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Among the groups collecting the funds were the Working with Women Alliance, which pushes free abortion via Medicare, Minus18 Foundation, which hosts “Queer Formals” for 12-year-olds, and Acon Health, which promotes “gender transition” treatments for children.

Australian governments funnelled $2.2 billion in taxpayer funds to left-leaning advocacy groups over five years, according to a new report from the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), with no equivalent funding identified for conservative groups.

“They’re stacking the debate. They’re literally putting their thumbs on the scales,” IPA director of research Morgan Begg told independent reporter Topher Field, after his team searched for a taxpayer-funded advocacy group representing a conservative position on the same issues and found none.

The report, Stacking the Deck, examined 100 non-government organisations across five policy areas between the 2021 and 2025 financial years, drawing on filings submitted to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission by the groups in question. State and federal governments handed them $2,237,280,125 combined.

In an interview with Field, Begg said the problem was not confined to any one side of politics but is a pattern that persists “regardless of which party is in power.”

The report’s co-author, Jordan Abou-Zeid, said the funding was not incidental. “Taxpayers are on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars each year to fund a progressive advocacy network that is crowding them out of public debate,” he said.

“When governments provide extraordinary financial support lobbying itself on diversity, nanny state, co-governance, and green policies, it generates a false perception that debate on these issues is settled.”

Gender Medicine and Family Policy

Among the groups receiving the funds is Acon Health, which received $99 million in taxpayer funding, has faced scrutiny for its role in promoting gender-affirming treatment for children and advocating for males who identify as transgender to compete in women’s sport.

Transcend Australia collected almost $2.2 million between 2020 and 2025 while campaigning against Queensland’s pause on puberty-suppressing drugs and cross-sex hormones for children, the report noted.

Minus18 Foundation, which received $1.9 million, runs an annual “Queer Formal” event for children aged 12 to 19 that bars parents and requires no parental permission.

The Working with Women Alliance, which received almost $1.3 million in federal funding, has recommended full Medicare coverage for abortion, lowering the voting age to 16, and requiring all artificial intelligence funding to carry a “gendered lens,” according to the IPA.

The Cancer Council, which forms part of a network that attracted $373.7 million in public health funding, has told government inquiries that “health mis and disinformation” should become a “regulatory responsibility” of all levels of government, the report said.

Groups spruiking diversity and multiculturalism absorbed the largest share of the funding, more than $1 billion over five years, with recipients including LGBTIQ+ Health Australia ($34.4 million), Thorne Harbour Health ($70 million) and Multicultural Australia ($178 million).

Free Speech, the Voice and Immigration

Morgan Begg told Field that many of the diversity-funded groups “push a similar narrative on entrenching support for multiculturalism” and expanding “human rights law and advocacy which actually is inconsistent with our freedoms and our way of life as Australians.”

He pointed to the federal government’s proposed Digital Duty of Care bill, which would give the eSafety Commissioner power to compel platforms to remove content it deemed harmful, as an example of the same pattern. Advocacy groups that received government funds made submissions to a government review calling for these powers to be strengthened, Begg said, with the government then committing to legislate it.

According to Begg, the pattern has extended to constitutional debates, in which groups funded by Australian taxpayers were enlisted to create public support for the government’s preferred outcome.

Reconciliation Australia received $28.3 million between FY2021 and FY2025 to promote the Voice, treaty and related constitutional change. No group opposing the Voice received government funding.

On immigration, Refugee Legal and the Human Rights Law Centre received a combined $21.2 million to contest the deportation of unlawful migrants, while the report identified no funded organisation dedicated to enforcing immigration law.

The report states plainly that no equivalent funding exists for the other side of these debates: “Governments do not fund organisations whose core mission is to advocate for the biological realities of binary sex, against an Indigenous Voice or treaty, or for the removal of those residing in Australia unlawfully.”

The IPA has called for the funding to be scrapped rather than reined in. “Lobbying government is not a core function of government, and the taxpayer should not be compelled to fund one side of the nation’s political debates,” the report states.

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Image via Brian Doyle.