Illustration: Rocco Fazzari Four months from election and the people scratch their heads. Why, again, are we destroying the Reef for some billionaire Indian coalminer? Why fund private schools and de-fund public ones? Above all, how did Australia go from a country where the poor occasionally stole the goose from the common to one where the rich are consistently rewarded for stealing the common from the goose? The answer, at least in part, appears to be the IPA. The IPA has three member senators, David Leyonhjelm, Bob Day and James Paterson, and a fourth-in-waiting with ex-human rights commissioner Tim Wilson running in the lower house. It also has several state MPs and members with regular media gigs – like IPA senior fellow Chris Berg (The Drum and Fairfax) and board member Janet Albrechtsen, whose recent column in The Oz puffed Paterson and Wilson as "outstanding warrior[s] for the freedom cause". They all talk a lot about warriors – which is also what Abbott called Credlin. But the IPA's real power is the charisma of wealth. At its 70th birthday gala dinner in 2013, Rupert Murdoch gave the keynote. NewsCorp's Andrew Bolt was MC and opposition leader Tony Abbott called the IPA "freedom's discerning friend". Gina Rinehart, George Pell, George Brandis and Alan Jones were guests. I first encountered the IPA's passionate retrograde years ago, in a city-planning debate at ABC TV. I'd expected cut-and-thrust, but was amazed by the aggression and the import of IPA director Alan Moran's defence of car-dependent sprawl. Sprawl had been the world's bad guy for over a decade but Moran's fossil-based fury was intense.

Liberal senator James Paterson has vowed to sort out Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Credit:Facebook Still, the IPA then seemed like harmless cranks. Now it seems they're all but writing government policy. Even that's not bad in itself. The wealthy are allowed their clubs, and governments must get ideas from somewhere. But when the private interest of Big Money consistently presents as public interest, it's time to worry. Big time. We've heard much lately of illegal developer funding, which caused the NSW Electoral Commission to withhold $4.4 million from the NSW Liberals. But developers aren't the only group who might seek influence, and brown paper bags are not the only vehicle. The IPA has long insisted NGOs should be transparent, but it's notoriously secretive about its own sources of money. (Executive director John Roskam says its donors get intimidated). But revealed sources include all the bad boys of Big International Money: media, oil, tobacco, genetics, energy and forestry. Who benefits from IPA policy? They do. In 2012, the IPA published "Seventy-Five Radical Ideas to Transform Australia". I haven't done the math, but I'd say over a third are now law or seriously discussed.

The ideas included: privatise the CSIRO, abolish the Clean Energy Fund and Climate Change Department, cut company tax to 25 per cent, remove all barriers to international trade, end government funding to the arts and return income tax powers to the states. They'd also: dismantle and sell the ABC, sell SBS, allow all banks to merge, eliminate media-ownership restrictions and abolish local content requirements. Repeal the mining tax, means-test Medicare, privatise Medibank, end compulsory food labelling, abolish plain-packaging for tobacco, allow opt-out from superannuation and voting, and repeal the Fair Work Act and section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. The IPA brands itself strongly around freedom. Free market, free media, free speech are its constant rhetoric. But freedom is not simple. Libertarianism turns on prioritising individual judgment – for everyone, not just the rule-making few. If one person's freedom is another person's cage, is it really freedom? Or just privilege? The IPA's Freedom Watch blog, for example, calls itself a "civil liberties project" but insists, inter alia, on picketers' rights to confront desperate pregnant women outside clinics with aborted fetuses. Whose freedom? On free speech the air is comparably murky. This week, the Fair Work Commission reinstated a Centrelink officer sacked for criticising his employer online. The man's criticisms, over some weeks, highlighted the unconscionable processing time of Austudy payments (tardiness for which I can personally vouch).

But regardless of veracity, if the IPA prevailed, the Fair Work Commission would vanish; the employer would have every freedom to gag but the employee would have no freedom to speak openly as a citizen. Then there's racial vilification, a free-speech category beloved of the IPA. James Paterson told ABC radio recently that as senator he'd focus on sorting that "disgraceful" section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Section 18C – under which Andrew Bolt was forced in 2011 to apologise and to which George Brandis then devoted much attention – makes it illegal to insult, humiliate or intimidate anyone because of race, colour or ethnicity. Freedom? Does the freedom to repudiate on racial lines even deserve the name? As to press freedoms, the IPA would free Murdoch, or whoever is biggest on the block, to own every media outlet in the land. Sky or, well, Sky. He's free. We're in a blank-walled plasma box. My advice? Ideas themselves are not dangerous, but when money and "ideas" hold hands, get suspicious. Then get cracking. Fight for our freedom to see the strings and who's at the pulling end.