Call It What It Is: Foreign Interference
If a hostile state ran this sort of operation to swing our vote, we'd call it foreign interference. It's time we did.
Australian politics presents us with a profound irony. A party that is so xenophobic that its leader claims there are no good Muslims, will happily embrace all manner of very foreign ideas and expertise.
Some working in Australian media and politics may look at the US since Trump’s 2016 election and Britain since Brexit and think it all looks pretty attractive.
Everyone else would be well advised to stop treating the meteoric rise of One Nation as an organic phenomenon.
Pauline Hanson has not simply won a contest in the free marketplace of ideas.
I have written before about the open door on which One Nation has been pushing: the fury at collapsing living standards and a political class that neither knows nor cares. And I have written about what stepped through it: a sophisticated, transnationally networked information operation, one limb of which ABC News Verify exposed in March — networks of AI-generated Facebook accounts targeting Australians with pro-Hanson content.
What I want to add now is this: Hanson’s November address at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where she declared Australia an “economic and social tinderbox” to a room of American conservative powerbrokers, was almost certainly more than a mere ‘legitimising’ event.
The surge since looks less like the natural afterglow that comes from hanging with kindred spirits and more like a blinding flash after a local franchise is formally plugged into a near-infinitely funded global apparatus.
We know this apparatus. Or at least, we should.
Remember the (now primitive) techniques of the Russian-linked operations that Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie described turning “clicks into votes” for Trump 2016 and Brexit?
These were further refined by the likes of Viktor Orbán, whose capture of Hungary’s information space made him the model for what Anne Applebaum calls Autocracy, Inc. — autocrats and their enablers operating not as ideological soulmates but as a mutually reinforcing network.
If “network” sounds like a metaphor, the Epstein files should disabuse you. They detail a very small world comprising an elite with a few very particular obsessions. Beyond the sex trafficking that dominates headlines, Epstein and his friends had a laser-like focus on tax minimisation and wealth concentration and the cultural project that could help them cement these by not only sowing division, but by entrenching dominance and hierarchy.
CNN’s review of the correspondence shows Steve Bannon strategising with Jeffrey Epstein to foment a global populist movement, while the Guardian reports Bannon telling Epstein he was raising money for Le Pen and Salvini and their far-right parties ahead of the 2019 European elections.
This is not a marketplace of ideas. It is a funded, coordinated, transnational political project whose tactics stretch back decades. There’s even an Atlas and Big Tobacco link to accompany the better known link between the network and climate denial.
This transnational project seeks to neuter government in order to prevent fair taxation and any regulation that would interfere with wealth accumulation. And its principals have been open about wanting franchises everywhere.
This week, we watched some horrific consequences of the apparatus in operation.
In Belfast, anti-migrant riots that one MP called a “race-based pogrom” were planned and inflamed online before a single bin was set alight: Tommy Robinson posted protest locations to more than eight million views.
Elon Musk amplified him to nearly seven million more, urging people to protest “REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY”.
Families were burned out of their homes. And the UK government? It will take no action against X for at least two months.
That is what it looks like when a democracy spends years refusing to name what is happening to it. The infiltration. A foreigner of unimaginable wealth inciting against the danger of… foreigners.
It is worth understanding the machinery, because it explains something our focus groups have been showing us for months: participants quoting near-identical pro-Hanson talking points.
Modern influence no longer arrives looking like advertising or even just the bot networks. It arrives as the ‘clipping economy’ — armies of paid freelancers who chop long content into viral fragments and blast them across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts.
As The Verge’s reporting shows, these paid campaigns are often indistinguishable from fan uploads, and a million views can be bought very cheaply. When voters tell us about content from ‘Pauline’ that a mate shared, almost none of them can know whether the original share was even Australian.
And this engineered ubiquity produces a particular political dynamic: the preference cascade. Polling aggregates show One Nation’s near-vertical rise echoing the collapse of the Voice referendum: the moment people sense that everyone around them secretly agrees with something that may have been once a little transgressive.
I noted last time that voters who would once have been embarrassed to admit a One Nation vote no longer are. That shame’s evaporation was engineered.
So let us name it. What Australia is experiencing is a foreign infiltration of our democracy.
If a hostile state ran AI-generated sockpuppet networks to swing our politics, we would call it foreign interference and respond with the full machinery of state.
The fact that this operation runs partly through billionaires, platforms, and transnational political networks rather than embassies does not make it less foreign, less coordinated, or less corrosive.
It just makes it harder to see. And that is the point of the design.
Naming it also means rigorously questioning the very strange claim from some in our media and politics that One Nation is ‘centre right’.
There is nothing centre right about a party leader suggesting there are no ‘good’ Muslims.
There is nothing centre right about the push to restrict abortion in this country, which is also enjoying a push from a shadowy overseas group.
‘Centre right’ is quite simply laundering.
And it is incumbent on all serious people in our media and politics to point this out.
Because every commentator who deploys it performs, free of charge, the exact normalisation the operation is engineered to achieve.
None of this is to pretend the operation is purely foreign in its plumbing. The Atlas Network’s reach into Australia, and groups like Advance — which ‘copied the MAGA model’ with funding from some of Australia’s richest — supply the domestic pipeline.
Nor does any of this absolve those who left the door open. Had the major parties met people’s material needs, no operation would have been able to take hold in this way. Both things are true at once.
A polity that values its democratic nature needs to respond to this infiltration accordingly: with exposure, with regulation of the entities and platforms that fuel it, with fixing the material conditions that underpin it, and with the informational coalitions across progressive and genuinely centre-right politics that I have been urging for months.
The UK in general, and Belfast specifically, shows us the cost of waiting.
Alex Fein is RedBridge’s Research and Intelligence Principal. However, these are her views and not a reflection of her employer.
Bibliography
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