The think tank that built the Liberal Party just picked a new client

BYV: For 80 years the IPA pushed free-market ideology through the Liberal Party and shaped Australian policy in ways that served the wealthy few. Now it has found a more useful vehicle.

On 4 June 2026, the Australian Financial Review published an opinion piece by Cian Hussey, a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. It appeared on the IPA’s own website under its institutional branding. The headline: “Critics of One Nation ‘fringe’ are wrong. It’s the only mainstream party.” His argument rested on the AFR/Redbridge Group/Accent Research poll showing One Nation at 31 per cent nationally - ahead of Labor at 28 per cent and the Coalition at 20 per cent. The IPA published it without disclaimer or qualification.

That is not a personal blog post. It is the IPA’s institutional voice. And it matters, because of what the IPA actually is.

The institution that helped build the Liberal Party

The Institute of Public Affairs was founded in 1943 by Melbourne businessmen - among them George Coles and associates of Sir Keith Murdoch - in response to what they saw as the growing power of the Labor Party. Its inaugural director, Charles Denton Kemp, wrote a 1944 paper called “Looking Forward” that Robert Menzies described as “the finest statement of basic political and economic problems made in Australia for many years.” Journalist Paul Kelly, in The End of Certainty, concluded that CD Kemp was “probably the principal architect of the original Menzies platform.” Many of those policies fed directly into the Liberal Party, founded the following year.

This is documented history, not disputed.

The connection between the IPA and the Liberal project was never just intellectual. CD Kemp’s two sons, David and Rod Kemp, both became Liberal ministers. The IPA-to-parliament pipeline produced Tim Wilson, currently Shadow Treasurer, who worked at the IPA from 2007 to 2013. John Pesutto, Victorian Liberal leader, is an alumnus. So is James Paterson. For more than eighty years, the IPA functioned as intellectual infrastructure for the Liberal project - a source of ideas, personnel, and institutional legitimacy.

That is the institution whose research fellow just told the AFR that the Liberal Party holds “fringe” opinions.

Who funds both sides of this story

There is a name that connects the IPA and One Nation. NSW Supreme Court documents, disclosed during long-running family litigation, reveal that Rinehart’s company Hancock Prospecting donated $2.3 million to the IPA in 2016 and $2.2 million in 2017. The IPA’s annual reports for those years did not name Rinehart as a donor. At the time they were not legally required to.

Rinehart’s financial relationship with One Nation is separately documented. Hancock Prospecting confirmed it donated the Cirrus G7 aircraft - a light plane valued at over $1 million - to One Nation, with Hanson promoting it in a social media video as a tool to reach regional communities. An additional $2 million in cash came from Rinehart’s associates, including stockbroker Angus Aitken and former Northern Territory Chief Minister Adam Giles.

Rinehart is the common thread. The same person who was the major disclosed donor to the institution that built the Liberal Party is the primary backer of the party now being declared mainstream in that institution’s name.

You do not need to allege conspiracy to note that this is a structural fact. The money flows in a documented direction. The political effect is visible.

The British parallel

Australia is not the first country to watch this happen.

In Britain, the Institute of Economic Affairs - the IEA, the closest British equivalent to the IPA - spent decades as the intellectual backbone of the Conservative Party, helping to shape Thatcherism and the free-market framework that defined British conservatism from the 1980s onward. As Nigel Farage’s Reform UK surged, the IEA’s commentary shifted. The IPA published its own analysis of Reform UK’s trajectory in late 2025, describing Reform as seeking to “end the Conservative Party and reorient British politics” - and treating that ambition not with alarm but as a coherent expression of popular will.

Think tanks do not remain loyal to parties that are losing. They remain loyal to power.

What the record shows

One Nation’s voting record in the Senate is public. They voted against the federal anti-corruption body. Against transparency of political donations. In favour of repealing the section of the Racial Discrimination Act protecting people from public racial vilification. Against substantive climate action. In 2022, Hanson gave her word to Rex Patrick to support closing the billionaire disclosure loophole - then backflipped. The amendment died 17 to 17.

When Hanson was pressed on policy costings during the SA election campaign, she called the question stupid. One Nation does not publish costed platforms. That is not an accusation - it is a description of their practice across thirty years of parliamentary participation.

The IPA’s argument is that One Nation now represents mainstream Australian values, and that the political and media classes are the fringe. That argument rests entirely on One Nation’s current polling position.

However, a polling result is not a policy delivery. It is an expression of where trust has collapsed and what vehicle people have reached for in its absence. The communities driving One Nation’s numbers have real grievances. The question the IPA’s endorsement does not answer is whether One Nation’s record - thirty years of it - suggests it will address those grievances in parliament, or perform them.

The question for Liberal MPs and senators

Tim Wilson said on ABC’s Insiders on 10 May that he would not rule out a coalition with One Nation. By Monday morning he had revised that to “never, ever, ever.” The speed of that reversal tells you something about the internal Liberal calculation - that formal alliance with One Nation is currently seen as a vote-loser in the seats the party needs to survive.

However, the IPA’s endorsement is not about Tim Wilson’s arithmetic. It is about institutional legitimacy. When the think tank that spent eighty years supplying the Liberal Party with its intellectual foundation declares that party “fringe,” it withdraws something that cannot simply be reclaimed. The IPA has not published a rebuttal of that piece. It has not qualified it. It put it on its website under its own name.

That is not a rogue employee. It is a signal.

Every Liberal MP and senator who built their political identity in relation to the IPA - and there are many - is now entitled to ask what the institution they drew from has decided to become.

And every voter is entitled to apply the same five questions they always should: What does this level of government actually control? What is the party’s actual record? Who is funding them? Who are they accountable to? What specifically are they promising - and is it costed?

The answers to those questions have not changed. Only the institutional framing around them has.

Your Vote. Your Future.

You know what to do.

Onward we press

Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote a free civic education resource for every Australian who wants to cut through the spin. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday. If this was useful, send it to five people