One Nation unveils eight Victorian election candidates including former Liberal and anti-woke film animator
Pauline Hanson has named eight One Nation candidates for Victoria's November state election, but excluded reporters from the ABC, The Age and the Guardian from the announcement event.
Intelligence analysis by Llama
One Nation's Victorian branch, which won just 0.22% of lower-house votes in 2022, has unveiled its upper-house team as polling puts the party at 19-27% support, with Labor moving to scrap group voting tickets.
A political party called One Nation in Australia picked the people who will try to win seats in a state election in November. The leader held a news event but didn't tell some big reporters where it was. Many people are now thinking about voting for this party, even though almost no one did last time.
Analysis
The Candidate Lineup Mixes Establishment Defectors and Cultural Warriors
The lineup combines figures from across the political spectrum united by opposition to the state Labor government. Colleen Harkin, who until June sat on the Liberal party's administrative committee and serves as education director at the Institute of Public Affairs, brings direct insider experience from the factional battle that has destabilised the Victorian Liberals. She led the supreme court challenge over John Pesutto's $1.55m defamation loan, publicly backed Moira Deeming, and once described calling climate change an emergency as "almost" child abuse when she ran as the Liberal candidate for Macnamara in 2022. Her defection marks a notable talent transfer inside the conservative movement.
Mark Nicholson brings the party's culture-war media engine. His studio Stepmates produces Pauline Hanson's cartoon web series Please Explain and her satirical, anti-woke feature film. Chris Burson, a Geelong councillor with a defence force and policing background, ran unsuccessfully for two minor parties in 2022 before joining One Nation. He has publicly claimed he worked on the close personal protection team guarding former premier Daniel Andrews and his wife Catherine during the pandemic, a statement that is likely to draw sustained scrutiny before November. The remaining candidates, including the party's only sitting MP Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell, fill out tickets across all eight upper house regions.
Press Freedom Flashpoint at the Announcement
Hanson used Monday's press conference to escalate her long-running antagonism with mainstream outlets. Reporters from the ABC, The Age and the Guardian were not told where or when the event would be held, with Rebel News Australia's Avi Yemini among the outlets given access. When challenged that excluding the national broadcaster was self-defeating in a democracy, she replied: "Democracy doesn't happen on the ABC at all." She added that the same treatment would be applied to the Guardian and claimed she had previously kept the ABC out of her events for "eight months" back in 1996. The episode echoes a pattern that has shadowed Hanson since the 1990s and is likely to dominate campaign coverage regardless of policy substance.
A Polling Surge That Could Reshape the Upper House
The bigger story is the political backdrop. One Nation's Victorian branch under president Warren Pickering won just 0.22% of lower-house first-preference votes and 2% of upper-house votes in 2022. Latest polls now show 19-27% of Victorians are considering a One Nation vote, a swing that would translate into multiple upper house seats if even partly converted on election day. A second factor supercharges the prospect: new Labor premier Ben Carroll has introduced legislation to scrap group voting tickets, a mechanism minor parties have historically exploited. With that channel closing and internal party polling apparently holding, the eight candidates unveiled on Monday are positioned as One Nation's most realistic path to parliamentary representation in Victoria.
Key points
- One Nation has named eight upper-house candidates for Victoria's November state election.
- Pauline Hanson's press conference excluded reporters from the ABC, The Age and the Guardian.
- Former Liberal committee member and IPA director Colleen Harkin has defected to One Nation to contest South-Eastern Metropolitan.
- Animator Mark Nicholson, who made Hanson's anti-woke film, and Geelong councillor Chris Burson are also on the ticket.
- Polling suggests 19-27% of Victorians may vote One Nation, up from 0.22% lower-house support in 2022.
- New premier Ben Carroll's bill to scrap group voting tickets could reshape the upper-house contest in One Nation's favour.
If the 19-27% polling levels translate even partly into actual votes on election day, One Nation could pick up its first Victorian upper-house seats since 2006, giving Hanson leverage to extract policy concessions on issues such as immigration and energy. A strong showing would also validate the party's strategy of recruiting defectors from the Liberal right rather than relying solely on protest voters.
Polling "considering a vote" rarely converts one-for-one into ballot-box support, and One Nation has a history of underperforming its numbers in Victoria. Excluding the ABC and Guardian from campaign events will amplify hostile coverage of the candidates, several of whom already carry baggage around climate denial, factional litigation against the Liberals, and unverified claims about guarding a former premier. The group's federal wing is also facing deregistration in Queensland over missing financial statements, a risk that could overshadow the Victorian campaign.
