One Nation threatens major parties as voters turn to AI for information

Will former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who lost his seat in the teal wave, use Victorian Liberal leader Jess Wilson's campaign as a soft launch of his own tilt to return to Canberra?

Jess and Josh on the hustings might offer moderate Liberals the image they have been yearning for. 

If the Liberals can win a majority in the Victorian state election, which polls suggest will be hard but something both Labor and Liberal strategists believe is still possible, it may provide a rejuvenation — a green shoot, if you will — of the Liberal brand.

With fewer than 50 days until Victorians cast their votes, the race is operating on two levels: the macro, and the subterranean. The race is becoming a proxy war on several fronts that are less obvious but nationally significant.

Rumbles in the ranks

So what does a daily three-way contest between Labor, the Coalition and One Nation look like? 

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Brisbane this weekend, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor played second fiddle to Hanson. She was the rock star. 

How often does Hanson come to Victoria to get on the hustings, and what are the consequences of her involvement?

It looks like becoming a contest far from traditional, with political reverberations far beyond the border.

But both parties have problems in their own ranks.

Victorian Premier Ben Carroll's primary opponent is Labor. He has to convince voters he offers something different from the government he helped run.

Labor has a habit of handing the leadership to a woman when the party is on its last legs: Joan Kirner in Victoria, Kristina Keneally in New South Wales. They also handed it to Jacinta Allan, but all she did was remind voters of Daniel Andrews. He continued to loom over her leadership.

In Canberra, the Liberal Party is facing an almost existential identity crisis as it tries to peel back votes from One Nation.

Taylor is still trying to find his line and length on what his alternative offer to voters is — part Hansonism, part agrarian conservative with an Oxford pedigree.

Party strategists see Wilson as what the brand needs to win back heartland seats and appeal to frustrated Labor voters. She offers a return to traditional small-l liberal values, with a focus on the economy, not culture wars.

Voters want someone who will get on with fixing the basics: potholes, housing, hospitals and the cost of living. 

For most people, those basics will determine how they vote. Everything else starts to fall into the fringe basket; you would be hard-pressed to find someone with a mortgage and a commute from the suburbs whose first thought in the morning is the politics of transgender toilets.

That could make life difficult for both Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Taylor. One Nation threatens both major parties; it has already picked up Secret Harbour from Labor at a state by-election in Western Australia.

The risk of disgruntled Labor voters going straight to One Nation rather than parking their vote with the Liberals can be hard for people in Canberra to fathom.

The answer is not that complex: they are fed up. To those voters, One Nation sounds like the only party that cares about the same things they are worried about.

The more Taylor talks about fringe issues and culture wars, the more he helps One Nation appear to be the only party interested in voters' concerns. Even his migration policy shows how beholden he is, whether he understands it or not, to One Nation.

AI in the campaign

AI adds another complication. Labor strategists will have PTSD at the mention of death taxes. Labor's own 2019 election review found its rebuttals helped amplify the scare campaign. 

The more they spoke about it, the more real they made it. The more they tried to kill it, the more they fed it.

But AI's role is not confined to bots and disinformation. People are using it as the new Google — to plan trips, look things up, and to make sense of information.

That means people will be asking Claude, ChatGPT or whichever model they use about policies and political parties. What happens when they start asking these models who to vote for?

Research from digital marketing agency Topham Guerin points to another problem: AI can leave One Nation out of the answer.

In 200 answers comparing parties on Victorian election issues, the models mentioned Labor in all, the Liberals and Nationals in 199 each, the Greens in 178, and One Nation in just 43.

Across 155 recorded comparison answers, only four systems in seven searched for One Nation.

That is a problem for One Nation. It also fits neatly into the party's worldview that the major parties and the system are trying to stop them. It could make the party more popular with aggrieved voters who feel the system is stacked against them.

As Andrew Hirst, former Liberal Party director and now chief executive of Topham Guerin, puts it: "Voters and consumers are increasingly getting their information from AI tools, so political parties and media outlets are being judged on how well a machine can understand them.

"These tools aren't making things up from scratch. They draw heavily on a small number of sources they trust. Whoever explains something most clearly online ends up explaining it to everyone who asks an AI."

The study does not establish deliberate suppression, but it does show the models often leave One Nation out of general comparisons.

Ben Guerin, Topham Guerin co-founder, added: "This isn't bias in the way people usually mean it. If a party doesn't set out its policies clearly on its own site, and what the media and others say about them is thin, the AI has less to work with, so it says less. Being absent online means being absent from the answer chatbots give."

The findings are a snapshot of September 22 and 23, using AI companies' developer interfaces, which can give different answers to the consumer apps. The research does not show that anyone changed their vote.

When questions are specifically about One Nation, the models can incorporate it into their analysis. But you have to lead the horse to water. They often leave it out of the first answer.

This election will also be shaped by algorithms. 

What your feed shows you can be vastly different from mine, and the consequences of what specific content is funnelled into your phone may have political ramifications no-one can really get a handle on.

Patricia Karvelas is host of ABC News Afternoon Briefing at 4pm weekdays on ABC News Channel, co-host of the weekly Party Room podcast with Fran Kelly and host of politics and news podcast Politics Now.