One Nation economic adviser brings free market and Trump tactics to party
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Version 0 of 1. One Nation’s new economic adviser has been billed as “one of the world’s leading economists”. Darren Nelson worked on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and with radical free-market thinktanks in America. But the ideas advanced by those organisations don’t always fit with the policies espoused by Pauline Hanson. In September 2016 Hanson’s chief of staff James Ashby told a One Nation community forum in Rockhampton, Queensland, that “on the economic side of things, tomorrow there’ll be a front-page announcement, from what I understand … We have just taken him from the Trump camp, so he’s come on board with us. So that’s pretty exciting and we need to build credibility on the economics front.” Ashby didn’t name the new adviser but described him as “one of the world’s leading economists”. One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, tweeted that he was “very excited” by the news. However no announcement was made the following day and it would be another four months before One Nation’s new economic adviser would be publicly identified. In January 2017 in the course of controversy over how Hanson had been “invited” to attend the inauguration of the United States president, Donald Trump, it was revealed that Darren Brady Nelson had taken a position in Roberts’ office. Nelson describes himself as “a professional economist and project manager” with two decades experience working with business, government as well as “those outfits trying to influence them.” Described as a “neo-Austrian economist, regulatory analyst and communicator”, one public account of Nelson’s outlook highlights his “strong interest in the Reagan and Thatcher administrations”, his formal studies of the history of economic thought “especially that of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman”, as well as his recent “rediscovery of the American liberty culture and the Austrian School of economics ... especially the thinking of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard”. But these groups’ neo-Austrian or anarcho-capitalist ideas are far from One Nation policies such as opposition to free trade, taxing multinationals, industry subsidies and plans for a “people’s bank”. The Trump Campaign It is perhaps no surprise that Nelson became involved in Trump’s election campaign. His role was, however, somewhat more modest than that suggested by Hanson’s chief of staff. According to his own account, Nelson served for a short period as an economic analyst within a large team based at the Trump campaign headquarters in Trump Tower in New York. Nelson’s campaign work largely focused on analysis of economic statistics relating to the state of American cities and urban areas. His entry into the Trump campaign came through links made in radical US thinktanks, including the following. The Ludwig von Mises Institute: Once described in Forbes magazine as “the greatest thinker you’ve never read”, von Mises was a leader of the mid-20th century “Austrian School” of economists whose writing have long been a touchstone for doctrinaire advocates of free-market economics. Nelson’s other intellectual hero, Murray Rothbard, was an American economist and intellectual follower of Mises who was the leading theoretician of “anarcho-capitalism”, a political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favour of individual sovereignty, private property and free markets. Rothbard famously described government as “the organisation of robbery systematised and writ large”. To promote his economic and political ideas, Rothbard established the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama in 1982. In the view of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a leading civil rights advocacy organisation specialising in the investigation of far-right groups in the United States, the Mises Institute promotes “a type of Darwinian view of society in which elites are seen as natural and any intervention by the government on behalf of social justice is destructive. The institute seems nostalgic for the days when, ‘because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority [were]likely to be passed on within a few noble families’.” In March 2015 the Mises Institute published an article by Nelson that argued vociferously against government regulation as a “hidden tax” on wealth generation and accumulation. Nelson’s solution was radical deregulation — “as much as possible, as fast as possible”. Heartland Institute: Darren Nelson has been a regular contributor to the Heartland Institute, a thinktank that has transitioned from a long campaign denying the link between smoking and lung cancer, to denying the link between carbon emissions and climate change. Nelson’s articles in June 2015 uncritically reported the views of Austrian-born, American physicist and climate change sceptic Siegfried Fred Singer that “Warming is not serious. We can stand warming. Ice ages are serious … They wiped out the Neanderthals.” Nelson is still listed as a contributor on the Institute’s website. Center for Freedom and Prosperity: The CF&P, at which Nelson still lists himself as an “associated senior fellow”, lobbies for offshore tax havens. CF&P insists offshore tax havens and banking secrecy have no role in tax evasion or money laundering but rather “promote economic growth, sound fiscal policy, and individual liberty.” CF&P’s declared enemy is the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – “a bunch of crazy European socialists”, in the words of the centre’s founder, Daniel Mitchell. Some insight into CF&P’s lobbying operations has been provided in the course of media reporting on the massive Panama Papers leak to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) of offshore tax haven records of the controversial Panamanian law firm and off-shore tax haven facilitator Mossack Fonseca. In April 2013, the ICIJ and the Washington Post reported on CF&P’s aggressive lobbying to counter efforts to pursue investigations into off-shore tax havens and tax minimisation by US corporations. Significantly CF&P was revealed to be engaged in secret fundraising activities aimed at foreign entities to bankroll the centre’s campaign against attempts to crack down on offshore tax havens. Specifically, CF&P was trying to raise $250,000 for a lobbying campaign to “stop the bleeding, build allies and go on the offensive against efforts in Washington to regulate the industry”. CF&P declined to disclose his donors or say how much of the organisation’s income is from the offshore world. In a 2015 article posted on CF&P’s website, Nelson urged a radical free market transformation of the US economy and society, arguing that “there will be more pain for some at first (the pain being much shorter, the more markets are liberated), for much greater and sustained gain for most thereafter.” LibertyWorks: Also of significance is Nelson’s association with a new Australian free-market thinktank, LibertyWorks. Headquartered in Brisbane, LibertyWorks seeks “a drastic reduction in government control over people’s economic and personal lives”. LibertyWorks’ website highlights opposition to renewable energy targets, calls for repeal of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, and libertarian argument in favour of the legalisation of cannabis use. Nelson’s perspective certainly fits uneasily with One Nation’s declared policy of increasing government regulation. Nelson’s involvement with LibertyWorks began in October 2015 with his role described as “chief economist and deputy start-up manager”. He is now a member of the LibertyWorks advisory board. Other board members are the president of the Australian Libertarian Society, John Humphreys; a former director of deregulation at the Institute of Public Affairs, Alan Moran; and Anthony Cappello, director of conservative publishing house Connor Court Publishing. One Nation policy clash It remains to be seen what influence Nelson may have on One Nation’s economic policies and whether he will help them “build credibility on the economics front”. In many respects, Nelson’s radical libertarian approach may be more in tune with Senator David Leyonhjelm’s Liberal Democratic party (LDP) than Pauline Hanson’s more populist economic approach that includes strong opposition to free trade agreements, and preparedness for governments to directly subsidise manufacturing industry. Leyonhjelm’s aggressive free-market liberalism has led him to ask “Is Pauline Hanson a communist?” Nelson’s recruitment to One Nation, with his “neo-Austrian” outlook and involvement with LibertyWorks may represent a radical free-market breach in One Nation’s protectionist front. Nelson’s perspective certainly fits uneasily with One Nation’s declared policy of increasing government regulation of financial markets, including working to “bring back a people’s bank”. Hanson has long argued that foreign companies should pay a “fair share” of tax – by which she means a larger share – on profits made in Australia. This nationalist position was a prominent aspect of her economic policy platform during her parliamentary service in 1996-98 and continues to feature in One Nation’s economic platform with the party calling for some $100 million in tax to be clawed back from multinational corporations. There would appear to be some inconsistency between this objective and One Nation’s engagement of an “associated senior fellow” with the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, the most prominent lobbyist group in the United States arguing the case for off-shore tax havens. Policy coherence is not one of Hanson’s strong points. However, given his extensive involvement with US free-market thinktanks, Nelson may be a harbinger of greater American “alt-right” influence on One Nation’s thinking. Philip Dorling is the senior researcher at the Australia Institute. This is an abridged and edited version of a report published by the Australia Institute. The full version can be read here |