A machete robbery, a roadside birth, a flood through parliament. None of it happened, but it's part of a real election advertising campaign in Victoria, Australia.

Here's the full story, via Guardian Australia.

One Fix Victoria ad shows "a man clad in a balaclava and brandishing a machete" terrorising a petrol station worker before firebombing the building. Another shows a woman giving birth roadside, unable to reach a hospital "due to ambulance ramping and crater-like potholes." A third shows a flood "gushing from the steps of state parliament, towards a scared child," meant to symbolize Victoria's "tsunami of debt," forecast to hit $199bn in the next four years. All three are AI-generated illustrations, not real events.

Fix Victoria is run by former operatives of the Institute of Public Affairs, a conservative thinktank and long-term critic of Labor governments. It was registered with ASIC in early August by Deborah Henderson, the IPA's deputy executive director until June. Its communications director, Andrew Hudgson, held a similar role at the IPA until earlier this year, and its head of advocacy, Gideon Rozner, spent six years there. Rozner recently posted on X that he was rejoining the Liberal party to back its new leader, Jess Wilson, and when asked directly whether he's still a party member, he declined to answer. He describes Fix Victoria as "issues-driven, not politics-driven," saying it's "focused on the three key issues dragging our state down, that being crime, corruption and debt," the same three issues that dominate opposition talking points.

Better Victoria launched a month after Fix Victoria, running its first Facebook ads in early August. Its listed secretary, Ronald Holzer, a Melbourne lawyer, says he only holds an administrative role and referred questions to an anonymous spokesperson, who declined to name who actually runs the group. That spokesperson says Better Victoria is "fully financed by donations from its members," who "have exercised their right to privacy."

Ad-spend analyst Ed Coper, whose agency Populares tracked the campaigns using public data, says Fix Victoria spent just under $100,000 on ads in August, "about a quarter of all the advertising spend related to the election." Better Victoria spent about $40,000. Together, the two groups outspent the Liberals, teal independents and One Nation on Google and Meta advertising, and Fix Victoria also ran a TV ad during the AFL wildcard final between the Western Bulldogs and Collingwood on Channel Seven. "They will have spent tens of thousands of dollars," Coper says. "The actual content of their advertising is very, very similar to the way that a political operative will message during an election campaign."

Under Victoria's electoral laws, a group publishing political ads only has to register as a third-party campaigner, triggering donor-disclosure rules, if it explicitly promotes or opposes a named party or candidate. The Centre for Public Integrity's executive director, Catherine Williams, says Victoria's laws are "narrower in scope than their federal equivalent." At the federal level, mandatory disclosure once revealed that a third-party group attacking Labor, Greens and independent candidates had been bankrolled by the coal lobby. No equivalent disclosure applies here, so both groups' financial backers stay shielded from public view unless they choose to reveal themselves.

Transparency International Australia's chief executive, Clancy Moore, says Fix Victoria's ads are "clearly trying to influence voting," even though the group doesn't meet the legal threshold of a third-party campaigner. "It's really important Victorians know who is behind these types of campaigns and what their political affiliations might be," Moore says. "There is a long history of third-party and fake grassroots campaign groups exploiting loopholes in electoral laws to try to influence elections."

Neither group appears to be breaking any law, and that's exactly what transparency advocates are warning about: a legal loophole that lets politically-aligned operatives spend more than any registered candidate or party, using AI-generated fear, while voters may never learn who wrote the check.

Source: Guardian Australia: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/sep/06/fix-victoria-ai-ads-flooding-social-media-election-who-is-behind-them

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