The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has called out a cartoon from One Nation that falsely suggests Labor would utilise electoral fraud to win the federal election.
The Pauline Hanson’s Please Explain skit, released on Friday, features cartoon characters impersonating Labor politicians Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong. It shows the Wong character promoting the use of fake postal ballots to Albanese, who is sick in bed with COVID-19.
The clip depicts Wong bringing Albanese a bowl of “bat soup” and a pile of postal vote ballot papers, discussing how to encourage voter fraud.
“These are postal votes under the names of dead people, fake identities, some were stolen out of letterboxes,” the Wong character says in the video.
“Oh really? But isn’t that illegal?” the Albanese character replies. Wong then tells Albanese the AEC doesn’t check voter identification “because that would be racist”.
“The AEC won’t find out until it’s too late, and by the time they realise, we’ll already be in government – kicking back, passing laws, spending money,” the Wong character says.
“This commentary about the electoral system is very disappointing,” the AEC commented on Twitter.
“Registered parties are aware of electoral integrity measures in place including information received / roll objection action taken for deceased Australians, and outbound & inbound postal vote verification steps.”
The clip has been removed from Facebook and Tiktok, but is still available on Twitter (where it has been labelled misleading) and on YouTube. The AEC has contacted social media platforms asking for it to be taken down due to its disinformation.
Pauline Hason has written on Facebook that she will refuse to take down the cartoon on any social media platform.