Australia’s web regulator looking into Pauline Hanson’s Voice to Parliament domain registrations

Australia’s web domain administrator auDA is set to review Pauline Hanson’s One Nation cybersquatting on Voice to Parliament and Uluru Statement from the Heart as part of the party’s Vote No campaign.

Last week, Pauline Hanson announced her intention to spearhead the campaign against the Voice to Parliament during next year’s referendum. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph’s James Morrow, Hanson said that her office had registered 46 website domains in preparation for the campaign.

Hanson mentioned VoicetoParliament.com.au and Ulurustatement.com.au as two of the domains. Further work by the ABC’s Kevin Nguyen, Ariel Bogle and Michael Workman found 39 relevant domains registered by One Nation including variants on notovoie.com.au, saynotovoice.com.au and more.

Political parties regularly register domains to direct voters towards information about themselves and their opponents. Earlier this year, Crikey published more than 1,000 registered by the two major parties. Registering a domain is cheap, easy and can help with search engine optimisation, a crucial part of getting your information in front of people. This sometimes includes purchasing domains to run negative campaigns against others.

But individuals and groups are only supposed to register web domains that are either a match or “closely and substantially connected to the registrant” according to rules made by auDA, Australia’s web domain regulator. auDA has the power to suspend or cancel domain registrations and has done so in the past when the Liberal Party registered Albanese.com.au. Registering these domains is unlikely to have a substantial impact on campaigns, and is generally more of a stunt.

While One Nation is free to claim variations on Vote No domains, their claim to domains about Uluru statement from the Heart and about the Voice may be harder to justify.

A spokesperson for auDA told Crikey that they were aware of One Nation registering domain names as part of their campaign and has processes in place to review eligibility.

“Registrars are accredited to assess domain name applications and issue domain name licences to applicants that meet required criteria,” a spokesperson said.

Pauline Hanson has experienced this first hand In 2021, someone bought PaulineHanson.com.au and redirected to the Refugee Council of Australia website — a redirect which has since lapsed.