There is an interesting article on this on Newsroom:
https://tinyurl.com/44y8zemx
While the initial focus is on the TU there is also coverage of other >organisations (including the CTU) towards the end.
What stands out to me is that registered third-party promoters are
free to advocate political issues (as political parties are) but are
not required to disclose their income sources as political parties
are. The solution seems simple - third-party promoters should be
required to disclose their funding sources in the same way (and for
the same reason) that political parties are required to do.
There is an interesting article on this on Newsroom:
https://tinyurl.com/44y8zemx
On Tue, 31 Oct 2023 09:44:59 +1300, Crash <nogood@dontbother.invalid>
wrote:
There is an interesting article on this on Newsroom:
https://tinyurl.com/44y8zemx
Sorry - I forgot this is behind a pay wall:
---
Chiding in plain sight
Inside the Taxpayers’ Union’s in-your-face push for change
Imagine if an organisation that raised millions of dollars from
unknown donors and employed almost as many people as the Parliamentary >Commissioner for the Environment tried to influence the election.
Not only that, but its campaign was waged, in the main, in public
view, and within the rules.
As the dust settles on a bitter election campaign, questions are being
asked about the influence of corporate and private money in our
politics. Some of those questions will no doubt be directed at the >free-market think tank the Taxpayers’ Union (TPU).
Between August 1 and election day, it paid for polling at the national
and electorate level, issued almost 100 press releases, hosted seven >political debates, published four policy reports, started a petition,
and drafted alternative legislation.
A debt clock gimmick was rolled out. Taxpayers’ Union staff appeared
in the media as commentators.
One way or another, many, if not most, citizens would have tripped
over the Taxpayers’ Union's work, and its constant messages about
taxes being too high, the government over-spending, and wasteful
bureaucracy.
Its critiques were mostly aimed at the sitting Labour government. And
though it did occasionally praise National, it also criticised the
party for not going further.
After the election, in which the country lurched to the political
right, Newsroom asked the Taxpayers’ Union if it influenced the
election. Executive director Jordan Williams responded: “We certainly
hope so!”
On election night, Williams and Taxpayers’ Union co-founder David
Farrar, the National Party pollster, attended the National Party
event.
Nobody spoken to by Newsroom alleged the Taxpayers’ Union had broken
any rules.
It registered with the Electoral Commission as a “third-party
promoter”, which means it has limits on advertising spending, and has
to adhere to rules on advertising disclosures and signs.
There’s no suggestion it won’t comply.
However, the commission’s manager of legal and policy Kristina Temel
confirms third-parties don’t need to disclose their funding sources.
Also, much of the Taxpayers’ Union’s activities fall outside the
Electoral Commission’s oversight, which is restricted to advertising.
As a free-market think tank, the Taxpayers’ Union’s principles are
clear, and it has declared its association with the global Atlas
Network umbrella group.
But is it acceptable for the funding of such an influential group to
be a black box? And what about its direct influence on politicians and >policy?
Timothy Kuhner, an associate professor of law at the University of
Auckland, says the lack of transparency from third-party promoters is >problematic.
“What we’re seeing is an increase in the number of ways that people
can influence electoral outcomes, and the formation of public opinion,
free from public scrutiny.”
The public’s probably familiar with the concepts of hard and soft
power: the former using a stick or a gun to gain influence; and the
latter attempting to persuade people with values or investment.
Kuhner says there’s another type called conditioned power, in which
groups construct issues in a way that’s favourable to their interests.
Your average voter might not be thinking deeply, or in a Machiavellian
way, about how topics like climate change, taxation, and immigration
are portrayed during an election campaign.
Speaking of what’s happened recently in the United States, Kuhner
says: “That prioritisation of issues is something that’s been paid for
and constructed and strategically built. And so I really worry about
that.”
In theory, political parties are supposed to channel public opinion
and people’s interests to form ideas of public good and political
will.
“And then you get these registered promoters who can start to outspend >political parties or outmanoeuvre political parties, and what they’re
trying to do is kind of construct a very different type of political
will – which is a political will tailored to, generally, the economic >interests of their supporters. Sometimes it’s the ideological
interests of their supporters.
“But either way, it’s unaccountable, and it’s opaque. The label I
would put on all this stuff is privatisation of democracy.”
What we know about TPU, and what we don’t know
The Taxpayers’ Union’s formation was announced 10 years ago on October
30, 2013.
John Bishop, the father of National Party MP and campaign strategist
Chris Bishop, was founding chairman, and Farrar was a board member.
Williams, a lawyer, was named executive director. He was enmeshed at >different times with Act party politics – working as an intern for
leader Don Brash, and for MP Stephen Franks’ 2008 election campaign.
He also worked at the latter’s law firm.
In Nicky Hager’s 2014 book, Dirty Politics, Williams was described as
one of Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater’s closest political
associates, and the “apprentice” of National’s strategy consultant
Simon Lusk.
In 2011, Williams fronted an anti-MMP campaign group, Vote for Change,
whose campaign manager was Lusk, and Slater did “a large part of the
work”, wrote Hager, through Whale Oil posts.
Hager detailed how Williams was involved in rolling Act leader Rodney
Hide in 2011, by talking to a woman Hide had been sending “dodgy
texts”.
(Hide told Stuff the allegation was untrue, and Williams called it
“utterly, utterly false”. In the same story, he said he’d fallen out
with Lusk, and, though he talked to Slater every day, denied the
Taxpayers’ Union worked in concert with Whale Oil.)
Williams was involved in another political leader’s downfall, that of >Conservative Party’s Colin Craig.
A long-running court feud ended, in 2019, with Williams paying
compensation and issuing an apology.
Williams is also a founding council member of the Free Speech Union,
which became an “intervener” in the High Court’s consideration of
whether anti-trans activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, or Posie Parker,
should be allowed entry to New Zealand.
In the Taxpayers’ Union’s first press statement, in 2013, its founders >described it as “a politically independent grassroots campaign to
lower the tax burden on New Zealanders and reduce wasteful government >spending”.
The independence claim has been repeatedly knocked.
In Dirty Politics, Hager wrote the Taxpayers’ Union “operates, in
effect, as an arm’s-length ally of the National Party” and called it a >“political tool”.
The following year, political scientist Bryce Edwards described the >Taxpayers’ Union to the NZ Herald as “the Act Party in drag”.
Its modus operandi for revealing wasteful spending is to flood
councils and government departments with official information
requests. But that hasn’t always gone smoothly.
The NZ Herald wrote in 2018 how it had been caught making requests
using fake identities.
After proudly stating it would never take Government funding,
Taxpayers’ Union applied for and received more than $60,000 from the
wage subsidy scheme during the Covid-19 lockdown. A search for its
name on the Work and Income website this week drew a blank, suggesting
it paid the money back.
In November 2021, the Taxpayers’ Union was unmasked as the company
that registered the www.motherofallprotests.nz domain name, showing
its direct link to fringe agricultural group Groundswell. (That was
changed, soon after, to Williams’ digital marketing firm The Campaign >Company.)
That same year, ex-Act staffer Grant McLachlan said Act weaponised
so-called astro-turfs – groups that masquerade as concerned citizens
but actually push the interests of large corporates.
McLachlan told RNZ the Taxpayers’ Union “did a lot of the groundwork”
for the Act Party in the 2020 election campaign through its Campaign
for Affordable Housing. “It was actually a contrived problem that the
Act Party told them to create.”
In response, Williams said it was ridiculous to suggest the Taxpayers’
Union was a mouthpiece for any political party. He has repeatedly
mentioned its wide membership and that the majority of its money comes
from “small dollar donations”.
A Guardian investigation in 2019 revealed the Taxpayers’ Union, which
had railed against cigarette tax increases and plain packaging laws,
received money from British American Tobacco.
It’s better about disclosing interests these days.
In an August 22 press statement headlined “Vaping crackdown will
jeopardise Smokefree 2025 goal", the Taxpayers’ Union made this
disclaimer: “2.1% of the Taxpayers' Union annual income is from
membership dues and donations from private industry, which includes >contributions from the nicotine, alcohol, sugar, and construction >industries.”
Newsroom asks Williams about the Taxpayers’ Union’s funding, staffing,
and influence.
He confirms it has 18 staff on its payroll, and used a couple of
contractors during the election campaign. That’s roughly equivalent to
the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment which, according to
its latest annual report, employs 20 staff.
Though the Taxpayers’ Union’s accounts are public, its funding sources
are not.
Its financial statements from last year, made public last month on the >Incorporated Societies website, show its income was $2.8 million, $2.6 >million of which was from donations.
Not bad for an outfit with income of $355,000 in 2017.
“Our income will not be significantly different to last year,”
Williams says.
He admits to some international funding.
“I’m not aware of any funding from individuals overseas who aren’t
either expat Kiwis or own houses and spend their time in New Zealand.”
As president and chair of World Taxpayers Associations (an Atlas
Network partner), he gets some travel expenses paid.
The Taxpayers’ Union has also won awards and travel scholarships from
the Atlas Network, chaired by New Zealander Debbi Gibbs, daughter of
the businessman Alan Gibbs, a long-time supporter of the Act party.
“We publicly disclose these,” Williams says of the Atlas money. “For
example, our investigations co-ordinator recently won the Asia ‘Shark
Tank Competition’ – successfully pitching a campaign idea in a
Dragons’ Den-style event during the Asia Liberty Forum in Malaysia.”
The $US10,000 prize winner was Oliver Bryan, a former political
advisor for a British Conservative Party politician.
“The prize money, and other Atlas funding, is small in terms of our
overall budget. It has never constituted more than 1 or 2 percent of
our annual income, and it is our only funding from overseas.” (This
last statement jars with the earlier one about individual donations.)
Back home, some listed companies and well-known brands donate to
Taxpayers’ Union, Williams says, but its industry income is low by >international standards – at the aforementioned rate of 2.1 percent.
The bulk of its donations average $65. “It was mostly raised through
small dollar / online giving from tens of thousands of New Zealanders
among our hundreds of thousands of subscribed supporters.”
Some of those supporters are MPs, with Williams confirming a dozen or
so are members.
“None, as far as I know, have given more than $50 or $100. The joining
fee is $25, and most will have just paid that.”
(Williams says various former staff work “in and around the NZ First,
Act, and National campaigns”, and former Taxpayers’ Union chair Casey >Costello, who resigned as a board member to stand for NZ First, will
enter Parliament on the party’s list. The mother of a Taxpayers’ Union >researcher was a Labour MP until last weekend.)
There is a funding anomaly.
According to year-old data on its website, 17.4 percent – as much as
$487,000 – of Taxpayers’ Union funding comes from the so-called
Taxpayers' Caucus.
Policy positions can’t be influenced by donations, its website states.
It also respects the privacy of supporters – which translates as
donating without fear of being outed.
The Taxpayers’ Union’s membership and one-off donations have soared
over the past two years as it tapped into opposition to major
government policies, such as Three Waters and Co-Governance.
“The Taxpayers’ Union ran the ‘Stop Three Waters’ campaign and, more >recently, the ‘Hands Off Our Homes, Stop Central Planning Committees’ >campaign," says Williams. "With the exception of the ‘Stop Three
Waters’ campaign, the vast majority of our creative and digital work
was in-house.”
Its association with Groundswell – the Taxpayers’ Union registered the >motherofallprotests.nz website in 2021, before the name changed to
Williams’ digital marketing agency, The Campaign Company – has no
doubt pulled in a new source of support: disaffected rural people.
(Williams argues the Taxpayers’ Union led a public change in attitude
on Three Waters. “By the time we had an alternative, broadly supported
by our supporters, and the group of councils who shared our concerns,
it was pretty easy for the centre-right parties to adopt the same, or >consistent, policies.”)
The Campaign Company helps various political and commercial clients in
New Zealand and overseas, Williams says.
“I don’t manage it day-to-day, and nor could I disclose client matters >without their permission.”
(However, it’s known the Campaign Company worked, briefly, on failed
Auckland mayoral candidate Leo Molloy’s election campaign, while, >confusingly, another Taxpayers’ Union offshoot, the Auckland
Ratepayers’ Alliance, criticised Molloy.)
Did the Taxpayers’ Union’s almost 100 press statements and its polling
during the election campaign get it more media mentions than ever
before?
“We did OK through the election, but we certainly didn’t get as much
media as we used to get during the [National Party leader and former
Prime Minister John] Key administration,” Williams says.
“TV, in particular, appears to have become a lot less balanced – for
example, the CTU’s critiques of National’s alternative budget numbers
were run largely unchallenged, while the quite obvious holes and
flawed assumptions in Labour’s GST policy costings didn’t even make
TV.”
(It did make the NZ Herald, however – which ran criticism of Labour’s
GST policy from the Taxpayers’ Union.)
In the think tank world, Williams says it’s difficult to measure
policy impact.
“If you are successful, and you manage to make good policy popular,
the politicians take the credit for what by then is ‘common sense’.”
One way to create influence is through polls – something the
Taxpayers’ Union did at a national and electorate level during the
election campaign.
“We see organisations all over the world funding and putting out
polls, and poll questions, in order to enhance things like press
releases, in order to enhance campaigns, and in order to create a
sense of consensus,” says Dr Lara Greaves, an associate professor in >political science at Victoria University of Wellington.
If there’s public consensus on an issue, and you repeat it enough,
that creates the “social reality”, Greaves says. But it’s important to
check the wording of poll questions to check for agreement bias –
because people being surveyed tend to agree with statements.
Something else people like to do is follow the leader – known as the >bandwagon effect.
“We’ve seen a lot of arguments on things like a wealth tax, for
example,” Greaves says. “People will repeat poll results, or repeat
this and that, and it creates that consensus.”
An example in this latest election was Labour’s line it was getting a >last-minute surge in the polls, in an attempt to create a consensus it
was going to do well.
Polls play an important part in democracy, Greaves says, to help get a
finger on the nation’s political pulse.
Greaves says if an electorate poll shows a candidate’s not going to
win people might be less inclined to vote for them. “People also don’t >understand the limitations of electorate-level polls.”
Political commentator Grant Duncan, a freelance writer and scholar,
says polls make a difference but there are many different ways in
which people are influencing one another.
“I think the question is, what do we regard to be as a fair and
democratic level of influence, that where vested interests aren’t
using their economic clout, you know, in their finances, in their
networks, and so forth, in ways that are injurious to the public
good?”
Taxpayers’ Union headlines on poll-related press statements:
Labour crashes and Winston's back
National leads in Napier electorate
National lead in Ilam Electorate
National/Act could form government comfortably
National Lead in Northland Electorate
Voters torn in Auckland Central electorate
Statistical tie between National and Act in race for Tamaki
Kiwis don’t believe Winston when he says he would not work with the
Labour Party again
Cost of Living Bites Taxpayers as They Head to the Polls
Kiwis overwhelmingly support inflation-adjustment of income tax
brackets
Kiwis oppose Government’s plans to strip planning powers from councils
Party political finance is a skewed playing field, Duncan says. The
wealthy have more money to donate, and they’ll donate to parties that
are going to represent their interests.
But third-party activities are more even. He mentions the Council of
Trade Unions, which had “a very well-organised and financed attack
campaign” on National leader and Prime Minister-Elect Christopher
Luxon during the election.
“But we don’t necessarily know where that money is coming from – and
that’s the thing that troubles me.”
We asked the same questions of the Council of Trade Unions that we
asked the Taxpayers’ Union.
Secretary Melissa Ansell-Bridges says the campaign was financed by the >Council of Trade Unions, affiliated unions and donations from the
public, and overseen, in the main, by one staff member – although
others contributed as required.
“The amount spent will be reported in due course, but pales beside the
large contributions made by businesses and wealthy New Zealanders to >National, and Act.”
Its objective was to highlight the costs to many communities from
National and Act’s policies – including the axing of Fair Pay
Agreements, the unfairness of tax cuts, and the risks to public
services.
Ansell-Bridges says the Council of Trade Unions contributed to the
debate on these policies and highlighted “fundamental flaws” in
National’s tax plan, “such as how few families would receive the
maximum tax cut benefit”.
“We wanted the retention of a centre-left government which has the
interests of working people at its heart, and so we are disappointed
this has not happened and share the worries of many from the policies
that may now be enacted.”
What does influence look like?
Defeated Ilam candidate Raf Manji, The Opportunities Party leader,
believes one way was the electorate poll in Ilam.
The Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll put the former Christchurch city
councillor well behind National’s Hamish Campbell, which Manji said
was an issue for his campaign.
“I don’t think we ever got out from underneath that poll.”
In the poll, Campbell ahead on 33 percent, encumbent Sarah Pallett, of >Labour, on 15 percent, and Manji on 14 percent.
The poll, released on August 29, the evening of The Working Group Ilam >debate, hosted by the Taxpayers' Union, was a blow for TOP, which was
relying on its leader winning the electorate to propel the party into >Parliament.
Manji notes 23 percent of the people polled were unsure or refused to
say who they’d vote for, and at least 10 percent said they’d vote for
a party that wasn’t even standing a candidate.
With 410 respondents, it had a margin of error of 4.5 percent.
It was a snapshot in time, more than seven weeks from election day,
but Manji believes it made a difference. Media mentions of Ilam and
Manji constantly repeated the result.
“The number of people who said to me, ‘Well, I’d vote for you, but I
need to know if you’ve got a chance in Ilam’. And then people in Ilam
go, ‘Oh, you haven’t got a chance – we heard there was that poll,
which had you miles behind’.”
By the time his campaign team thought it would be prudent to allocate
some money towards a poll, it was too late and was going to be too
expensive, Manji says.
“This stuff gets embedded into people’s minds and then they do vote
based on what they see the polls to be – and so, yes, I think the
polling does impact outcomes.”
On preliminary results, Campbell got 15,107 votes, or 45.1 percent,
streets ahead of Manji, who got 8526, or 25.5 percent.
Given the nature of vote-splitting MMP, it’s impossible to know how
much polling was a factor.
Maybe Manji didn’t reach or resonate with voters, or Campbell’s
mammoth door-knocking was effective. It might simply have been the
return of what was a safe blue seat.
Whatever happened, Manji learned a campaign lesson – “polling is
important”.
(He might have learned other lessons, too, like the folly of releasing >mysterious internal “polling”, and claiming the National and Labour >candidates were “pulling back”.)
The lively Ilam electorate debate was also noticeable for how
left-wing candidates were heckled, while National’s Campbell was left
to speak unmolested.
Manji describes the debate as slightly unsatisfactory, but says it
didn’t bother him or have an influence.
Labour’s Pallett says the crowd’s behaviour – directly mainly at her –
is what she expected, and she found it fun. “I knew what I was walking
into.”
Asked about the poll and debate, National’s Campbell says debates
definitely play a role in electorate campaigns but his main focus was
meeting as many people across Ilam as he could – having knocked on the
doors of more than 15,000 voters.
Some Taxpayers’ Union-The Working Group debates were described as
raucous and rambunctious, including a “party policy” debate in
Auckland.
Newsroom asked attendees National’s Paul Goldsmith, Labour’s Willie
Jackson, Te Pati Maori’s John Tamihere, and David Seymour, of Act,
about the debate, the Taxpayers’ Union, and whether their party
discuss policies with the Taxpayers’ Union before they’re announced
publicly.
Jackson and Tamihere didn’t respond.
Goldsmith says though the crowd tends more to the right, heckling is a >normal, and generally entertaining, part of debates.
“We welcome the involvement of groups such as the Taxpayers’ Union in
the political debate, so we have a wide variety of voices.”
Seymour says it was a good-natured debate, which the crowd seemed to
enjoy, and there were supporters from all sides of the political
spectrum.
Asked again, about his take on the Taxpayers’ Union and its
role/influence in politics/the election, and whether it discusses
party policy announcements with the Taxpayers’ Union before they’re
publicly released, Seymour’s reply was: “Nothing to say on the first >question, the answer to the second question is no.”
We realised our phrasing was clumsy, so asked Act whether it discusses >policies with the Taxpayers’ Union before they’re announced. There was
no response.
The Taxpayers’ Union publicly released all electorate and monthly poll >headline data no matter the result, Williams says.
“The result is the result, and the reason we contract David is that he
is subject to a code of practice and has a reputation for being among,
if not the best pollster in New Zealand.”
Though it polls on specific policy positions, providing accurate,
scientific polling is a public service, he says. And they’re not >self-fulfilling prophecies – Williams point to three Maori seats,
which went to Te Pati Maori, but which Curia had them behind in polls.
“In a case like Ilam, where the result could have had national
implications, voters benefit from having an accurate reading of how
well each party was performing. Such polling is not, however, a
prediction of the final result but rather a snapshot of voters’ views
at that particular point in time.”
Curia owner David Farrar says the Ilam poll was a good indication of
the actual result, as Campbell got around twice as many votes as the
Labour and TOP candidates. “It is no surprise that candidates who do
badly in a poll are unhappy with that.”
It’s not unusual for poll respondents to cite a different preference
to known candidates, he says, especially as nominations hadn’t closed.
“The level of undecided is an important factor in interpreting the
poll. That is why we are one of the few companies that publish the
results both including and excluding the undecideds.
The phone numbers – mostly mobile phones – used in the poll were >leased/purchased from a specialist company with a database of almost
one million New Zealand phone numbers tied to specific addresses.
Electorate polls are a snapshot and shouldn’t be seen as a conclusive >forecast, he says.
“Generally, electorate polls are less robust than national polls. A
smaller sample has a larger margin of error.”
Polls can influence voter behaviour to some degree, Farrar says, but
they also allow voters to make a more informed choice.
“When national polls showed Labour in the 20s, this probably did have
some influence on turnout as some supporters would have thought no way
they can win, as happened to National in 2020.”
If polls are wildly inaccurate, the media should be more cautious
about reporting results from those companies. There should be lower >expectations about a poll in, say, August of this year, compared with
close to election day, Farrar says – “campaigns matter”.
Asked about the Taxpayers’ Union’s direct, behind-the-scenes
influence, Williams says: “I speak to the leaders or their
representatives before the release of each month’s poll and provide
the results under embargo, as is custom for major political polls.
“As I – and nearly everyone else in the team – have been out on the
road, we’ve run into loads of MPs, leaders, and party officials. What
we say to them, or lobby them on, is no different to what we say
publicly.”
Of the debates, Williams says it’s not fair to say left-leaning
candidates were heckled more – although that was the view of some
candidates.
The most heckling occurred at the Tamaki debate, he says, in which the
front runners were on the centre right.
Every participating party or candidate received equal allocations of
free tickets.
Silencing The Voice
On election day here, Australians voted in the indigenous ‘The Voice’ >referendum.
The previous month, Australian academic Jeremy Walker, a senior
lecturer in social and political sciences at University of Technology
Sydney, published a paper in the journal Cosmopolitan Civil Societies, >summarising his research into the ‘No’ vote.
(One of the anti-Voice campaign’s themes, that its implementation
would divide Australians on the basis of race, was similar to the New
Zealand Act Party’s election campaign slogan and billboards of ending >“division by race”.)
Walker’s article argues the ‘No’ campaign was conducted on behalf of >fossil-fuel corporations and their allies, and coordinated by the
Australian branches of the Atlas Network – the “mother of all think
tanks”; a global umbrella organisation for 515 public policy research >institutes.
Atlas’s stated aim is to “litter the world with free-market
think-tanks”, Walker’s article states. The network has a “permanent >anti-climate policy campaign”, the article says.
Limited disclosure laws prevent Australians from knowing who finances
that country’s Atlas organisations which, Walker writes, gives rise to
the possibility of “dark money” from fossil fuel and mining companies.
“The Atlas Network’s ever-growing roster of think-tanks have
foundational histories of oil-derived core funding among wider
corporate support, including from ExxonMobil and other oil majors,
from the oil-refining billionaires Charles and David Koch’s
‘philanthropic’ foundations, and those of Richard Mellon Scaife, heir
to the family banking, Alcoa and Gulf Oil/Chevron fortune.”
For decades, the Australian organisations affiliated with Atlas have
“worked in concert with their US-based counterparts to challenge the >long-established scientific confirmation of global warming, and to
oppose government policies to phase out fossil-fuel extraction and >combustion, such as carbon taxation, government support for renewable
energy, and an effective UN climate treaty”.
A core aim of the Atlas Network’s expansion since 1988, when the IPCC >(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was formed, “was to
enhance oil industry efforts to undermine support for the UN Framework >Convention on Climate Change and to prevent the negotiation of
binding, equitable, quantified, timetabled, legislated, science-based >national CO2 reduction targets”.
Walker writes the Atlas Network constantly generates “abundant,
seemingly diffusely sourced ‘independent’ publications and media
content promoting the same agendas, to exert influence on public
opinion and policy without its corporate investors or the global
network itself being exposed to public scrutiny”.
Newsroom has previously reported the Taxpayers’ Union’s (and the NZ >Initiative’s) links to Atlas.
Cindy Baxter, who has spent years researching think tanks in the
United States, says the Taxpayers’ Union’s links to the Atlas Network
are almost never mentioned in the New Zealand media. Certainly not
during this election campaign.
“Nobody here seems to care. I find it extremely concerning.”
The association is declared on the Taxpayers’ Union’s website.
It’s a proud member of the Atlas Network, the Taxpayers’ Union says,
sharing its vision of a “free, prosperous, and peaceful word where the >principles of individual liberty, property rights, limited government,
and free markets are secured by the rule of law”.
Atlas has provided Taxpayers’ Union travel grants, professional
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