“Bullying, harassment, intimidation:” Inquiry told astroturfing inflaming division over renewables

Misinformation and “astroturfing” is alive and well in energy policy and climate action debates in Australia, and likely exacerbating community division.

Children intimidated in the playground and ostracised families have been observed in communities splintering over the renewables rollout, with misinformation understood to be inflaming divides.

“The division in the community, and the bullying, harassment, intimidation, that I’ve seen, it saddens me,” Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner Tony Mahar said during a parliamentary hearing on Monday.

“And it troubles me.”

Mr Mahar is on the frontline of fracturing over clean energy and transmission infrastructure in his role designed to address inadequate community engagement by industry and government.

Fire risk and compensation questions are some of the concerns he and his team hear regularly, anxieties the commissioner says can be “exacerbated by lack of understanding or trust and fuelled by misinformation”.

“I’ve heard face-to-face stories of children being intimidated at school, and families being ostracised and things because of the views that they might or might not hold,” he said.

The noisy information environment plaguing energy debates in Australia was canvassed by several witnesses during parliamentary hearings set to continue on Tuesday.

The Union of Concerned Scientists and a Brown University expert on US anti-offshore wind opposition networks are among those set to give evidence on the prevalence and motivations of misinformation and disinformation on climate change.

Professor Daniel Angus, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society, said the energy and climate “astroturfing” – posing as grassroots organisations despite ties to well-heeled political parties or lobby groups – was common during the last federal election.

“At the moment, it’s quite easy for these groups to just put a simple tagline, as many of you would be aware, as yourselves having to put authorisations on political materials,” Prof Angus told the senators.

“The problem with those authorisations is that they don’t really provide meaningful transparency about the nature of the funding behind the scenes.”

ADM+S Australian Ad Observatory analysis of 580 political ads during the 2025 federal election revealed climate and energy as “prime targets” for third-party advertising framed as “ordinary Australians”.

Names like “Mums for Nuclear” and “Energy for Australians” were picked by vested interests to conjure the image of a grassroots outfit, Prof Angus explained, or there would be attempts to mirror the identity of an authentic group by adopting a similar name

Prof Angus said astroturfing was not solely the domain of conservative-leaning interest groups but they were the dominate players, based on international and domestic experience.

“What we find is a lot to do with the new kind of discourse around climate change denial, which is more now delay and obfuscation,” he said.

“And so you’re going to find a lot of groups who are trying to position in the debate confusion, or try and slow any kind of meaningful change, for example, uptake of renewables.”

Source: AAP