There’s been a lot of focus on the role of lobbying in the decision of the Commonwealth and Queensland governments to hand more than $900 million to US company PsiQuantum — a deal the auditor-general may now take a look at. PsiQuantum has two lobbyists: long-term Liberal strategists-cum-lobbyists C|T Group, and Brookline Advisory, the Labor-aligned lobbying firm led by veteran Labor advisers Lidija Ivanovski and Gerard Richardson.
Brookline was only established last year and PsiQuantum was — according to the federal lobbyist register — its second client after the University of Tasmania. Another client Brookline gained last year was US gas company Tamboran Resources, which plans an LNG plant at the Middle Arm “Sustainable” Precinct in Darwin — to which, during the 2022 federal election, Labor committed $1.5 billion. That brings us back to Ivanovski who, like Richardson, has been a senior Labor adviser at the highest state and federal levels.
The Australian Greens take up the story in their “Additional Comments” for the recent Senate Environment and Communications Committee’s report on Middle Arm:
Brookline was co-founded in 2023 by Lidija Ivanovski, who had previously worked for the NT chief minister Paul Henderson and in the last federal Parliament, was the chief of staff to shadow defence minister Richard Marles.
Between March and May 2022, Ms Ivanovski took time out of this parliamentary role to be the chief of staff running Labor’s federal election campaign. At the precise time that Ms Ivanovski was running Labor’s election campaign, then shadow infrastructure minister Catherine King announced that a Labor government would fund the Middle Arm project with $1.5 billion of public money.
The biggest beneficiary of Labor’s funding is the gas company Tamboran Resources, who would go on to become Ms Ivanovoski’s client.
As the Greens go on to admit, this is merely circumstantial evidence. Ivanovski did not respond to Crikey’s questions about what role, if any, she played in Labor’s campaign decision to fund Middle Arm — after all, it’s not as if Labor needs any help committing taxpayer funding to fossil fuel projects. Unlike C|T Group or two other well-known Labor strategists and lobbyists, Evan Moorhead and Cameron Milner in Queensland — both now banned from lobbying in that state, but still active at the federal level — Ivanovski wasn’t a lobbyist both before and after she was a campaign strategist.
And Brookline isn’t Tamboran Resources’ only representatives in Canberra. At the end of May, the company signed up Pacific Partners Strategic Advocacy — owned by Joe Hockey’s Bondi Partners. Like PsiQuantum, Tamboran Resources clearly likes having lobbyists connected to both sides of politics. That looks like a very smart move now that the Country Liberals have smashed NT Labor and returned to power in the Top End.
They may have been busy at Brookline with the government’s foreign student caps. One of the few winners from the federal government’s cap on foreign student numbers happened to be… Brookline’s first client University of Tasmania. But before anyone gets too carried away, one of Brookline’s more recent clients, Western Sydney University, copped what it says was a 23% cut on its projected 2025 intake. Can’t win ’em all.
