How Jordan Peterson Is Importing Australia’s Racist Politics Into Britain

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), the London-based hard-right conference network co-founded by Jordan Peterson and linked to Sir Paul Marshall – the owner of GB News – is actively seeking to import the anti-Muslim politics of hard-right Australian politics into Britain. Simultaneously, it is seeking to reshape Australian politics in the image of Britain’s leading insurgent national populist party, Reform UK, with significant success.

ARC sits Reform UK’s only MP on its board and counts one of the party’s biggest donors among its funders. Nigel Farage was a speaker at its third conference, which closed at London’s Olympia on 25 June 2026, appearing on stage in conversation with ARC co-founder Philippa Stroud.

That same network has platformed former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who over his career has demanded that the West declare its superiority over Islam; was accused by UN officials of “racism” for claiming the Government should not “endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices” of remote Indigenous residents; and attempted to repeal Australia’s part of Racial Discrimination Act for being “un-Australian”.

He sits on ARC’s advisory board and advises Advance Australia, the campaign group that claims credit for defeating the Indigenous Voice referendum. He is a director of Fox Corporation; and, this year, he was elected president of the collapsing Liberal Party in Australia.

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart funds both Advance and One Nation, the previously fringe party led by Pauline Hanson that now leads Australia’s first-preference polling.

Newly published donor records show the ARC conference backed by fossil fuel executives, coal magnates and donors to US President Donald Trump. Seven Australians sit on ARC’s advisory board, including two former prime ministers – and a February proposal to steer the Liberal Party through its succession crisis was built around three of them.

Out of the sweltering June heat, right-wing actors from a range of nations networked to extend what has been described as a “messianic MAGA alliance”. Aiming to create a “new narrative” to “save the West”, the conference brought together fossil fuel corporations and think tank representatives, including those promoting “anti-gender” policy. Politicians representing Reform UK and European far right parties mix with those who claim to be conservative.

Reform UK donors including Lord Anthony Bamford and crypto billionaire Ben Delo contributed funds to the event, joining hedge fund billionaire Paul Marshall. Delo – who donated £4 million to Reform UK earlier this year – has been added to the body’s Advisory Board since June 2026. Several of the donors have close ties to the Trump administration, many representing the coal and oil sectors in both the US and Canada.

ARC has had Australian involvement from the outset with former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson around the table when it was founded. Australia, in particular, has a high-profile presence on the Advisory Board. Former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott sit alongside Andrew Hastie, the Shadow Defence Minister, and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Northern Territory senator, both identified with the party’s “national right” faction and both seen as future leadership contenders. The remaining two Australians are the former Senator Amanda Stoker and Robin Batterham, a former Chief Scientist of Australia.

By contrast, there are two Canadian politicians, one Austrian and four American officeholders, including the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. The British contingent is three peers – Labour’s Maurice Glasman and two Conservatives, co-founder Philippa Stroud and Helena Morrissey – plus Reform UK MP, Danny Kruger, in the Commons.

Who Funds ARC?

The ARC is a culture war conference organisation overlapping with the National Conservatism (NatCon) circuit, with some key personnel and organisational connections. The two organisations position themselves as the intellectual faction of the ethnonationalist and socially conservative movement that dominates the transnational Right.

ARC is an offshoot of the think tanks of Tufton Street, which the Guardian columnist George Monbiot has labelled “junktanks”. They function as comms operations for extreme free market policy positions and controversial industry sectors, packaged as fact-based policy research. Tufton Street’s front groups are both official partners of, or closely linked to, the Atlas Network based in Washington DC. Their role is to create an apparently independent chorus of voices for policy goals sought by wealthy elite donors.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is a product of the entity formerly known as the Legatum Institute (now the Prosperity Institute). The Atlas Network – a global network of hundreds of extreme free market lobby organisations – has claimed that body as an official partner.

Legatum’s website declared that ARC was an “international movement with a vision for a better world where empowered citizens take personal responsibility, working together to bring flourishing and prosperity to their families, communities and nations”. Its ambit is to promote “free enterprise”, “inexpensive, reliable” energy and “realistically pliable” environmental stewardship.

The original “think tank” of the Atlas model was the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), founded in London in 1955 by Antony Fisher. The IEA shaped Margaret Thatcher, who founded a partner think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, in 1974, and the model was replicated in Washington by Heritage, which set out more than 1,000 pages of policy for Ronald Reagan’s administration. The Atlas Network’s now-secret list of partners reveals close to 500 entities in more than 100 countries.

A related body, the US Council for National Policy, links the anti-reproductive rights and anti-LGBTQIA bodies Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council, both represented at ARC; a third, Focus on the Family, was listed as an ARC donor.

Baroness Philippa Stroud, ARC co-founder, is one of several “think tank” alumni placed into politics through the House of Lords by friendly Tory leaders: Liz Truss elevated 32 people to peerages during her month in office.

Anti Islam network activists Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are also both on the ARC Advisory Board.

The Money and the Local Machine

Gina Rinehart, West Australian mining magnate, has been a long-term donor to the Liberal Party but has expressed her frustration at its brief recent resistance to becoming the local MAGA party. She appeared to transfer her support to Queensland senator Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. She has been flying Hanson in her private plane around Australia, on a Thai holiday and to her home in Florida near Mar-a-Lago. Hanson spoke at an “elite” CPAC event at Trump’s resort. Rinehart and her company donated a plane and A$1 million to One Nation in April.

The original Australian “free market” think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), was co-founded in 1943 by Rupert Murdoch’s father. The IPA has been abandoned by its corporate sponsors, after its climate-denial and culture wars became embarrassing. The Murdochs continue to support the IPA, if only by providing media platforms. The only known donor in the current era is Rinehart. The billionaire is dedicated both to Ayn Rand and to Donald Trump.

Rinehart is also funding an Atlas Network offshoot, Advance, with a recent A$900,000 donation. This is an astroturf operation, faking grassroots activity. It takes credit for having flipped Australia from majority support for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament consultative body to majority opposition. Advance, advised by Tony Abott, generates propaganda online and through interlinked front groups of an abrasively right-wing populist nature.

Climate denial and Islamophobia pervade the emerging messaging. Advance brought figures like Benjamin Harnwell, Steve Bannon’s anti-Muslim sidekick at his War Room podcast, to Australia for its secretive 2026 conference. One Nation’s Senator Malcolm Roberts said at a theocratic conference recently that the party would work for a “blanket abortion ban”.

Tony Abbott has been an Advance advisor since its founding, and remains listed at Orbán’s Danube Institute.

Australian Atlas partner affiliates expressed fervent admiration after the first ARC conference in London in 2023. The local “chapter” was headed up by John Anderson and run by a former employee of Philippa Stroud, Gerard Holland.

They had earlier hosted a conference in Australia in 2024. The organisers rebranded themselves for their 2026 conference, calling the religiously dominated committee FORM (Freedom, Opportunity and Responsibility Movement) Australia and the new iteration of ARC Aspire, perhaps to fend off accusations of foreign interference. It took place a week after the Advance conference and its nationalist language was much more coded than the astroturf body’s event.

Murdoch’s mastheads share the ARC and Aspire speeches and use the logos.

Related reading: The Trumpian Power Worship at the Heart of Jordan Peterson’s ‘We Who Wrestle With God’

One Nation’s Surge

Echoing the UK, Australia has recently seen a shock surge in the popularity of its previously marginal nativist populist party. Pauline Hanson, 72, has led it since winning a parliamentary seat in 1996 on a platform objecting to Australia being “swamped by” Asians, then Muslims, and spent time in prison for electoral fraud (conviction overturned).

Hanson has been described locally as an early model for the far-right women leading political parties in the Global North more recently. While Hanson was considered a fringe outsider for most of her career, she dragged Australia’s politics toward the far-right regardless. Now her party is polling as leading on first preference votes with Hanson as preferred prime minister (although her place in the federal Senate makes that impossible currently).

Hanson continues to face charges of electoral irregularities and a failure to carry out her parliamentary role.

Hanson and her candidates have repeatedly attracted scandal over racism, antisemitism and Neo Nazi sympathies, and Hanson herself recently expressed disgust at being forced to sack a staffer who had served prison time for rape and violent assault of a woman.

The apparently sudden shift of “battler” Hanson from the unsavoury fringe of Australian politics to the lead reflects the behind-the-scenes support of a transnationally-connected radicalised Right.

Related reading: Murdoch: ‘Thug and Bully is Terminal Trouble for Democracies’, Says Former Australian Prime Minister

High Stakes

Rupert Murdoch and son Lachlan have long been accused by both major parties of having a dramatically outsized impact on Australian politics and civic discourse in a media market judged the second most concentrated in the world. Tony Abbott, who has just been named president of the collapsing Liberal Party, is also on the board of Fox News. He is reputedly “thick as thieves” with Lachlan Murdoch. The pair will likely decide whether, in Australia’s ranked choice voting system, Liberal Party preferences will be funnelled to One Nation.

The pair will no doubt also decide if they are willing to unite Australia’s old Liberal and National party coalition in a minority government with the fringe right One Nation. Another Liberal Party politician who emerged from the IPA has left this course open.

Massively-funded strategic operations in Australia match Farage’s surge in popularity. How much of this constitutes foreign interference remains unclear.

A February proposal for a “Council of Elders” to steer the Liberal Party through its collapse was built around three of ARC’s own board members – Howard, Anderson and Abbott. Australia’s political realignment, on both the Liberal Party’s future and One Nation’s rise, now rests substantially with men who sit simultaneously on ARC’s board.

The same three men sit on the board of a movement built to remake Reform UK’s Britain in its own image while steering Australia’s realignment – both the Liberal Party’s succession crisis and whether its remnants fold into government alongside One Nation. Australia’s shift to the far right and Britain’s, on the evidence, run through the same boardroom.

ARC did not respond to a request for comment.