Warren Pickering will take One Nation to the 28 November state election as its Victorian leader, with Pauline Hanson unveiling her long serving state president at the head of a ticket that runs across the upper house while he contests the lower house seat of Pakenham. The ticket includes Daniel Andrews' former bodyguard Chris Burson, Liberal defector Colleen Harkin, Please Explain cartoonist Mark Nicholson and Criminal Lawyer Aaron Sanford.
Senator Hanson fronted the media on Monday morning to confirm the names, with the full ticket first revealed by the Herald Sun. It makes good on her pledge last week that the party had candidates locked in for up to 76 of Victoria's 88 lower house seats, and it lands with Labor barely a week into Ben Carroll's premiership after Jacinta Allan's resignation.
Mr Pickering confirmed at the press conference that he's running for the lower house seat of Pakenham, the outer south eastern Melbourne electorate Labor's Emma Vulin is vacating at this election. The rest of the slate contests the upper house:
- Warren Pickering, 43, former army combat engineer and coal industry worker, One Nation's Victorian president and now state leader, contesting the lower house seat of Pakenham
- Chris Burson, Geelong councillor, army veteran and former police officer, Western Victoria
- Colleen Harkin, former Liberal member, South-Eastern Metropolitan
- Mark Nicholson, the animator behind the Please Explain cartoons, Northern Metropolitan
- Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell, One Nation's sitting MP, recontesting Northern Victoria
- Natalie Adams, office manager from Bulleen, North-Eastern Metropolitan
- Fiona Lopez, human resources manager, Western Metropolitan
- Aaron Sanford, 29, criminal lawyer, Southern Metropolitan
"Warren has done a great job as state president of One Nation in Victoria," Senator Hanson said.
"We'll have a talented team of people intent on restoring Victoria and kicking out the tired and toxic Labor government that has run this state into the ground, getting away with it thanks to a weak Liberal opposition."
Warren Pickering's road from a Gippsland potato farm to the top of the ticket
Mr Pickering's working life started on a Gippsland potato farm and never strayed far from hard yakka: bricklaying straight out of school, seven years in the army as a combat engineer based in northern Queensland, then the coal industry. That last job ended over his refusal to stay quiet about his employer's Covid rules, and he came home to Victoria with his daughter. A party insider quoted in the Herald Sun put it simply: "no one has worked harder for the cause in Victoria".
Chris Burson, the man who guarded Daniel Andrews says the job left him disgusted
Mr Burson brings the sharpest backstory on the ticket. By his own account, the Geelong councillor spent the lockdown years as one of the armed police on the Close Personal Protection Team watching over the premier of the day, Daniel Andrews, and Catherine Andrews, his wife.
"We'd be sitting there kitted up, ready to go in case there was an attack … you'd have your guns ready," he told a podcast in June, in comments reported by the Herald Sun.
"And you'd be like, 'how do we have six (counter-terrorism officers) looking after him and two people looking after the city of Melbourne?'"
He also claimed the then premier's lockdown evenings ran long, "six hours on the beers" and "however many wines" deep, running into the small hours while the city he governed was confined to home.
"As a cop I felt disgusted," he said.
The account is Mr Burson's own recollection of his time on the detail and hasn't been independently verified.
Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell broke through in 2022, now she's defending Northern Victoria
Ms Tyrrell, a dairy farmer for 16 years before entering politics, became One Nation's first ever Victorian MP when she won Northern Victoria in 2022, and she's the only member of the ticket defending a seat.
Her patch is the biggest electorate in the state, running the length of the Murray from Corryong to the South Australian border and reaching south to the outskirts of Melbourne. Born in Wagga Wagga and raised on the NSW south coast, she worked in tourism, hospitality and real estate before moving to Victoria with her young family to run a dairy farm, and now lives in Shepparton with her two children.
Water carried her into politics and it still drives her. She has spent her term pushing to bring the Murray-Darling Basin Plan's impact on Victorian irrigators under scrutiny, arguing whole districts have given up hundreds of gigalitres while farmers walk off the land.
"Many farmers have been forced to quit, unable to afford huge water costs, and this is costing regional economies while also jeopardising our state's food security," she says on her party profile.
Her other fights are affordable and reliable energy, including the Victorian gas reserves she says are "locked away because of reckless climate ideology", and stopping prime farmland being handed to solar and wind projects local communities don't want, alongside better roads and more water storage for the regions.
Colleen Harkin fought the Liberals in court over members' money, now she's running for One Nation
Ms Harkin was the director of education at the Institute of Public Affairs and the party's 2022 federal candidate for Macnamara, she spent decades volunteering, fundraising and campaigning for the Liberals before quitting in June, telling members that factionalism, expediency and a lack of policy conviction had left the party in an "insipid state".
"I have not changed. The Party has," she wrote in her resignation letter. "I no longer believe the party is committed to the same values that inspired my loyalty."
Her fight over the party's money isn't finished either. Ms Harkin led the five state executive members who went to the Supreme Court to block the $1.55 million the Liberals lent former leader John Pesutto, via the party's investment company Vapold, to cover the debt from a defamation case he lost, arguing the funds were held in trust for members. She has handed the lead plaintiff role to Tony Schneider but wrote that she will stay involved and looks forward "to taking the stand".
Explaining the switch on ABC Radio Melbourne, she said One Nation was "prepared to have the hard conversations".
"I think for a long time people have skirted around really difficult questions. And they're controversial questions but I think as a country, we have to have them."
Mark Nicholson, the Please Explain cartoonist is running where the Greens are strongest
Mr Nicholson created the Please Explain series with fellow Stepmates Studios animator Seb Peart from their base in Fitzroy, and millions of viewers have watched the cartoons skewer federal politics on One Nation's channels. His full length film A Super Progressive Movie, made for Senator Hanson, premiered at Crown in January to a protest that ended with a stink bomb let off inside the cinema.
He's contesting Northern Metropolitan, the inner city region that takes in his own suburb and some of the strongest Greens territory in the country. The party is betting the audience that watches his cartoons is bigger than the commentary class assumes.
Criminal lawyer Aaron Sanford, 29, takes on Southern Metropolitan
Aaron Sanford, 29, is a lawyer whose practice runs across family violence and criminal matters, and he lives in Bentleigh East, right among the bayside and inner southeastern suburbs his Southern Metropolitan Region takes in.
He's one of three fresh faces on the ticket alongside Natalie Adams, an office manager and Bulleen mum who is the party's lead candidate for North-Eastern Metropolitan, and Fiona Lopez in Western Metropolitan.
Ms Lopez, a human resources manager, is a first generation Australian raising her family from Sunshine in Melbourne's west, a wife, mother of two and grandmother of three. Her volunteering runs from feeding the homeless at Sacred Heart Mission to mentoring women into work after domestic violence or disability, and getting Year 12 students at western suburbs schools ready for their first job.
Why 27% in the polls makes all eight regions winnable
The ticket lands with real numbers behind it. RedBridge polling of 6,500 Victorians for Victorian Trades Hall in July put One Nation first on 27% of the primary vote, up three points, with the Coalition and Labor tied on 26% and the Greens on 12%, as tracked on the poll tracker. A separate DemosAU mega poll found One Nation can form government in Victoria, with Labor's majority already gone.
The upper house arithmetic explains why the party wants a name at the top of every region. Victoria's Legislative Council has 40 seats, five in each of the eight regions, and a candidate needs just under 16.7% of the vote after preferences to win one. A party polling 27% statewide clears that bar everywhere, with enough spare to push a second candidate into contention in its strongest regions.
The rules are moving One Nation's way too. Labor is legislating to scrap group voting tickets before November, the system that let micro parties trade preferences behind closed doors and elect candidates from tiny primary votes. Ms Tyrrell won her seat in 2022 from a single digit primary vote carried by preference flows. If the change passes, preferences will follow the voter instead of the party ticket, and a big primary vote converts straight into seats.
The state push also sits inside a national surge. The latest Capital Brief and DemosAU megapoll of 9,343 voters projects One Nation on 60 federal seats to Labor's 68, leaving a One Nation and Coalition bloc just three seats short of majority government.
Senator Hanson hosts a Hawthorn function on Monday night where supporters and business figures from around the state will meet Mr Pickering's team for the first time. Victorians vote on 28 November.
