Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

Labor is not taking the threat of AI-powered far-right extremism seriously. Worse than that, they're opening the door to it. Take American AI surveillance company Palantir. Palantir was founded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, an unhinged nutcase who thinks that Greta Thunberg could be the Antichrist, a man who has said that he doesn't believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

Palantir is now a central figure in the US military-industrial complex, enabling a massive expansion of the surveillance state, helping Israel generate kill lists in Gaza and supporting Donald Trump's ICE to track and deport immigrants. It was Palantir's AI targeting software that was responsible for the strike on the school in Iran that killed over a hundred children. This is a company whose CEO, Alex Karp, has lauded the West's 'superiority in applying organised violence'. This is a man who says that society needs to be willing to destroy millions of jobs to develop military AI.

You'd think that all of this would have made Labor think twice before getting into bed with Palantir. You might think that the government of a sovereign nation would be reluctant to let in, through the front door, a company that says it has a 'moral debt' to serve US military interests, but you'd be wrong. Labor is giving millions of dollars to Palantir in Defence contracts. The company has top-secret security clearance, embedding itself in the Australian Signals Directorate, AUSTRAC and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission. How much of your data does Palantir have access to, and what are they doing with it? How can we be confident that our data is secure? Labor needs to get with the program before it's too late and kick out Palantir.