Who and What is the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and what is its influence over our Australian landscape?

  • It is a small (~8,000 members) but very well-funded (~$10 million p.a.) thinktank and fundraiser for the Liberal Party,
  • It champions free market capitalism, small government and the elimination of regulation and supervision of commercial life; e.g. no restraints on mining and no minimum wage.
  • Big supporters have included the mining and tobacco industries, and individuals such as Gina Rinehart, Rupert Murdoch, Tony Abbott and George Pell.
  • It advocates the breakup and sale of the ABC.
  • It is enmeshed in a global web of libertarian right-wing networks, mainly centred in the USA and Europe, funded by wealthy businesses and businessmen like the Koch brothers

It has been quite a while since we turned our ABC Friends spotlight upon the Institute for Public Affairs, the IPA.

That has possibly been because the IPA, unlike some of the other libertarian “thinktanks” connected to the Atlas Network, is blatantly and publicly up-front about its real ideals and its targets, and so needs little exposing.

But it has the same key objectives as the others we are covering in this series on ABC enemies - pro-business and free market, anti-regulation, anti-environment, anti-social responsibility and certainly anti any form of education or media that can’t be bought and controlled – read public education and public broadcasting.

For example:

50. Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function

51. Privatise SBS

These two IPA objectives, numbers 50 and 51, were included in a 2012 IPA ‘wish list’ paper, ‘Be Like Gough’, coauthored by James Paterson, yes the same James Paterson who is now a Liberal Senator for Victoria and Shadow Minister for Finance, Government Services and the Public Service.

When Tony Abbott was elected Prime Minister, he implemented a significant number of the 75 objectives in this IPA wish list in his first year.

More recently, in its 2019 publication “20 Policies to Fix Australia” the IPA listed the objective:

8. Privatise the ABC

In a free society the government should not own and operate its own media company. The media market in Australia is highly competitive. Online platforms have transformed and disrupted traditional approaches to media. Consumers have never had more choice about where to source their news and opinions on current affairs. Moreover, the ABC is unremittingly bias. Its staff are five times more likely to vote for the Greens compared to the general population. The ABC is beyond reform. New leaders will not fix the problem, regardless of their experience or intention. The ABC must be privatised.

Complete disinformation of course. That publication was complemented in the same year by IPA members Berg and Davidson publishing the book Against Public Broadcasting – Why we should Privatise the ABC and How to Do It.

In its halcyon days in the decade or so up to 2020, the IPA could claim as members a number of federal MPs. Mark Buckley, in his 2020 article “IPA is Wrecking Our Democracy”, identified the 2020 Coalition government as including PM Morrison, his treasurer, finance minister, and eight other ministers as IPA members.

Add to those significant policy makers the opinion manipulators like Rupert Murdoch, the range of Sky presenters, journalist at The Australian, Janet Albrechtsen, herself an ex-Chair of the IPA, and IPA funders like Gina Rinehart, and one wonders how things could possibly have gone awry. But they did, and Morrison lost the election.

The answer is possibly given by John Roskam, who, as he departed as IPA’s Executive Director at the end of a 17-year tenure, said:

Twenty or 30 years ago, we had dozens of ASX 100 companies supporting the IPA. Now, there’s not one. “Not one,” he repeats, for emphasis. “Not one of the ASX 100 companies supports the IPA.”

That Roskam despairing comment about the waning interest in the IPA from big business, was further reflected in the 2025 election. Business, which originally created the IPA, was clearly ambivalent about the absent detail on IPA supported Coalition policies, on energy (nuclear?), workplace practices (work from home?), taxation and so on. And the anti-ABC aspect of the campaign makeup was consistent throughout – as seen in Dutton’s ‘hate media’ public comment and several aggressive campaign interactions with ABC journalists. Also, about 40% of the roles in the Coalition’s Shadow Ministry led by Peter Dutton were held by people who had in the past personally voted in Parliament to decrease ABC funding or to privatise the ABC.

So, the world had changed, but did the IPA change with it? Some commentators have remarked that the 2025 federal election has shown how the hard right of the conservative movement lives in its own ‘echo chamber’, detached from reality and believing in the reverberation of its own opinions from like-minded souls.

However, encouraged by what is happening in the USA, we expect the IPA to reflect, revitalise, and reinvigorate its core objective to destroy public broadcasting – it’s in its DNA, count on it.