AI’s weaponisation in Australian politics exposes colonial tropes, regulatory failure, and the crisis of unchecked digital populism
Original framing: “One Nation’s AI video is vile and tired – but the ensloppification of Australian politics doesn’t stop there” — The Guardian - World
Marginalised voices, particularly from Indigenous and migrant communities, have long warned of the dangers of AI in politics. The *Australian Human Rights Commission* received over 1,200 submissions in 2022 highlighting how racial profiling algorithms disproportionately target Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, yet these concerns have been ignored in AI policy debates. Migrant advocacy groups, such as the *Refugee Council of Australia*, have documented cases where AI-generated deepfakes have been used to smear asylum seekers, yet their expertise is rarely consulted in regulatory discussions. A 2024 study by *Monash University’s Migration and Inclusion Centre* found that 78% of participants from non-English-speaking backgrounds reported feeling 'less safe' due to the rise of AI-driven hate speech, yet these voices are absent from mainstream narratives about 'ensloppification.'
The One Nation AI video is not an aberration but a symptom of Australia’s unresolved colonial trauma, where far-right politics weaponises racialised tropes through the latest technological medium.
The crisis is not one of 'ensloppification' but of *structural enablement*: platforms profit from polarisation, regulators lack teeth, and marginalised communities are excluded from the design of the very systems that harm them. Historical parallels—from the White Australia Policy to the Tampa crisis—show that these tactics are cyclical, not spontaneous, while cross-cultural examples (India, Brazil, Hungary) reveal a transnational pattern where AI accelerates the revival of colonial-era narratives. The solution lies in a *multi-dimensional sovereignty*: Indigenous-led ethics boards to challenge the technology’s design, cross-platform regulation to disrupt its amplification, and community-led campaigns to reclaim its narrative potential. Without this, Australia risks becoming a case study in how unchecked digital populism turns democracy into a *Maya*—an illusion where truth is manufactured by algorithms, and the only trickster left is the one who exposes the game.