It’s a strange place for Warren Pickering to be. The recently appointed leader of One Nation in Victoria is being asked by me what conversations he’s had with the state’s Liberal Party about a coalition – or what portfolio he might prefer should his party at least acquire the balance of power in a hung parliament next month. The latter is a live possibility.
Despite One Nation’s historically strong polling, and his party’s overtures, Pickering tells The Saturday Paper that the Victorian Liberal Party has not engaged with them on matters of shared power. “We haven’t had those discussions,” he says. “We invited the Liberal Party to speak with us, but whether it’s theatrics or hubris, they haven’t.”
I ask Pickering if he has a preferred portfolio, should the Victorian election next month confer the possibility. “I’m not gonna give you an exclusive on that,” he says.
Warren Pickering hasn’t given many interviews since becoming his party’s state leader. He spoke to The Saturday Paper for almost an hour – about Trump, his own personal history and One Nation’s un-costed policy aspirations.
Last month, Pickering gave one of the more dramatic political press conferences in recent memory. In the days before, his former partner, Joanne Scott, had divulged to The Australian their shared history of hard drug use, sexual liberties and domestic fracture. Scott had battled drug addiction for years, and was now estranged from her children, one of whom Pickering fathered. She insisted her disclosures to the newspaper were not vindictive and were made merely to ensure the public better knew the past of the man who now had claims to becoming a significant figure in Victorian politics.
A part of Scott’s salacious disclosures was one handwritten letter from Pickering from 2012. “I’v [sic] been talking to people about my own sexual deviance when on the shit & it turns out its [sic] all fairly common like all 70s rock stars who got off everything and went on to lead normal lives.”
Speaking to The Australian, Scott said: “They’re reasonable questions and now he’s in the public eye, wanting people to vote for him, talking about being premier or whatever in Victoria, he should answer them.”
Pickering sought lawyers, who warned the newspaper against publication – there were “substantial reasons” for distrusting Scott’s accounts, they said. “It wasn’t in the public interest,” Pickering told The Saturday Paper this week. “And that’s the feedback I’m getting from the community, too.”
Pickering initially denied the claims. Then, the following day – September 8 – called a media conference. He was flanked by his daughter and stepson. Nervous and tearful, Pickering admitted to years of drug use in his 20s, drink-driving convictions, “sexual experimentation” and domestic tumult. “I never pretended to be an angel,” he said.
In another time, these admissions might have proved disqualifying. Not now. Such is the public’s contempt for the major parties, and the lawyerly language and evasions they employ, that Pickering’s raw confessions, far from being a terminal liability, seemed proof of One Nation’s claim: that they were selecting candidates from real-life and not the classic political “Petri dishes”.
“People want honesty above all else,” Pickering tells The Saturday Paper. “Authenticity. Perhaps there was some naivety there [from me], but media should have also done more due diligence. This wasn’t in the public interest. And I think it shows that media won’t be rewarded for playing these personal games. Inadvertently, I think it highlighted what we’re talking about – that we’re preselecting real people.
“There was nothing premeditated about my response. It was uniquely human in the context of political candidates, and that’s the feedback I’m getting from my local community.”
It’s the second time he uses that refrain. The local community to which he refers is the state seat of Pakenham, in Melbourne’s outer south-east, currently held by the Labor Party on a wafer-thin margin. It is now a genuine three-way contest, the prospective primary vote split about evenly between Labor, the Liberals and One Nation. “And polling suggests we have genuine three-way contests in 50 per cent of the seats,” Pickering says.
One Nation has made a point of describing its candidates as “ordinary” people – passionate, unpretentious and far from the typical political factories. Pickering is something of a poster child here: a former brickie, coalminer and army engineer who deployed several times overseas. He joined the army when he was 28 and says that was the moment he “became the man he wanted to be” – someone less passive, less self-destructive. “Politics was something I had only a loose interest in as a young man, until I served in the Australian Army,” Pickering says. “That triggered a couple of things in me: serving community and being part of a legacy larger than myself.”
As a soldier, Pickering helped during the 2009 Townsville floods – he was part of the sandbagging of homes, the evacuations, rescues and clean-ups. He was also deployed to Iraq, to help train locals there “to help take back Mosul and Baghdad from ISIS”.
As someone deployed to the foreign wars to which Australia committed, and of which Donald Trump falsely professed never to repeat, I mention to Pickering his leader’s unqualified enthusiasm for the United States president. “I have personal opinions about global conflicts,” he says. “But they’re not relevant here, not in a state election. I say that people should stay in their lane as representatives of local communities. I have views, but this is a state election.
“But there is a lot of distrust between countries … and the axis of power that’s kept us in relative peace for the past couple of decades is shifting dramatically. Strategically Australia is vulnerable, because we have one of the least diverse economies in the world.”
Pickering’s passion, it seems, is restoring economic self-reliance – though I confess to being confused about his party’s policies regarding foreign investment. Should we diversify our economy? If so, does that not mean foreign capital? “What I’d say is that we need to stop our constant need for external validation,” Pickering says. “We have the resources we need here. Let’s look after locals first. Let’s get away from net zero and tax subsidies for ideological changes.
“Politics was something I had only a loose interest in as a young man, until I served in the Australian Army. That triggered a couple of things in me: serving community and being part of a legacy larger than myself.”
“We can lean back into our resources. If we want to diversify our economy, we must stop punishing ambition and make Victoria fertile for investment.”
Data centres are one apparent opportunity. One Nation’s “policy booklet” expresses a qualified distaste for them, but Pickering says there are places in Victoria where they might be welcomed. “There’s a requirement for these things, and if Victoria wants to remain at the front of tech advances, then I think there are locations where these would be welcome. But I don’t want communities to have to compete for resources like water and energy. But they could be placed where they’re welcome – Hazelwood, for instance. Now, the long-term benefits I don’t know. But short term, there would be plenty in the construction.”
Pickering asks: Might the Latrobe Valley, long the cradle of Victoria’s power plants, become the site of new industries?
Pickering’s rise – if that’s the word for someone who is yet to have secured a parliamentary seat – has been swift. Still, the party depends upon its founder, Pauline Hanson, as its figurehead. Outside Pakenham, you won’t see much literature or signage that bears the face of its state leader. As much as Pickering, and the party generally, celebrates its pool of candidates as “regular people” who “come from the school of hard knocks”, there remains internal frustration, even fear, about how loose and unaccountable the vetting of candidates is.
For a party enjoying historic popularity, their state campaign has fretfully cocooned its candidates. Very few have been permitted to give interviews. The ABC, The Age and Guardian Australia have been prohibited from public events and press conferences.
The Saturday Paper spoke with a One Nation source this week who said the party’s systems of vetting candidates and staff – and for centralising campaign strategies and policy – remained shambolic. As quickly as One Nation has risen in popularity, the source says, and so too in its cash and pool of energetic volunteers, it has not developed commensurate political sophistication.
This is a major problem, the source says, when the party’s ambition has dramatically scaled up: One Nation has candidates for all 88 seats in Victoria’s lower house, and another 20 in the upper, which is unprecedented. “One Nation’s recent successes in Farrer [in NSW] and SA and WA byelections make them seem more competent than they are … The vetting of candidates is bad enough. The vetting of staff is even worse. They use totally arbitrary and capricious rules about preselection.”
Pickering says “all elections are local” and wants candidates to advocate for their prospective communities – a myopic devotion he offers as a reason for the media bans and tiny, often non-existent candidate profiles. “We don’t need a candidate in Narre Warren South, say, appealing to millions of Victorians on television that can’t vote for them,” he says. “They should appeal to local constituents. And the only way to capitalise on that is human energy – our volunteers.”
Pickering says this while acknowledging that One Nation is enjoying the benefit of a general contempt for the major parties and sustained domestic economic stagnation and high cost of living – that is, his thesis that all elections are local has never seemed more wrong.
Curiously, the Victorian One Nation campaign has spurned doorknocking, a traditional feature of winning votes. Pickering says it’s intrusive, but the aggrieved One Nation source says the reluctance is part of a self-defeating instinct to do the opposite of the major parties. “But a blanket rejection is silly,” the source says. “You should be knocking on doors.”
A former campaign leader for One Nation can only scratch their head. They tell The Saturday Paper that the party now “enjoys an embarrassment of riches, but has low IQ”.
A fortnight ago, One Nation Victoria released a 63-page “policy booklet”. It stressed anxieties over crime, debt and sickened public faith in political leaders. To help its launch, at an event from which several media organisations were barred, candidate Mark Nicholson jokingly pledged the imprisonment of former premiers Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allen.
Pickering tells The Saturday Paper that “the unforeseen consequences of severe Covid lockdown” helped shaped his party’s policies. “During Covid, the erosion of sovereignty and civil liberties was largely unwarranted and there was a lack of foresight economically that locking down the state was going to hurt. I think the second- and third-order effects of that are still unfolding, and one of them is a distinct lack of trust in government. They lost the faith of the people and we must reinstate it.”
To reduce debt, One Nation proposes killing the Suburban Rail Loop as well as the recently instated Gellung Warl, a representative body for First Nations Victorians. The economic benefits of both are highly dubious.
Regarding crime, the party wants to build more courts, expand the judiciary, better fund public legal aid and create a 24/7 bail court. Lawyers have described the cost of these policies as unworkable if not impossible.
About trust, One Nation proposes a new, publicly accessible database recording all expenditure – from tenders to bids to acquittal, and the justifications for each. It wants to “open the books”, saying the public is sick of debt and the lack of transparency regarding their dollars. The party does so in a document that is entirely un-costed.
I ask Pickering how he might reconcile his belief in financial transparency with his party’s lengthy policy wish list that doesn’t explain how it would be funded. “Contrary to popular belief, [One Nation] don’t have billions of dollars,” Pickering says. “We have donation caps, and when assessing the task of costing, we’ve come to the conclusion that cost projections are widely inaccurate. We don’t think Victorians need more numbers on a spreadsheet. What they need is a government of integrity.”
I thought this oddly circular: if cost projections were inherently unreliable, then why were they beating the government over the head with them? To this, Pickering relapsed into boilerplate: “Look, people will vote with their middle finger. People want change more than ever. And One Nation is the last bastion of conservatism.”
One Nation will talk publicly about its desire to win government outright, making Warren Pickering premier. Privately, they know this is highly unlikely. Yet it remains a possibility that the party will win sufficient seats in a hung parliament to acquire the balance of power.
The former campaign leader shivers at the prospect. “They can’t get the balance of power,” they say. “It would be terrible. They’re trading on the abject hatred of major parties, which is fair enough. But One Nation in Victoria will have scandal after scandal if they get balance of power. They’re a mess. Their internal processes are a mess. And Pauline’s appeal will always be a mystery to me. But the moment’s met them, not the other way around. The time suits them now, but I think it will fall apart.”