Tim Wilson’s LinkedIn proves he is Liberal spiritual leader in waiting

Many people on LinkedIn shamelessly brag about their professional achievements. But shadow minister for small business, industrial relations and employment Tim Wilson profile is hilariously boastful, even by LinkedIn standards.

The federal member for Goldstein’s bio describes him as “one of the most ‘eminent political strategists of their political generation’” (it is unclear who he is quoting). His “experience” section also informs us that he “defied political gravity, made three Australian electoral milestones and retook Goldstein against an electoral tsunami”.

Why was I on Wilson’s LinkedIn profile? I was curious how he spent his three years in the political wilderness, between losing his seat to independent Zoe Daniel in the 2022 teal wave and regaining it in May 2025.

His profile lists three positions during this interregnum: occasional columnist at the Australian Financial Reviewprincipal consultant at Dynamic Sunrise Consulting (a side-hustle business he owns), and PhD candidate at RMIT University.

Crikey asked Wilson about the nature of his consulting work but didn’t receive a reply before publication. But it’s his PhD — which, according to his profile, he is still doing part-time — that is most interesting.

The Institute for Digital Libertarianism

Wilson is undertaking his PhD at RMIT’s Blockchain Innovation Hub, which has attracted controversy as many of its researchers are former employees of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), a right-wing think tank with close links to the Liberal Party. This might help explain why Wilson, a former IPA policy director, was attracted to the Hub.

The RMIT Hub was co-founded in 2017 by former IPA researchers Chris Berg and Jason Potts. In 2020, Guardian Australia reported that five of its 15 researchers were then or previously affiliated with the IPA (not including Wilson, of course, who only started his PhD in November 2022). The IPA did not provide funding to the Hub, which was funded by RMIT and Australia Research Council grants.

The IPA had never published research on blockchain technology before 2017 and hasn’t published much on it since. So why were so many IPA fellows drawn to RMIT’s Hub?

As Berg told Crikey: “I think blockchain is a very interesting technology for those who are sceptical of state power.” It is the same reason that the American right has so fervently embraced cryptocurrencies — they promise to reduce the role of government in finance and currency regulation. Berg stresses, however, that he has worked with people across the political spectrum on the research.

The Hub started at a time of great — some would say excessive — enthusiasm for blockchain technology (90% of blockchain solutions implemented by companies ended up failing). Application of the technology has developed since, as have the cryptocurrencies that rely on it — but not enough to recapture the imaginations of RMIT’s higher-ups.

Berg said the College of Business and Law has decided to “reprioritise its resources”, reducing the Hub to a less well-resourced “research group” and requiring its researchers to go back to teaching late last year.

However, its researchers remain at RMIT and their clique of former IPA fellows continues to promulgate techno-libertarianism in their roles. For instance, Berg, Potts and Darcy Allen, another former IPA fellow, make frequent submissions to parliamentary and departmental enquiries related to the digital economy. These tend to stress that industry players deserve greater legislative certainty.

But other suggestions are more controversial. Berg, for instance, has cited approvingly the Trump administration’s decision to drop or pause Biden-era lawsuits against crypto exchanges and providers (he argues legislatures, not executive governments, should shape the industry’s regulation). Allen also serves on the board of the Digital Economy Council of Australia, an industry lobby group whose members include many major crypto exchanges and traders, including Crypto.com, which is working with Donald Trump’s Truth Social to develop a MAGA-branded crypto exchange.

The Albanese government is set to soon craft policies on crypto, the ACCC’s digital economy powers and artificial intelligence, with Labor MPs and unions divided on some of these questions.

As a member of Sussan Ley’s economics team, Wilson will likely have a say on how the Coalition should position itself on these issues. Watch this space.

Future doctor? Future Liberal leader?

Beyond providing context for future policy fights, why does Wilson’s CV matter? For starters, it provides a window onto how ideological influencers such as the IPA intersect with factions in institutions such as academia and government, and how their protégés can carry forward and iterate their ideas.

More immediately, Wilson’s relationship with the IPA’s agenda casts some light on his ideological direction, which might prove consequential, given he is one of the increasingly few articulate, energised, young shadow ministers in a shell-shocked rump of a partyroom. Under the “moderate” Ley, the Coalition could foreseeably head in a more Wilsonian direction.

Despite his RMIT Hub affiliation, he hasn’t publicly gone full techno-libertarian in the same way as his former colleagues (so far). However, he has championed another long-standing IPA preoccupation: preserving super as a tax-avoidance vehicle.

Wilson led a recent push for his party to campaign hard against the government’s $3 million super cap, teaming up with fund manager Geoff Wilson with whom he successfully fearmongered about Bill Shorten’s franking credits policies in 2019. With nothing much else to agree on, the Coalition is now coalescing around the Wilsons’ push. Australian journalist turned IPA economist Adam Creighton, the paper’s chief attack dog on super, must be pleased.

Wilson’s fellow Liberal “moderate” Andrew Bragg is also a leading critic of Labor’s approach to super. Bragg used to work for the Financial Services Council (FSC), a lobby group whose members include retail super funds, which is also campaigning against Labor’s cap.

The FSC recently produced modelling suggesting half a million current Australian workers could be impacted by the cap before they retire, which kicked off unquestioning media reports suggesting it would affect “young people”. But half a million is a small fraction of Australia’s 14 million workers. This model of “research as bad faith policy grenade” is reminiscent of the IPA, whose tactics have been endlessly copied.

Peter Dutton’s Musk-like agenda of cutting the public service and its staffers’ remote work conditions, pushed by Bragg’s former think tank, the Menzies Research Centre, proved disastrous. It appears the party is now channelling its small government agenda into the more expedient avenue of tax minimisation, under the influence of “one of the most eminent political strategists of their political generation”.

The Coalition is a broad and fractious tent, but at least it can agree on one thing: helping wealthy people pay less tax.