In February, I and eight others from around Australia wrote to the Reserve Bank board to “urge the RBA to sever its relationship with, and support of, the Centre for Independent Studies”.

The RBA currently has a $20,000 per annum corporate membership of the CIS. It is our contention that the CIS does not meet the criterion of independence from, and non-alignment with, political parties or other institutions, which is expected of policy institutes of which the RBA has corporate membership.

It might be thought that a $20,000 per annum association is trivial. But, as in many areas of politics and public policy, such arrangements often act as tacit signals of shared interests and reciprocal influence. The RBA’s association with the CIS is effectively an endorsement of it. Given the importance of the Reserve Bank to the nation, such matters merit close scrutiny.

Our full letter to the Reserve Bank board follows. As of early April, we have received no response.

“To the Board of the Reserve Bank of Australia (by email)

23rd February 2025

We write to urge the RBA to sever its relationship with, and support of, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), via its $20,000 per annum corporate membership of the CIS.

We note that in its 2024 Annual Report, the RBA lists the CIS as one of several policy institutes of which it has corporate membership, one of the key criteria being that such institutes are “independent and not aligned with a political party or some other institution”. This is clearly not true of the CIS.

CIS was founded in 1976 by Greg Lindsay (who until 2018 was its executive director), with foundational funding organised by Hugh Morgan in 1979, from mining companies Santos, Shell, Rio Tinto, BHP and WMC, as well as the Murdoch empire’s Adelaide Advertiser. John Bonython, founding chairman of Santos, was the first chairman of the Board of Trustees at the CIS. As befits a neoliberal think-tank, many current and former board members have also been members of the Mont Pelerin Society (Greg Lindsay served as its president from 2006-8). CIS alumni include a number of past and present Liberal politicians.

CIS has been and remains a strongly Right-leaning think tank. “The Centre for Independent Studies promotes free choice and individual liberty”. It “believes true liberty and prosperity can only be achieved with a small state that defends free speech and national sovereignty”. It believes that “the excessive increases in public spending most governments in the developed world chose to make in response to the COVID crisis … (are) an alternative form of socialism”. It is concerned about China’s increasing “global footprint”. (All quotes from “ CIS About”,)

A current major activity at CIS is the questioning of Australia’s renewable energy plans and strong support for a future role for nuclear energy in Australia. (See, this for example,)

There is nothing inherently wrong with the RBA having membership of a hard-right entity; as long as any influence arising therefrom is balanced by membership of a range of other entities with diverse views, including one from the radical left. More concerning, however, is CIS’ close but undeclared association with two hard-right activist organisations: the Australian “Advance” (formerly known as “Advance Australia”); and the international, US-based “Atlas Network”.

The Atlas Network is “the international umbrella organisation for neoliberal think-tanks” (Daniel Stedman Jones, “Masters of the Universe”, Princeton, 2012, page 165). It describes itself as “a non-profit that aims to secure the right to economic and personal freedom for all individuals” through its global network of think-tanks. Founded in 1981 by Anthony Fisher, there is abundant evidence that it acted for many years to oppose actions to restrict the availability and promotion of tobacco products; and more recently to deny the reality of climate change and to oppose moves away from fossil fuel extraction and use around the world. Leading US members of the Atlas Network drafted Project 2025, currently being enacted by the new administration of President Donald Trump.

Until 2023, the Atlas Network boasted of its “more than 500” partner organisations around the world. It has now removed its “influence map” from public availability, but an archived version, from 2021, shows the CIS as one of seven Australian members.

For a list of the organisations comprising the global Atlas Network as of 2021 see this link.

Advance was set up in 2018 to be the right-wing equivalent of GetUp! It has effectively operated as an external campaigning unit of the Liberal Party, as evidenced by the $500,000 donation to Advance in 2024 from the Cormack Foundation, the Liberal Party’s multi-million-dollar investment group. Advance has pitched itself as a group representing Australian “battlers” against the “woke” elite. However, many of its financial backers are wealthy investors and businessmen, including CIS director Sam Kennard ($115,000 in 2023, through his company Siesta Holdings).

Advance campaigned strongly for the no position in the 2023 Voice referendum, led by its associates and leading spokespeople, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine. Price is a Liberal MP and shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, and a former director of the CIS Indigenous Program. Mundine is director of the CIS Indigenous Program. It is impossible not to conclude that the CIS was a partisan actor in the lead-up to the Voice referendum.

In summary, it is our strong contention that the Centre for Independent Studies is not independent and unaligned. We urge the RBA to sever its relationship with the CIS at the earliest opportunity. We look forward to receiving the RBA Board’s response.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Barnes, Victoria and eight other signatories