The Saturday Paper: Undercover at the Advance conference
Michael Barnett OAM
Comment
Conal Feehely
Undercover at the Advance conference
Less than 10 metres from the conference entrance stands a bronze sculpture titled Life From A Suitcase, a celebration of Australian immigration. It depicts a family of new arrivals, children looking up with anticipation. In the background, the Sydney Harbour Bridge arches over the water. The sculpture honours the idea that migration is woven into the national story. In the auditorium a few steps away, speakers warn of an “invasion crisis”.
Last weekend, I spent two days undercover at Advance’s conference, titled Evolve: Because being right isn’t enough. As a campaigner for GetUp! – the organisation Advance was created to defeat – I wanted to see this machine from the inside. I registered under a pseudonym, describing myself to others as a university student researching political campaigning. In shorts and a T-shirt, noticeably out of step in a sea of suits, I sat towards the back of the room with my notebook open.
While GetUp! is far from defeated, Advance has assembled itself into one of the most consequential third-party political operations in the country. Tens of millions of dollars, most of it from undisclosed sources, have been spent by Advance attacking the Voice to Parliament, targeting teal independents and running continuous campaigns against Labor and the Greens, both with some success.
I expected grievance and applause lines. I expected culture-war slogans and rehearsed outrage. I expected talk against immigration and net zero, and in defence of Australia Day. What I did not expect was the infrastructure behind the rhetoric.
Right now, Australian politics is unsettled. One Nation is polling at levels never seen before. The Coalition is scrambling for identity and leadership clarity. Electoral funding reforms will tighten disclosure laws and cap spending from mid 2026, but much of the campaign structure built under looser rules remains intact. Third-party actors such as Advance – and GetUp! – are no longer peripheral to our political ecosystem. They are entrenched.
Given the secretive air that Advance has cultivated, I arrived on the first morning unsure of what I would find. Four hundred people filled the ballroom. Some younger faces, sponsored by donors. The atmosphere was calm, corporate and competent.
Two teleprompters flanked the stage. Branded tote bags and bumper stickers were stacked neatly on tables. The event booklet bore a single word – Evolve – superimposed over an image of Australia viewed from space, glowing as though suspended in a moment of civilisational rupture.
The guest list signalled ambition as much as ideology. Onstage stood members of the Liberal establishment: former prime minister Tony Abbott, outspoken Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Victorian Liberal MP Moira Deeming. Their presence signalled legitimacy. This was pitched not as a fringe rebellion but as a gathering of the conservative mainstream.
Yet the messages from the lectern over two days revealed something else.
Immigration was described repeatedly as an “invasion”. Feminism was blamed for weakening Western civilisation. The Greens were described as Soviets in new clothing. Speaker after speaker dismissed the current Liberal Party as weak, compromised and indistinguishable from its opponents. One international speaker declared that Angela Merkel had done more damage to Germany than the Nazis. When asked to clarify, he doubled down.
“The centre-right,” one speaker said, “is part of the enemy.”
From the floor, I overheard an attendee saying that if the Liberals did not “sort themselves out” they would “bring out the battalions”.
In that room, Tony Abbott seemed restrained.
Immigration was described repeatedly as an ‘invasion’. Feminism was blamed for weakening Western civilisation. The Greens were described as Soviets in new clothing. Speaker after speaker dismissed the current Liberal Party as weak and indistinguishable from its opponents.The former prime minister acknowledged that there are good migrants. He spoke of Australia’s welcoming heritage. In a conference hall where others spoke of civilisational suicide and demographic replacement, Abbott occupied the relative centre. That shift says something about where the centre of gravity has moved on the right of politics.
Rhetoric – even extreme rhetoric – was not the most consequential thing I witnessed at Advance’s conference. What was truly interesting was the way speakers explained their approach to right-wing activism and change.
One session methodically outlined a campaign sequencing model: awareness, interest, decision, action. The approach was not to escalate too soon. They would construct a version of themselves in the minds of voters before attacks arrive. Assumptions would be embedded long before an election is called. Consumer data would be used to refine political targeting. Advance and other campaign bodies like them would flood the feeds of look-alike audiences, shaping the terrain before opponents step onto it.
“Persuasion is cumulative,” the presenter said.
Another speaker broke voter psychology into segments with forensic precision. Advance’s task, he said, was to look for the persuadables. Link cost-of-living anxiety to immigration. Frame net zero as an immediate household burden. Find a narrative and repeat it until it stopped feeling like a narrative and started feeling like reality.
This was not about airing grievances; it was foundation-building.
Speakers emphasised resilience: systems that survive leadership and staffing changes, collaboration with other conservative organisations, expansion into universities and continuous operations that do not wait for election cycles.
The branding of the conference as Evolve took on a different tone in that context. The language of evolution and civilisational survival threaded through multiple speeches. There were repeated references to demographic decline, cultural dominance and the need to harden. The ideas were rarely stated in biological terms, but the undertones were unmistakeable.
During breaks, I spoke with attendees. Most were not cartoon villains or radicals obsessed with “protecting the West”.
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A former engineer from Sydney’s northern beaches described himself as a Liberal voter in the lower house, One Nation in the Senate – a tactical split, he said, because the major parties had simply stopped representing him.
A farmer and volunteer firefighter talked about energy costs and a growing certainty that no one in power had ever seen, or cared about, what his life actually looked like. He was a man who had run out of patience with politics.
Movements like Advance do not manufacture grievance from nothing. They find it, name it and direct it.
Australia’s democratic fabric is different from that of the United States or parts of Europe. We have compulsory voting. We have independent electoral administration. We have a political culture that has, historically, resisted some of the more corrosive currents experienced elsewhere. Still, that requires work to maintain.
One Nation’s rise is reshaping right-wing politics. Younger men are drifting towards harder-edged political identities. Those trends are now being cultivated between elections, not just during them.
What I saw over two days was not a fringe spectacle. It was a disciplined attempt to shape the assumptions through which Australians interpret politics – to build permanence and to professionalise outrage.
It gives me no pleasure to write this – in part, because I am aware that Advance will no doubt weaponise these words for their own purposes – but it’s important to expose what Advance is doing.
It is already shifting the ground. The response cannot be complacency or caricature. It must be organisation and execution. At GetUp!, that has meant confronting some hard truths. Election-year mobilisation is no longer enough. We have invested more heavily in long-term voter research, earlier narrative framing and year-round digital organising that does not switch off between election cycles. We are building a deeper regional presence and strengthening investigative work into the dark funding streams that underpin these campaigns.
As the conference closed, the room rose for a final standing ovation. “Evolve” glowed on the screen behind the stage.
Outside, the bronze arrivals of Life From A Suitcase stood in the late afternoon light, looking out across a country shaped by the world’s oldest continuing culture, continually remade by arrival, conflict, adaptation and reinvention.
Inside the ballroom there was certainty. Outside there was complexity. Australia stands between those realities.
Advance is preparing for what comes next. The question is whether the rest of us are too.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 28, 2026 as "Undercover at the Advance conference".