One Nation launches in Victoria with crime and budget blank

The launch

The event runs from midday to 3pm Melbourne time at the Crown Conference Centre in Southbank. It’s sold out on the ticketing site. And One Nation’s pitch for it is big. “In three hours we’re putting three things on the table,” the listing says.

The first is policy. The party says “the full Victorian platform will be released in public for the first time, covering the cost of living, law and order, power prices, water, roads, farming and the regions and an end to the waste and debt that Victorians have been made to pay for”.

The second is people. It says all One Nation candidates contesting the election will be on stage. The third is the campaign plan between now and polling day. Hanson’s the keynote speaker, alongside One Nation MPs and the Victorian leadership team. The listing signs off with, “It’s time to take Victoria back. It starts here.”

Not everyone at Crown will be there to cheer. 3AW reported that a Unite Against Racism rally will be held at Crown while the launch is on. Its chair, Julie Monteiro, told the station’s Drive program why the protest was going ahead. Pickering went on the same program on Friday and previewed what’d be announced, including on crime, airport rail and his view of Liberal leader Jess Wilson.

What’s on the website, and what isn’t

One Nation Victoria’s policy page lists eight areas. Six have short summaries and a link to more detail.

On health, it promises “a statewide wait-list guarantee, 24/7 regional emergency departments, and admin savings moved to the front line”. On education, it’s “a clear year-by-year syllabus, orderly classrooms, real trade pathways, and vouchers so funding follows the student”. On farming, it talks about water “for farmers who irrigate, not speculators”, protecting farmland from industrial energy projects and bringing back fisheries officers. On firearms, it’s “simpler licensing, a genuine amnesty, protected duck and deer hunting, tougher penalties”.

On cost of living, it promises to wind back Labor’s land tax hikes, lift the payroll tax threshold, abolish stamp duty on insurance and cut “the cost built into every new home”. On energy, it says Victoria “sits on coal, gas and uranium” and promises to scrap net zero targets, put Victorian gas first and end the nuclear ban. Pickering has already pledged to keep Loy Yang A open past 2035 and to repeal the 1983 nuclear ban.

Then there are the two that read “update in progress”. Crime. Fiscal Management. The ABC noted on Thursday that the Crime section was a blank page.

This isn’t new. In August, The Age’s state political editor Chip Le Grand wrote that if you tried to click on any One Nation policy you got the same generic message. Since then six areas have filled in. But crime and the budget are arguably the two biggest issues in this campaign, and they’re the two still missing.

Joyce on crime

Barnaby Joyce is One Nation’s federal Treasury spokesman, and he’s been campaigning in Victoria. On Thursday 1 October he went on 774 ABC Melbourne’s Mornings program with Rafael Epstein and promised One Nation would have the “toughest” crime agenda in Victoria. Epstein asked him when Victorians would actually see the policy.

The ABC’s own summary of the interview didn’t soften it. Joyce made the promise “despite no clear policy two months out from the state election”. If the answer comes, it’s likely to come at Crown. One Nation’s launch listing names “law and order” among the areas the full platform will cover.

Crime’s a strong issue for the party. One Nation’s Victorian branch has been campaigning on bail laws and violent crime for months. Back in March it attacked then-Premier Jacinta Allan over rising violent crime and called for stronger bail laws. What it hasn’t done yet is publish a crime policy that can be costed and tested, and as of Friday night it still hadn’t.

Pickering on the budget

Pickering’s plan for the budget is an audit first. He laid it out on News24 on Tuesday 29 September, the day the Reserve Bank lifted rates for the fourth time this year, One News Australia reported.

Asked where a One Nation government would cut, he wouldn’t name programs. “We haven’t seen enough transparency around the Treasury in this state to know exactly where all their funding is going,” he said. “That’s the first step, is to blow the books wide open, see where the spending is occurring, and then make cuts.” He added, “Every dollar needs to justify itself.”

He said “not one cost projection in the last decade has proved accurate in Victoria” and that Labor’s forecast of about $200 billion in net debt by 2030 was “probably significantly more than that”. The state’s May budget put net debt at $165.3 billion by June 2026, rising to $199.3 billion by June 2030, according to the figures One News cited.

He did name some things. He’d scrap the Suburban Rail Loop, Labor’s planned train line through Melbourne’s middle suburbs. He’d abolish payroll tax for regional businesses. And he wants a “live interface platform” where Victorians could check each month where their money was going.

There’s a case for the audit-first line. Opposition parties often say they can’t see the real state of the books until they win. The other side of it is that tax cuts, scrapping a major project and keeping coal plants open all cost money or give up revenue, and voters will want to know how the sums add up before polling day. In August, The Age reported that the Parliamentary Budget Office’s election tracker listed more than 150 promises from the various parties and none from One Nation.

Pickering also spelled out where he stands on forming government. One Nation intends “to secure government in our own right”, he said, and if it falls short, “we will absolutely do what it takes to get rid of this dangerous Labor government here in Victoria and we’ll work with whoever we must”.

Filling the ballot paper

One Nation has promised to run a candidate in every Victorian seat. That’s 88 lower house seats. It’s been announcing them in batches. One News Australia’s tracker counted 39 named candidates by mid-September, 30 for the lower house and nine for the upper house. Nominations close at noon on Monday 9 November.

The latest batch came on Wednesday 30 September. In the north-east, the party named its first ever candidate for Benambra, the safe Liberal seat around Wodonga. She’s Kellie Sheppard, a former freelance journalist and small business operator who runs a hobby farm at Osbornes Flat, The Border Mail reported. The paper said two Wodonga-based potential candidates had turned the chance down before she was named.

In central Victoria, Ellen Morgan will run in Bendigo West, which the parliament’s Speaker, Labor’s Maree Edwards, is leaving at this election. The Bendigo Advertiser said her party biography lists a background in youth justice, community services and case management, and support for “secure and orderly immigration and border settings aligned with national capacity and labour market needs”.

The local reaction gives a sense of how the other parties plan to fight One Nation. The Greens candidate in Bendigo West, Liza Shaw, said, “One Nation wants you to blame your neighbours, instead of the big corporations making your life harder.” Labor’s Brenton Baldwin stuck to his own campaign. “Only Labor has a plan to continue to deliver for the people and communities of Bendigo West,” he said.

On the Bellarine Peninsula near Geelong, the party preselected cyber security professional Ross McRae, the Bellarine Times reported.

How One Nation picks its candidates has drawn scrutiny too. Four Corners spoke to would-be candidates who described the process as chaotic and said applicants were charged $150 to apply and $5,500 if successful. We covered that in our report on the Four Corners investigation into One Nation. In August The Age reported that local party officials had put candidates under a gag order.

Why it matters

One Nation’s been polling strongly in Victoria. A Redbridge survey of almost 2,400 Victorian voters earlier in September had the Coalition on 29 per cent, One Nation on 25 and Labor on 24. Premier Ben Carroll pointed to those numbers when he said “One Nation terrifies me”, as we reported in Carroll’s comments to 7.30.

On numbers like that, One Nation is likely to have a big say over who forms government, and it’ll almost certainly win seats in the upper house. In August the party’s national director James Ashby said it was targeting 20 lower house seats. “We are not here to play games,” he told The Age. “We are here to win seats.”

There’s money in it too. Under Victoria’s public funding scheme, parties are paid according to the votes they receive. The Age estimated in August that a 23 per cent share would be worth about $10 million to One Nation.

So that’s the backdrop to Saturday. A party polling in the mid 20s, likely to hold the balance of power and possibly part of a government, is asking Victorians to trust it on crime and the budget. Until now it hasn’t told them in writing what it’d do on either.

What to watch at Crown

Three things. First, whether the crime policy is specific. Bail, sentencing, youth justice and police numbers are all live issues in Victoria, and a tough-on-crime label on its own doesn’t say what changes or what it costs.

Second, whether there’s any costing. Pickering has said the audit comes first. But the party’s already promised to scrap the Suburban Rail Loop, abolish regional payroll tax, cut land tax and stamp duty on insurance, and keep coal running. Voters will want at least a rough idea of how that balances.

Third, what Hanson and Pickering say about working with the Liberals. Pickering has said One Nation will “work with whoever we must”. Jess Wilson has said she hasn’t spoken to Pickering and has urged voters to back the Coalition. How One Nation talks about the Liberals on Saturday will shape the last eight weeks of the campaign.

If the platform delivers, the “update in progress” pages will be filled in by Saturday afternoon. If it doesn’t, they’ll get harder for One Nation to explain with every week closer to 28 November.