Pauline Hanson announced the eight candidates leading One Nation's upper house tickets at a press conference on 3 August 2026, ahead of the November 2026 Victorian state election. The lineup pairs party insiders with figures drawn from local government, the creative industries, and rival party apparatus (The Guardian).

Warren Pickering, One Nation's Victorian president, will lead the campaign and stand as the party's candidate for the eastern Victoria region. Colleen Harkin, formerly a member of the Liberal party's administrative committee, will contest the South-Eastern Metropolitan region. Mark Nicholson, co-founder of the animation studio Stepmates Studios, which produces Hanson's cartoon web series Please Explain, will run in the northern metropolitan region. Chris Burson, a Geelong councillor and former police officer, will contest western Victoria (The Guardian).

Hanson said One Nation had locked in candidates for up to 76 of Victoria's 88 lower house seats, selected from 1,200 applications (Instagram). The party maintains an official candidates page listing its contenders across Australia (One Nation). A meet-the-candidates event featuring Hanson and the Victorian ticket was scheduled in Hawthorn on 3 August 2026 (One Nation Victoria).

The announcement was stage-managed in its media access. Hanson denied reporters from the ABC, The Age, and The Guardian the time and location of the press conference (The Guardian). The selective exclusion of mainstream outlets from a candidacy launch is a familiar tactic from parties that position themselves against established media, and it functions as both a logistical filter and a messaging signal to the party's base.

Polling underpins the seriousness of the effort. Latest figures showed between 19 and 27 percent of Victorians were considering voting for One Nation at the November election (The Guardian). An ABC News analysis from June 2026 assessed that One Nation could win a substantial number of Victorian seats and potentially enter government within six months (ABC News).

Victoria's Legislative Council is elected by proportional representation across eight regions, each returning five members. A party polling in the high teens or low twenties can plausibly secure upper house seats without the primary vote thresholds required in single-member lower house contests. One Nation's ticket composition reflects this calculus: candidates with name recognition, local government credentials, or media production capacity are placed in regions where preference flows and minor-party vote concentration can compound into quota.

The candidate mix also reveals a recruitment strategy that reaches across traditional party lines. Harkin's background in the Liberal party's administrative committee signals an effort to attract disaffected Coalition-aligned voters, while Burson's policing and local council profile targets regional constituencies where law-and-order messaging and anti-establishment sentiment overlap. Nicholson's candidacy, rooted in the party's own media ecosystem, underscores One Nation's emphasis on building an in-house communications infrastructure that operates outside mainstream press channels.

The broader context here is whether One Nation can translate polling interest into seats under Victoria's electoral system. The 19–27 percent range in polling measures voter consideration rather than firm intention, and the gap between the two can be wide. But even at the lower bound, that level of support would reshape preference distributions in both houses. In the lower house, One Nation preferences could determine outcomes in marginal seats whether or not the party wins them outright. In the upper house, the party would be positioned to negotiate with whoever forms government, a prospect that the ABC's June analysis flagged as a path to potential inclusion in a coalition arrangement.

The November contest will test whether the candidate roster and polling numbers translate into parliamentary representation. One Nation's last significant Victorian electoral performance fell short of expectations, and the party's organisational capacity in the state has historically been thinner than in Queensland or Western Australia. The scale of this effort, with candidates for up to 76 lower house seats and structured upper house tickets across all eight regions, marks a more comprehensive Victorian campaign than One Nation has previously mounted. Whether the exclusion of mainstream media from the launch proves a liability or an asset depends on which theory of the electorate the party is betting on: one where base mobilisation through alternative channels outperforms broad press coverage, or one where conventional media visibility still moves undecided voters in the final stretch.