John Roskam, the head of free-market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Credit:Ken Irwin The man on track to be prime minister next month also acknowledged the overlap of the IPA's manifesto of 75 big radical ideas with his own platform, including the abolition of the carbon tax, repeal of the mining tax, and economic development of northern Australia. ''So ladies and gentlemen that is a big 'yes' to many of the 75 specific policies you urged upon me.'' It is doubtful that any other political organisation in Australia, outside the mainstream parties, currently attracts such weighty political and financial support, or enjoys such a high-public profile. Yet a cloud continues to hang over the think tanks that emerged from the political fringe in the 1980s and became part of the push dubbed ''new right'' or ''neo-liberal'' that challenged the Keynsian orthodoxy across the Western world. In particular, questions remain about the funding and credibility of the IPA's research, and about the real political impact of its vociferous campaigning.

Tony Abbott and Rupert Murdoch at the IPA's 70th anniversary dinner in April. Credit:Twitter Who and what is the IPA? Does it have real influence, and if so why? Are its leaders political miracle workers or just naughty boys? In a utilitarian Collins Street boardroom, executive director John Roskam, 46, is in full flight on the IPA's core principles of human freedom, free markets, small government and personal responsibility. With him is 25-year-old communications manager James Paterson, a smooth-skinned, word-perfect free market warrior. Gina Rinehart arrives at the IPA's 70th anniversary dinner. Credit:Michael Clayton-Jones Talking politics with two Fairfax journalists he regards as ''lefties'', Roskam is like a ravenous man at a feast.

Of Polish and Dutch Catholic stock, his grandfather was a prisoner of both Nazi Germany and communist Russia, a background he highlights to explain his suspicion of government. ''Our view is that all governments are threats to our freedom,'' he says. Former prime minister John Howard tells Fairfax media he wants Roskam in Canberra, nonetheless. Ideas and insights tumble over one another as the former adviser to Liberal ministers, and networker across the political spectrum (he is friends with Bill Shorten, enjoys the company of Greens legend Bob Brown) struggles to keep up with the pace of his own brain. In the corridor outside, the portraits of former IPA heads reveal the organisation's roots in the Melbourne establishment - Liberal stalwarts C.D.Kemp and Charles Goode, retail giant Sir George Coles, grandson of Alfred Deakin Sir Wilfred Brookes, and former BHP chairman Sir James Balderstone. Founded in 1943 by Melbourne-based Coles, the IPA was dominated for years by old Tory Melbourne, with industrialists playing a prominent role. While mining tycoons and financiers were emerging as leaders by 1990, the IPA membership list shows that Toorak remained the single most popular residential address. Not one Melbourne-based member - including media mogul Rupert Murdoch, former beer baron John Elliott, Olympian and Shell executive Kevan Gosper, and Melbourne University chancellor David Penington - lived further north or west than Parkville.

Raised in Dandenong by his butcher father who studied to become an accountant, Roskam is anything but Melbourne establishment. That may explain why we are here in the first place. The IPA is not what it was. As Fairfax Media reports today, it has overtaken the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies as the most cashed up and probably most influential conservative think tank in Australia. Its income more than doubled from 2009 to 2012, easily outstripping the CIS, its membership increased five-fold since 2008 to almost 3400, and its public profile is the envy of political players, left and right. Roskam says its growth is partly due to the IPA's break with comfortable, leafy-streeted conservatism, and its active embrace of a new aspirational membership from the suburbs and beyond. Even Catholics, like himself. The Melbourne bastion's fastest-growing membership is now in Queensland. Roskam says the change is reflected in the Liberal Party's supporter base and the ascendency of a tougher breed of free marketeers in the party. Initially intended as a bulwark against full-scale socialism, the IPA's early policies reflected the dominant, mixed economy, Keynsian thinking of the time.

As the old economy began to unravel amid the oil crisis and the collapse of manufacturing in the mid-1970s, the IPA turned against big government and the clubby, postwar detente between big capital and big unions. So, too, did it seek new ideas and inspiration. Sydney University political economist Damien Cahill points out that as early as the 1940s, free market academics like Austrian ''granddaddy'' of neo-liberalism Friedrich Hayek had declared a ''war of ideas'' on the political left and Keynes. At the time, he says, they were regarded in the political mainstream as ''loonies and cranks''. ''Slowly they normalised their ideas, got people thinking about them,'' says Cahill. By 1974 Hayek was a Nobel prize winner and by 1975 conservative MP Margaret Thatcher was waving his books around in the UK. In 1976, the IPA brought Hayek to Australia, a watershed moment, says Paterson, for the IPA and Australia. In the mid-1980s, the IPA was one of a group of think tanks, including the CIS and the H.R. Nicholls Society, dubbed the New Right, whose ideas seeped into the consciousness of both the Liberal and Labor parties and helped pave the way for the Hawke government's free-market revolution.

The Howard government largely followed the same economic (if not social and cultural) policy path. Through these years the IPA was active but not as high-profile as it is now. A noticeable spike in its membership, support and media appearances, coincided with Labor's return to power and the government's carbon pricing plans and pushes on media regulation and data surveillance. Given its potency as a political force at a time one of its devotees is preparing to take the reins of the country, it is timely to ask: what is it the IPA wants? When does it want it, and how will it go about getting it? Roskam confirms that the IPA has a set of policies it would like implemented in full, but those policies are constantly reworked and their boundaries expanded as the IPA seeks to draw the debate its way. Some of its 75 big ideas, such as abolishing family tax benefits and ending all public subsidies to sport and art, seem laughably unrealistic - a bit like Friederich Hayek's ideas in the 1940s. Being ''radical'' - even hailing Gough Whitlam for his crash-through approach - is central to the IPA strategy. ''If we're not out there arguing for the Australian Human Rights Commission to be abolished,'' says Paterson ''no one is going to advance the idea of radically reforming it.''

John Howard puts it bluntly: ''They just try and condition the public attitude on these [policy] matters.'' So, too, does the IPA work at what Roskam calls a ''spine-stiffener'' for conservatives lacking the political courage required for serious reform. ''Political parties have the pressure of elections. We offer something unique in public debate of coming from a principled approach,'' he says. Important to this strategy is the demonising of opponents and the use of put downs like ''the genocide industry'' to dismiss academics concerned with indigenous issues and the stolen generation. Cahill says Howard-government favourite terms like ''political correctness'' and ''elites'' were ''incubated'' within conservative think tanks during the 1980s and 1990s. On tactics, Roskam insists his institute does not engage in traditional knocking-on-doors lobbying. Its preferred weapon of choice is the open battlefield of the media, both the mainstream and burgeoning social media sectors. Indeed, over the past decade the IPA's presence in print and electronic media has grown nearly eight-fold. Its spokesmen have regular spots on ABC TV and radio and on Murdoch's Sky News. IPA commentators are daily contributors to newspapers in both the Murdoch and Fairfax stables, including The Age. The IPA's growing presence on the ABC is a case study in the effectiveness of its method: it supports privatisation of the ABC, a position that provides cover for conservatives to complain about left-wing bias and push for more conservative voices.

Roskam and his IPA colleague Tim Wilson now alternate in a weekly spot on Jon Faine's morning radio show on ABC 774. Says Faine: ''The ABC's need to provide different points of view, to provide balance and to hear different voices, has very much been to their [the IPA's] advantage.'' While the IPA has built an enviable public profile, questions remain about whether it is deserved, given that it is, after all, supposed to be a research body. Up close, Roskam and Paterson are refreshingly open. Their energy and unswerving belief in their message partly explain the traction the IPA now has. It feels like evangelism, the kind that drove pilgrims into the wilderness and revolutionaries to the barricades. Only two questions rankle Roskam: Do you do research or paid propaganda? Is the IPA an activist group? The IPA was established as a quasi-academic body with the trappings of a university, including titles for staff such as ''research fellow'' and ''emeritus fellow'' and a structure based on policy units.

But its research has no academic weight and nor is it peer reviewed. Most controversially, the funding of research is not revealed. Roskam, a former Melbourne University politics lecturer who is halfway through a PhD, seeks to turn the tables by questioning university research. ''I'm sceptical about peer review in as much as you're reviewed by your mates. Good analysis will stand up to scrutiny whether it's peer reviewed or not.'' He acknowledges that some of the IPA's work is funded by commercial interests, including its controversial tobacco industry-funded research in the 1990s that attacked the science behind passive smoking. Roskam will not publicly stand by the tobacco research, pointing out that it was done before his time. Ditto an AIDS campaign from the past. But he denies the IPA tailors its findings to the demands of the paying client. On the contrary, he says, clients come to the IPA because their concerns are consistent with IPA principles.

In recent years the IPA's high-profile skepticism on climate change has tested even some of its own financial supporters. A source from a major resources company says the IPA's stance on climate change is ''nuts'' and ''lunacy''. Roskam confirms the IPA lost some corporate donors but would not identify them. And he refuses to reveal the names of the companies that backed the IPA's climate change research and campaign. ExxonMobil Australia confirmed it had been an IPA member but had not been ''for several years''. A pattern is emerging of the IPA alienating large, image-conscious multinationals but gaining support from cashed-up hard-liners like Gina Rinehart. While some critics have likened the IPA to the Tea Party in the US, he rejects the activist tag. ''Activism means to me dressing up and protesting in the street. I like to think of it as a loud voice.'' Cahill says the IPA's policy and research work is ideological and closed to alternative views. He describes the IPA and CIS as ''shock troops for neo-liberalism. ''They're not about to produce a piece of research that says 'plain packaging on cigarettes is a fantastic thing' because everyone knows Philip Morris is up to their eyeballs in think tank funding.''

Cahill says it is ''unfortunate'' the media tends to quote the IPA as an independent research institute when it is ''clearly ideological and completely dependent for its continued existence on corporate support''. Does such a public platform add up to real influence? Measuring the causal relationship between political campaigning and government decision is notoriously difficult. Probably the answer is a qualified yes. There are instances where the IPA appears to have had a profound and obvious impact. The policies of the Howard administration were often consistent with the IPA's, notably concerning labour-market reform, privatisation of unemployment assistance, the full sale of Telstra, greater choice in health insurance and education, and the accountability of publicly funded, non-government organisations. In 2003, the IPA accepted a rare federal government commission to advise Howard on NGO policy. Roskam and colleague Gary Johns produced a report recommending greater transparency for government-funded groups. In response, the government drafted laws to curtail the tax-exempt status of charity organisations engaged in political activities. And the Australian Tax Office exposed environment group the Wilderness Society to three tax audits.

Yet on matters at the core of the free-market project, the Howard government fell well short of the IPA's ideals. It failed the core test of downsizing government. Under Howard, state spending as a proportion of GDP remained steady. Policies implemented under the free-market mantra of choice cost taxpayers billions of dollars, including home-owner grants, private school funding, private health insurance rebates, and family tax benefits. Although a fan of the IPA, Howard questions the extent of its direct influence on his government. ''I was probably not as conscious of it [the IPA] as I have been over the last few years because many of the things which the IPA stood for, such as individual freedom, a less regulated labour market and a less regulated economy, were things that my government believed in and practised.'' He says the IPA's clout in the Liberal Party tends to be ''indirect''. ''I'm quite certain that people in the Liberal Party are influenced by [IPA staff] newspaper columns, by television appearances, by the literature.''

Faine is in no doubt about the IPA's political wherewithal. ''They are clearly now very influential on a number of issues,'' he says, citing recent examples including campaigns around climate change and against Labor's proposed local government referendum. Roskam is especially proud of his work on climate change and openly accepts credit for a key role in undermining carbon pricing. He points out that in the mid-2000s, a conservative columnist criticised the IPA for its ''radical position'' against an emissions trading scheme. ''Not so radical in 2013 is it? Boundaries do change.'' Indeed, as they have over the once wacky idea of special tax concessions to develop northern Australia. Despite being at odds with free-market theory - if the north was ripe for development it would do so without government help - support for development is being promoted by both major parties after a surprise promise from Kevin Rudd this month. The Coalition had already pledged a white paper. The IPA has long supported the idea, but has pushed especially hard recently, courtesy of a joint project with the Gina Rinehart-backed Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision. Roskam confirms the funding but denies the billionaire is using the IPA to press for lower tax for her mining projects.

Faine describes the parties' new-found agreement on the north as ''classic'' IPA work. ''For a long time people poo-pooed it [developing the north] and now it's bipartisan policy for the Labor and Liberal parties.'' So where does it stop, this dragging of the public agenda the IPA's way? Certainly not with the likely election of an Abbott government which, as all governments do, will find itself restrained by public opinion and polls. Roskam says while he is excited by the increasing currency of dry, free-market thinking in the Liberal Party, vigilance is always required. He nominates the ABC as a key issue in the event of a Coalition victory. ''That was off limits under the Howard government - the role of universities and all of that broad cultural debate. What is really exciting is that I think Abbott wants to take on some of this.'' Loading

Surely the Coalition won't privatise the ABC? ''Sometimes the things that are improbable do happen,'' says Roskam. Jesus Christ would have to agree. with CRAIG BUTT