One Nation has released an AI-made ad called ‘Coming Out’. I have watched it, and I wish I could say it was clever, or even creative. It is neither. It is a string of tired stereotypes stitched together by software and pushed out to stir up fear.
It opens on a suburban lawn with a “Vote 1 Greens” sign, then cuts to a family dinner. Dad wears a rainbow shirt with the word “yes” on it and asks for the nutritional yeast for his vegan meal. Mum wears a blue wig. The miserable older son finally blurts out his terrible secret: “I’m conservative.” Mum rips off the wig to reveal bright orange hair styled like Pauline Hanson’s. Dad announces he “voted no” in the 2017 same-sex marriage vote, which Australia answered with a Yes vote of more than 61 per cent. The daughter says she doesn’t want to be a little girl anymore. A fake ABC presenter says we should defund the ABC.
Then the ad shows who it really thinks the problem is. A young African man holds a machete and says he shouldn’t be on bail. An Indian man says we should end mass migration. A Middle Eastern looking man wears what appears to be an explosives vest and says he should never have been let into the country. The ad closes on the slogan “Take Victoria Back.”
Look at who gets to be what. The white characters are the law-abiding, flag-loving Aussies, even when the joke is on them. Every person who causes trouble has brown or black skin. That is not an accident. Someone made those choices.
This week, One Nation’s Victorian deputy leader, Colleen Harkin (pictured above), went on 774 ABC Melbourne with Raf Epstein and defended it. “I don’t accept the premise that it is racist,” she said. She called it “big issues that need to be addressed.” She also said climate change was irrelevant to the Australian economy and that One Nation was serious about rescinding Victoria’s landmark Treaty. When Epstein pressed her on whether the video judges people as members of a group instead of as individuals, she asked: “Would you complain if it was a white-skinned person or a female with blonde hair?”
I’m sorry, but what?
Colleen, as a white-skinned, blonde-haired woman, of course you don’t see it.
I am a culturally diverse woman with coloured skin, and from where I stand, everything about that video is racist. Nobody in it is portrayed as a villain because of what they did. They are cast because of how they look. A blonde woman in an ad is just a woman in an ad. She does not carry the weight of an entire community’s reputation, and she is not shown holding a weapon or wearing a bomb. That is the whole difference, and it is not a hard one to grasp.
Not all Africans are criminals, and the overwhelming majority have nothing to do with machete gangs. Not all Middle Eastern people are terrorists walking around strapped in bomb vests. Saying so should not be controversial. It is offensive. It is disgusting. It is grubby politics, and we have had enough.
Then there is the AI problem. This is cheap, mass-produced slop, rolling out old tropes at no cost and at enormous scale. It is designed to play on people’s fears, and it spreads racism, hatred and misinformation. Many people couldn’t even tell it was AI. When fake faces can be made to say anything and viewers can’t spot the difference, the stereotypes stop looking like a cartoon and start looking like evidence.
What worries me almost as much as the video is the applause. Plenty of people have cheered it on, and that says more about the culture of our country than it does about One Nation. We should be looking at other nations and what hate and division have done to them and saying: not in our backyard.
Harkin insists the video is about problems with crime and “social cohesion and where it’s coming from.” If she wants to talk about cohesion, here is a place to start. Social cohesion is not built by pointing at your neighbour and calling them a threat. It is built by knowing them.
And here is the part the slogan skips over. Racism, hate and division might get you elected, but they do not bring down house prices. They do not lower your grocery bill or reduce what you pay at the petrol bowser. They do nothing for the family struggling with rent. All they do is teach you to hate the neighbour who might have brown skin and eats tabouli, who did nothing except flee a war-torn country, trying to find peace and security for their family in the land of fairness and opportunity.
At what point do we grow up as a country and move beyond these stupid depictions? How many more times do we have to watch the same cartoon villains wheeled out, the machete, the bomb vest, and the brown face at the border, before we admit they are not about crime or cohesion? They are about fear. And fear is cheap, which is exactly why they keep using it.
A fair go is supposed to be who we are. It is the promise that brought my family, and so many families like mine, to this country. I know this country is better than that ad. Most Australians do not look at the people next door and see a threat. They see someone to wave to on the way to work. That is the Australia I know, and a few seconds of AI-generated slop does not get to rewrite it.
Racism, hate and division have never lowered a grocery bill, and they never will. We should be saying “not in our backyard, and not with our vote”.