 500 “free market” think tanks. Each sought to defend themselves from allegations that they acted in concert with or as part of a coordinated action with other organizations on campaigns.
On the other side, there were a raft of significant submissions from climate groups both within Australia and internationally, including Eliza Morgera, UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights and the International Panel on the Information Environment. Drilled was among four media organizations to contribute, including wire-service Australian Associated Press. Major trade groups such as Australian Energy Producers and the Minerals Council of Australia were notably absent.
The curious lack of industry input, and the overall composition of the submissions, suggests the extent to which the public conversation on climate change in Australia is largely left to proxies. Even if there is no strict coordination or nexus, an alignment of interests means the dynamic works to their advantage. With the next round of hearings yet to be scheduled, and the deadline for its final report to be delivered on 4 February 2026, Tasmanian Senator Peter Whish-Wilson says the body has its work cut out for it. There is already “substantial” evidence before the committee, he says, but any judgements will have to wait for the process to play out.
“Even if all we get out of this inquiry is that the average Australian realizes that what they’re reading about how climate change is a hoax, even in the comments, it’s bullshit, that it was put there by someone with a vested interest, that it’s ideological – that’s a good thing,” he says. “That itself would be an outcome for me, that we raise a level of awareness so people can apply a more critical lens to what people are reading and hearing.”
