Pauline Hanson’s One Nation pretends to be a party of battlers, standing up for the little guy against the major parties. This narrative has been parroted by the mainstream media and even taken up by Hanson’s opponents. The party’s lead candidates for the March 2027 New South Wales state election paint a very different picture of who the party represents.
Take Mike Newman, newly-appointed NSW leader and candidate for Cessnock, the Hunter Valley seat One Nation considers winnable. Newman’s riches-to-riches story involves growing up in well-heeled Mosman on Sydney’s lower North Shore and attending the elite private school Cranbrook, along with billionaire James Packer. His father, Maurice Newman, was the chair of the Australian Securities Exchange and then of the ABC.
Son followed father into the world of investment banking. After a long career as a banker in Tokyo, Newman landed a gig in the public service as NSW Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner in Japan. The wasteful inefficiency of the bureaucracy supposedly radicalised Newman and convinced him to go into politics. Curiously, during his three-year stint as commissioner, Newman racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses (funded by the taxpayer) for flights, five-star hotels and restaurant and bar bills, as was recently revealed by theSydney Morning Herald. This spending included more than $20,000 for an extended stay in a Meriton Suite in Sydney.
Next up is Jeff Bacon, who will be second on One Nation’s ticket for the upper house. Bacon is the managing director of Oceana Precision, a weapons manufacturer based in Tamworth, his north-eastern NSW hometown. He ran as the lower house candidate for Tamworth with the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party in 2019, then joined the Nationals in 2023 before defecting to One Nation in October 2025.
In an interview with Tamworth’s local newspaper, the Northern Daily Leader, in January, Bacon alleged that every single one of Oceania Precision’s rifles was banned in NSW following firearms legislation passed by the state Labor government in the wake of the Bondi Massacre. Bacon would, apparently, be broke in six months if the laws weren’t repealed. Hanson has described him as her “go-to man on the firearms industry”.
Sure, you might struggle to pay grocery or electricity bills, or cover your mortgage or rent. But spare a thought for the owner of a medium-sized weapons manufacturer whose human rights have been trampled on by the Labor government.
Stuart Bonds, the party’s lead upper house candidate, is more regularly held up as emblematic of the party’s battler credentials.
Bonds, a former Hunter Valley coal miner, won 21 percent of the vote for One Nation in the 2019 federal election. Bonds is critical of both renewable energy and the behaviour of multinational mining companies. He left One Nation in 2021 over its support for the Morrison government's industrial relations legislation that undermined casual workers’ rights.
Bonds, however, is more representative of your average bigot than battler. At an anti-immigration rally in early November, he espoused the far-right Great Replacement conspiracy theory. He told the protesters that, “we are being demographically replaced inside our own nation”, and warned them that this was part of a “socialist plan” to “tear down the fabric of your civilisation”.
Bonds is also a bigot on other social issues. Many have rightly pointed out the irony of his misogynistic comments when he boasted: “I don’t have a woman boss, and I don’t have a gay boss, and there’s a reason for that”. The only problem for Mr Bonds is that he does indeed have both a woman boss in Hanson and a gay boss in James Ashby, the party director. Irony aside, the comments indicate the rank misogyny and homophobia that aren’t simply personal opinions, but party policy. One Nation boasts about being “pro-life” and is currently campaigning to restrict abortion rights in NSW.
One Nation’s NSW state election candidates give you a glimpse into the actual character of the party. Rather than being the authentic expression of working-class grievances, the party is a Frankenstein-like combination of bankers, bigots and small business owners. What unites them is not their genuine struggles under the system, but their hostility to the gains made by oppressed groups and minorities, hatred of the left and commitment to a pro-business economic agenda.
