Setting the record straight on Pauline Hanson, the Philippines and news.com.au's 'exclusive'

A news.com.au exclusive last week reported that Pauline Hanson's One Nation has used a contractor in the Philippines for digital work, with the going rate quoted at around $4 to $8 an hour. Within hours the headline had been picked up by Labor figures, GetUp and a long line of progressive commentators as proof of hypocrisy. Hanson, the line ran, rails against cheap foreign labour while paying for it herself.

The "exclusive" was a screenshot of a Facebook tab.

How news.com.au found out

Every Facebook page above a certain size displays a Page Transparency section showing the primary country location of the people who manage it. Meta introduced the feature in 2018 to flag foreign interference in elections, and it sits on every major political party page in the country, every news outlet page and most large commercial pages.

On the Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party page, that section currently lists 10 admins based in Australia, 2 in the Philippines and 1 in the United States. The page has been active since 10 August 2011 and was renamed to its current title on 30 May 2018.

The "scoop" is a screenshot of a tab Meta puts on every political page, including the page run by news.com.au's own parent company. Any reader can open Facebook, click through to a political party's About section, and find the same disclosure for Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals or the Greens.

What One Nation has said

One Nation hasn't ducked the question. A party spokesman told news.com.au directly:

"They don't control the Facebook pages [Phillipines contractor]. All of the content is created here. When establishing 150 candidate pages all at once, we use a template that is populated by virtual assistants."

That's the party's account on the record. The Philippines work relates to a one off page setup rather than the ongoing running of One Nation's social media, with the day to day still handled out of Australia. The detail's been quietly dropped from most of the coverage that's followed.

A one off contractor build is a long way from offshoring 200 Australian jobs. But before getting into who's actually doing that, it's worth being honest about how common the practice now is in this country.

Who else outsources, offshores and replaces staff with AI

One Nation's situation, which is a contractor or two on a Facebook page, sits at the very bottom of the list below that runs through some of the biggest names in Australian business, including the company that published the original story. Some are sending jobs offshore to the Philippines, India and Vietnam. Some are replacing staff with AI. Some are doing both. None of it is hidden. It's announced in company statements and covered by the mainstream press. Here's the public record.

Corporate Australia

Media Outlets

So of those same outlets writing about One Nation's $4 to $8 an hour contractor are the same ones sending work offshore, licensing their archives to AI companies, replacing journalists with AI, or getting caught using AI against their own rules. News.com.au's parent company is at the top of that list.

The cartoon factory claim

The same coverage suggested One Nation's animated content is produced overseas. The public record says otherwise.

Pauline Hanson's Please Explain and the 2026 feature A Super Progressive Movie are made by Stepmates Studios, an independent Australian animation house based in Fitzroy, Melbourne. The studio's own website carries the tagline "Broadcast quality 2D animation at the pace of the news cycle. Based in Melbourne." It's run by directors Mark Nicholson and Sebastian Peart and lists Channel Seven, the AFL, Sportsbet and The Alfred Hospital among its non political clients.

The IMDb listing gives the filming location as Stepmates Studios, Fitzroy, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and the country of origin as Australia. The feature film carries the same Australian production credit. The Sydney Morning Herald, B&T Magazine, Sky News and The Courier have all referred to Stepmates as a Melbourne studio in coverage going back to 2021.

If specific stages of the animation pipeline are being subcontracted offshore, that's an editorial line that needs documents behind it. None have been produced. On the public record, the studio behind the cartoons is Melbourne based and Australian owned.

The media that's writing the story

There's a particular irony in the way mainstream outlets have run with this one.

Star News Group, an Australian media company operating across Melbourne, Geelong and the Yarra Ranges, openly outsources its writers to the Philippines. Back office and design outsourcing is standard across Australian media.

Then there's what's happened to actual journalism jobs in this country.

In May 2024, News Corp signed a multi year content licensing deal with OpenAI reportedly worth up to $250 million, covering The Wall Street Journal, The Times, news.com.au, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier Mail, the Herald Sun and more. Within weeks, News Corp Australia began a rolling restructure. The list of names let go ran for weeks and reached senior editorial leadership at News Corp's own mastheads, including news.com.au itself.

News Corp had already been using AI to produce local news stories since 2023 and runs its own in house tool, NewsGPT.

In June 2024, Nine Entertainment announced 200 redundancies across The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the Australian Financial Review, the Brisbane Times and WAtoday, plus its broadcast division. Seven West Media closed 150 positions in the same window. The Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report on Australia listed all three rounds in a single line.

So the same outlets writing about One Nation's $4 to $8 an hour contractor are the same outlets licensing their archives to AI companies, replacing journalists with generative tools, and either outsourcing their back office to Manila or running NewsGPT in place of a copy desk.

GetUp, the second loudest accuser

The Instagram tile that drove most of the initial outrage came from GetUp, the progressive lobby group that's spent two decades campaigning against the Liberals, the Nationals and One Nation. Its recent track record on One Nation specifically is on the public record.

At May's Farrer by-election, GetUp ran an advertising campaign reported at $600,000 aimed at stopping One Nation from winning Sussan Ley's old seat. The campaign covered television, billboards, radio, digital platforms and 100,000 text messages sent directly to voters. One Nation's David Farley won the seat anyway, with around 39.5% of the primary vote and 57.4% two candidate preferred, becoming the first One Nation candidate ever elected to the House of Representatives. GetUp's national director told Sky News the loss was worth it and signalled the same playbook would be run again.

The Media and Campaigns Lead at GetUp is David Sharaz, hired into the role in February as the group, in its own words, took on the "democratic threat" of conservative groups. Sharaz is Brittany Higgins' husband. In 2025 the WA Supreme Court found he and Higgins had defamed former defence minister Linda Reynolds, and Sharaz was subsequently served with a bankruptcy notice over the damages and costs in that proceeding. His first major campaign letter for GetUp in May invoked his wife's story to launch a media regulator reform push.

By June, the campaign had moved off the page and into the Press Club. On Wednesday 17 June, during Pauline Hanson's first National Press Club address, a drop down banner unfurled behind the senator depicting her in pixelated meme sunglasses and accusing her of accepting a $100,000 pay rise while opposing wage increases for workers. GetUp's media statement on the stunt, in full, was "It was us."

The Press Club's chief executive Maurice Reilly issued a statement that evening, first read to air by Sky News' Caroline Marcus on Sharri, confirming two people had entered the venue without permission and installed a separate drop down screen in front of the club's media wall. Reilly named Sharaz directly, saying he "was seen filming the incident on his phone and, after the banner had lowered, left abruptly." The club referred the footage to the Australian Federal Police, formally apologised to Senator Hanson, and signalled legal action including damages. By Thursday, the NPC board had formally rejected Sharaz's membership application and banned every GetUp staff member, not just Sharaz, from attending future events. ACT Policing confirmed AFP Forensics officers were examining the scene at Barton.

So when GetUp's tile drives the framing of the Hanson outsourcing story, it's a progressive lobby group that just lost a $600,000 campaign trying to stop One Nation from getting elected to the seat now held by David Farley, run with a senior staffer whose household is currently one of the country's most public left wing political brands. That stunt, which GetUp publicly claimed as its own, is now an AFP matter.

What about the other parties

There's no public reporting that Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals or the Greens have voluntarily disclosed using Philippines based contractors for digital or campaign work. There's also no requirement that they do. Donation disclosure rules apply to money coming in above the threshold, not to where a party's WordPress build gets done. If new information surfaces, this article will be updated.

The correct framing

If "an exclusive" can be a screenshot of a Facebook tab anyone with a browser can open, the standard for an exclusive has slipped. KPMG just moved 200 Australian jobs offshore. News Corp swapped journalists for an OpenAI cheque. Nine and Seven cut nearly 400 jobs between them in a single month. Optus, ANZ and Canva all use offshore labour as a matter of course.

None of those decisions made the front page of news.com.au this week. Two admins on a public Facebook tab did.