Illustration: Matt Golding While membership is free, the sites do ask for donations. In most cases, it is only when attempting to pay that subscribers can discover who the backer is. The websites do not declare that the South Australian senator is behind them, and the majority do not reveal that the money raised goes to either the Conservative Leadership Foundation or its think tank Menzies House, which was co-founded by Bernardi. Bernardi, speaking from Washington on a parliamentary business trip, said the donations were used to further the foundation's purposes and none went to him personally. He said the foundation aimed to promote and support conservative, mostly young, people who were interested in leadership. He also said Menzies House was now independently run. ''At no stage do I profit personally from any of the engagements of the CLF,'' Bernardi said. The senator has a strong interest in the US Tea Party Movement - a collection of loosely affiliated community-based groups with no central leadership, who determine their own conservative and libertarian platforms.

And at least one group, the Heartland Institute, is keen on him, too - twice paying for Bernardi to attend and speak at its conferences. Supporters call it a grassroots uprising. Critics call it ''astroturfing'' because many groups in the US are funded through billionaire oil and tobacco interests, but portray themselves as being successful as a result of grassroots donations. Many of the groups are linked to organisations such as Americans for Prosperity, which uses donations from the oil and tobacco industries to seed, fund, educate and organise other groups. Visitors to the websites set up in Australia by the Conservative Leadership Foundation need to dig to find their relationship to Bernardi, the foundation and Menzies House. While the foundation openly claims ownership of the Conservative Action Network and its website, www.CANdo.org.au, on its own website, web visitors who find CANdo independently are only told who the backer is when they attempt to make a donation through PayPal. Menzies House declares its support for the stopgillardscarbontax.com site, a ''central portal and information resource for Australians opposing Julia Gillard's destructive carbon tax''. The site's actual registration, however, is held in the US by a company that hides its domain ownership, which is not possible on .au websites. An attempt to donate to the stopgillardscarbontax.com site through PayPal saw the money sent to an account that appears to be held by Menzies House editor Tim Andrews. Bernardi deferred most questions to the foundation's national director, Geoffrey Greene, saying he was not involved in its day-to-day operations. Greene admitted the stopgillardscarbontax website was ''one of ours'' and Menzies House was ''part of us''.

Greene said he had been involved in ''four or five'' new websites started through CANdo since April, when he began his role as a volunteer. He said more websites had been created before he joined, and some were accessible via Facebook. The CANdo network has 45 groups listed on its website and, according to Greene, thousands of members. Greene later clarified his statement by saying that the foundation only operated its own site, the CANdo.org.au website and two Facebook sites. Menzies House's domain registration shows, however, that it is owned by the Conservative Leadership Foundation. Greene denied the foundation's set-up was similar to the Tea Party movement and instead described it as more like the conservative version of the left-wing campaign movement GetUp!

''CanDo is a bit like, but not like a GetUp! type of thing. They [groups and websites] are self-generated operations that you can propose concepts to us. Some of them get picked up and taken around and others don't,'' he said. Greene said the foundation had not actively sought business support and would not declare its finances publicly because it was not required to by law. ''If people are keen and interested to support our objectives of promoting conservative leadership, we are happy for them to do so,'' he said. ''We are not a political party. We are not politically partisan. We are not here to put those things on the table … There is no siphoning of money or any political distributions of money.'' Bernardi's Registrar of Senators' Interests shows that last year he travelled to the United States as a guest of the Tea Party think tank, the Heartland Institute. He denied he had talked about Tea Party tactics or organising ''grassroots'' groups on the web, but said he spoke at its conference in May. In October last year he also declared the institute paid for his accommodation in Sydney during another conference.

The Heartland Institute is best known in the US as the think tank that declared that ''research'' showed passive smoking was not a health hazard, and for its role in Climategate. (The Sydney Morning Herald in 2008 exposed the institute's false claims that a chief scientist in New Zealand was part of a ''denial campaign''.) Family First senator Steve Fielding returned from a 2009 Heartland conference claiming global warming was caused by ''solar flares'', not human activity. When The Sunday Age asked Bernardi about the think tank, he said: ''I have no comment on the Heartland Institute. The only thing I can say is I have been invited to speak in respect to my personal views in regards to … climate change and I have done that … It is not an endorsement or a disendorsement of any other views,'' he said.