Barnaby Joyce defends One Nation after homophobic candidate remarks surface
Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, now a One Nation MP, has been forced to defend his party after a former Western Australian candidate's homophobic comments were aired on the ABC on 12 August 2026.
Parminder Singh, who was third on One Nation's ticket at the 2025 WA election, told online personality Jasky Singh, known as Mr Sikkant, that gay people have a mental illness and that marriage equality should not have been legalised. He claimed people are on earth to create the "next generation," that animals are "not gay" and "better thinkers" than humans, and referenced "three sex, male, female and mentally ill" in comments about transgender people. He also said gay people should not need to "gay parade in city" because they "advertise" their sexuality, and claimed women who tried relationships with women did not "go back" to men (ABC).
After the ABC put the video to One Nation for comment, Singh's profile page on the party's website was removed and returned a 404 error. Joyce told the ABC's Afternoon Briefing that removing the page was a "strong statement" and described the comments themselves as "highly offensive." He said he did not have the power to disendorse Singh (Guardian; ABC).
Joyce then offered a defence of One Nation that was, at minimum, unorthodox. He called One Nation "one of the gayest parties in Australia" and said it has "quite a large proportion of gay people." He pointed to the party's South Australian MP James Virgo, who is gay. When Singh's claim that animals are "not gay" was put to him, Joyce said of Singh that "he obviously hasn't been around farms" and confirmed he was referring to gay animals (ABC; Guardian).
The broader context here is that this is not the first time One Nation's candidate vetting has blown up publicly. In March 2026 the party was forced to drop South Australian election candidate Aoi Baxter after the ABC revealed a UK warrant for his arrest over an alleged 2024 sexual touching incident. Joyce framed the pattern as "growing pains," saying the candidate selection process would improve as the party expanded (Guardian).
That is a generous reading. A 404 page is not a vetting system, and "growing pains" is a phrase that does a lot of work when the thing growing is the number of candidates who have had to be quietly removed from a website.
Equality Australia chief executive Anna Brown described Singh's comments as "demonstrably false, thoroughly discredited and deeply harmful." Meaghan Holden, CEO of Living Proud Inc in WA, said the remarks were "inaccurate, harmful and inconsistent with decades of medical, psychological and community understanding that sexuality and gender diversity are a part of human diversity" (Guardian; ABC).
The factual record against Singh's claims is well established. Nearly two-thirds of the almost 80% of Australians who took part in the 2017 postal survey voted in support of marriage equality (Guardian).
Joyce's response does two things at once, and they sit awkwardly together. He distances himself from the substance of Singh's comments, calls them offensive, and points to One Nation's actual gay members as proof the party is not defined by them. But he also declines to draw any structural conclusion from the fact that a candidate third on a state ticket was saying these things in a forum Singh presumably expected would stay semi-private. Removing a webpage is not the same as accounting for how the candidate got there in the first place. "Growing pains" implies the problem is scale. The pattern so far, including the Baxter episode, suggests the problem is process, and that a party building its base faster than it can screen its candidates will keep handing its opponents, and the press gallery, material they barely have to work for.
