Pauline Hanson might be riding high in the polls, but the confusion over policies and the signs of internal rifts should be a warning to Victoria’s voters. Andrew Gardiner reports.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (ON) is a bit of a mess right now, and that mess goes way beyond its newly minted Federal MP, David Farley (Farrer, NSW), mulling a split ($) from the party months after he was elected. MWM reveals many aspiring ON MPs with on-the-record views wildly divergent from Pauline Hanson’s orthodoxy.
Intending ON voters might want to do their homework before casting their votes in state elections scheduled for November (Victoria) and March (NSW).
A look past the boilerplate, party-approved candidate bios reveals an eclectic bunch, ranging from business-friendly types (like Farley) at odds with Hanson on immigration or tariffs, to those whose values might align more comfortably with those of the Greens.
Party vs candidate policies
Take Geelong Councillor Chris Burson, ON’s candidate for Western Region (Victoria) and a believer in trendy, inner-city causes like rooftop-generated renewable energy and better programs for rehabilitation for criminals. “People come out (of prison), they get dropped off in the city with three days’ accommodation, and then we just expect them to (be good citizens).
How do we fix that problem?” the former police officer asked.
Compare that with the official ON line against renewables of any kind and for punitive deterrence over rehabilitation. The party goes out of its way to paint Victoria as overrun with crime, blaming a lenient Labor government and “rehab programs” which send teen offenders “for a holiday to Queensland’s theme parks”.
Then there’s ON’s new leader in NSW, Mike Newman, a former finance industry exec who lived in Japan for 25 years and married a Japanese local. He tries to reconcile apparent tension between ON doctrine and his personal and professional life with soundbites like “Japan is a monoculture”.
As NSW’s senior trade commissioner in Tokyo (2022-24), Newman publicly promoted Japanese and Korean investment in the Hunter region’s renewable-energy transition. But from 2025, the future ON leader started attacking net zero and wind farms – suggesting they could be a way for China to take strategic control of our energy supply – before spruiking nuclear energy and branding plans to close Eraring’s coal-fired power station as “economic suicide“.
While Newman seems at ease dancing around discrepancies in his resume and acceding to Hanson’s demands he speak English (not Japanese) at pressers, such elasticity is not for everyone. This brings us to another problem cohort for ON: likely splitters like Farley, who can’t (or won’t) toe the line in a party with a history of dysfunction and defections.
The quandary of setting aside personal beliefs for the party’s good is most strikingly summed up by 2027 NSW candidate Stuart Bonds, who ran for the party in Hunter (2019) before splitting over its support for Morrison government industrial-relations legislation, running as an independent in 2022, and ‘coming home’ to the party in 2025 when he ran again for Hunter (he came second).
Bonds may be an outlying case, but he’s unlikely to be the last to have qualms on policy.
A long list of ‘dissenters’
MWM compiled a list of actual or likely candidates (most of them in Victoria, where the election is just 12 weeks away) who are at odds with Hanson on one issue or another, based on unrecanted past statements.
Of the 27 already announced or expected to run at State or Federal level, nine remain at odds (there may be others whose dissent hasn’t been aired publicly).
In addition to Newman and Burson, former Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes, whose call for more NDIS around autism is a far cry from ON’s stated desire to roll it back. Victorian Upper House candidate Vaughan Williams, who, as a Bendigo councillor, called for emergency housing for homeless people, while the broader One Nation Victorian position is to cut bureaucracy and resist market distortions in the housing sector.
Eight announced or aspiring candidates have shown only a recent commitment to ON, having defected from other parties (six of those are from the LNP). Starting with Farley (a former National), most of the policy tension within ON surrounds the ex-LNP group, whose free market values and/or support for skilled migrants for regional healthcare and agriculture often run into a populist, nativist ON brick wall.
Farley is widely tipped to quit the party within days. Others may well follow.
Secret Harbour and beyond
Will Pauline Hanson’s cosying up to the wealthy donor class spell the end of her populism?
Following ON’s breakthrough win in the ALP bastion of Secret Harbour (WA) on Saturday, Pauline Hanson went online, insisting the Liberals could never take such a seat and only ON could beat Labor. “We are the only party that can take the fight to Anthony Albanese where the Liberal Party never could. We’re taking on the political establishment“, she proclaimed.
ON has big plans to usurp the LNP and co-opt its cashed-up donors. Early efforts bore fruit, with wealthy Wentworth (NSW) donating more to ON than any other federal seat during a two-week snapshot in June-July.
But bringing big money into the tent comes at the price of supporting what those donors want: broadly speaking, regulatory frameworks and immigration regimes that won’t jeopardise profit. Donor pressure to abandon nativism and embrace the free market, plus the steady arrival of like-minded former Liberals, has the ‘old guard’ up in arms.
The lesson from Queensland
Prominent among this ‘old guard’ is a newcomer, Barnaby Joyce, who, along with Hanson, sees “huge cuts to immigration ($)” as signature policy ON can’t walk away from. Farley torpedoed that policy as unworkable during an ABC Insider interview last month, and stands poised to pull the pin on his three months as an ON MP if the old guard shuts him down.
The current standoff could see a repeat of ON’s implosion following what to date was its biggest breakthrough at the 1998 Queensland election (11 seats won).
Early the following year, Hanson and her hierarchy (an earlier version of the ‘old guard’) tried to force a change to the party’s constitution that would enshrine their power at those new MPs’ expense.
Half promptly quit the party, sitting as independents before Hanson stripped party affiliation from the rest of them. Of the 51 ON MPs and Senators voted in at various elections since 1996, more than half left the party by mid-term.
“I’m pretty sure ON has elected more independents to parliament than any other party”, an independent campaigner quipped on X. The pieces are in place for a repeat of the Queensland implosion, leading another observer to admonish voters: caveat suffragator – let the voter beware.
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An Adelaide-based graduate in Media Studies, with a Masters in Social Policy, I was an editor who covered current affairs, local government and sports for various publications before deciding on a change-of-vocation in 2002.