Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Speaking of fighting every day for our democracy, I wanted to talk about the subject that I spoke about in my two-minute statement earlier this week about the unprecedented, extraordinary rise in the vote of One Nation and what might be behind it. I wanted to start with highlighting a study and a publication by ABC News Verify. They did an investigation into foreign influence on Australian politics, and they looked at various shady websites run out of Vietnam, and there was a later study on some websites being run out of Sri Lanka. They chose a one-week period to do this investigation.

Over that one week, they uncovered 400 posts from these two websites in Vietnam that were pretty much untraceable. They were highly sophisticated, deepfake AI videos on Australian politics. More than half of them featured Senator Pauline Hanson. They were complete fakes of Senator Hanson in hospital giving money to sick kids and so on and so forth—soft stuff through to anti-immigration and anticlimate stuff. About a third of them, on top of that, were about the Prime Minister and, once again, were putting the One Nation party in a very positive light. That was one week—400 posts in one week from two websites that we can't trace. When ABC News Verify went to a number of experts in this area, they said they could guarantee it was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the kind of content that's being generated. It's not just in Australia, by the way; this is a massive global challenge for all of us. But they said this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the political influence campaign that's coming from offshore, interfering in Australian politics and undermining our democracy.

It gets a little bit more complicated when you look at the motive or the potential motive behind this kind of disinformation campaign or political influence campaign—however you want to classify it. Is it monetising the algorithm? Are they using Australian politics to try and generate revenue? Possibly. Is it a nefarious, malicious, foreign-actor campaign or a foreign government? Possibly. That's not been ruled out. Once again, ABC News Verify in the article spoke to security experts who said it couldn't be ruled out. Is it a directly funded influence campaign on behalf of One Nation or other interests to influence our politics? Once again, no-one knows. Just to add a little bit of extra complication, it could have been all three or certainly a combination of the above.

I was with my colleagues, and we were wrapping up the Senate select committee into climate misinformation and disinformation when this was released. At the end of the Greens additional comments, we recommended an independent investigation of this as a potential foreign influence campaign on Australian democracy. As was featured in an excellent article by Alex Fein, 'It's time to call it what it is: Foreign Interference', to which I would refer senators who are interested in this—that was this week. It kind of beggars belief that millions of dollars are going into creating this kind of content. RMIT did a follow-up article, after the ABC News Verify report came out, and said that this stuff is effective. Wherever it's coming from, it is influencing outcomes here in Australia.

I'm going to deal with some interesting psychology and facts around this in a second, but we recommended an investigation because this is just the tip of the iceberg, with AI coming online as strongly as it is now. It can produce this kind of content now at an industrial scale, easily, and the services are available for those who want to buy them. There's been a lot of conversation around this lately. You can buy these kinds of services. You can buy bot armies now, and you have been able to for a while, to influence all the comments on the political page of a senator or any Australian. This is big business, and it can be purchased almost like real estate. We know the apparatus is there and how it works. Our committee, for example, uncovered significant coordinated campaigns to undermine climate action globally. We know that climate action is also linked to campaigns around anti-immigration, anti-trans—a whole bunch of kind of right-wing stuff.

I want to recommend to senators, if they want to read a really good book, Angertainment by Ed Coper. It is absolutely brilliant. I've only just finished reading it. He explains in really, really simple detail why these campaigns are so effective at influencing politics, how people vote and people's preferences. It pretty much goes like this, in really simple form—I'm only reading part of this, where he talks about how it functions. But he basically says that we're all products of our information environment in this day and age. Our decisions are heavily influenced by our information environment. There are no surprises there.

He's basically saying that the information environment is being polluted for malicious and nefarious reasons. To use his words, it's being hacked, or hijacked, by vested interests, especially political interests. He talks about engagement; it's all about engagement. He says that's the new form of capital in our attention economy. He says engagement hackers, those who can hack the algorithm—and they do; this is what these groups do—are the new gatekeepers of our attention. He says those who win the battle for our attention on social media ultimately win our opinions, and he backs this up with a lot of evidence, especially about young people who spend a lot of time scrolling on their phones.

He talks about the whole MAGA movement, and he talks about how politics is now entertainment. He says that, basically, the political right around the country, around the world, has won what he calls a pop-culture battle. He says social media rewards counternarratives and rewards disinformation. It rewards outrage, conflict and anger. In this environment—this is where it gets really chilling—he says new surveys are showing that, in 2025, for example, social media passed mainstream media as the key source of people's news, and that includes online news. Four out of 10 people now avoid mainstream media news. Personalities, celebrities and influencers are now trusted more than media outlets. In the US, the recent Pew poll showed that more than 40 per cent of Americans under 30 get their news from social media platforms and 42 per cent trust podcasts more than mainstream media news outlets. Of course, AI, once again, is going to elevate this kind of thing at scale.

What could go wrong? Well, Ed Coper surmises that the algorithm right now is making us more right-wing in our politics. Steve Bannon, when the Epstein files were leaked—there was an exchange there with Clive Palmer, which I must say Clive Palmer has denied. I don't believe him, but he's denied it. Bannon has basically said, 'If you give me a chunk of money, we'll run an influence campaign that'll completely bust open the two-party system in Australia.' He's openly spoken about flooding the room with a word I'm not allowed to use in here—BS. It confuses people and kind of turns the system upside down. People don't know whether they're coming or going, and, of course, while flooding the room, there are lots of distractions. It's been a highly effective strategy globally.

The circumstantial evidence for the rise in One Nation's vote around a massive foreign and local disinformation campaign is compelling. I urge the Australian media to dig a little bit deeper when they assume this is an organic campaign. This political party has gone from a vote of around six per cent in the polls to over 30 per cent—that is, a rise of 400 to 500 per cent, depending on which poll you go on. I'm not disputing those polls. This is unprecedented in Australian political history, and it's happened in nine months. This is a political party that is established, has had the same goals—I wouldn't even say they've had policies—and the same agenda for 30 years.

Australians have been moving away from the major parties now for over a decade, especially in the last five years. We know that they're disgruntled with politics but what's happened defies normal explanation. Clearly, people are looking at One Nation as an option, but we're not asking ourselves why. If someone has paid for a massive disinformation campaign or an influence campaign that's promoting One Nation, they're not shying away from the massive campaign infrastructure they've got around them now in Australia. They're flaunting their relationship with Australia's richest woman and other billionaires. Australians need to know about this because there are things we can do. We need to be really worried about where this goes next. This is just the tip of the iceberg for us, and it's only going to get a whole lot worse if we don't know how to identify these campaigns and put in place roadblocks and guardrails to help Australians understand they're being conned.

Senate adjourned at 20:36