One Nation's Victorian state election leader, Warren Pickering, told a podcast in 2025 that mass deportations are "not a reality" and "won't happen", directly contradicting the deportation policy championed by Pauline Hanson and the party's federal senator Malcolm Roberts. Guardian Australia

Pickering was unveiled as One Nation's leader for Victoria's November 2026 state election on 3 August 2026. He is the party's Victorian state president, a former federal Senate candidate, and will run for the lower-house seat of Pakenham. His elevation puts a man who has publicly repudiated the feasibility of one of the party's core policies at the front of its state campaign.

The comments come from an April 2025 interview on the conservative podcast WilmsFront. Pickering told the program he supported One Nation's stated goals to "abolish multiculturalism" and deport 75,000 people, but said he believed mass deportations would not occur in any Western country. He told the podcast that One Nation would "not discriminate against people that are already Australian citizens". Separately, in an appearance on the Carly Unfiltered podcast, also in April 2025, Pickering said "people have had a gutful of these dinosaurs, these 70-year-old elites in the major political parties" and suggested politicians over age 55 should "handball it to the next generation".

The contradiction with Hanson is stark. The One Nation leader said "I love it" when asked in a Channel Seven interview about the concept of mass deportation. Senator Malcolm Roberts has repeatedly advocated for "remigration" of international students and people overstaying visas, saying of visa overstayers: "That's 100,000 we would deport, remigrate. Call it what you want." One Nation has consistently declined to detail how it would enact its mass-deportation policy. Guardian Australia

Pickering's podcast appearances also pulled back the curtain on One Nation's campaign machinery. He admitted on WilmsFront that the party ran "ghost candidates" — which he described as "non-active candidates" — in election campaigns to boost its upper house votes. Guardian Australia has reported that One Nation is known to run "ghost candidates" in many seats to secure the public funding entitlement. Guardian Australia

The issue has gained broader traction. 7News and 9News reported on social media that One Nation ran so-called "ghost candidates" in elections, with some living far from the seats they were contesting. 7News News coverage of the 2026 Victorian campaign noted that while many One Nation candidates have online profiles, some so-called "ghost candidates" lack them entirely.

The broader context here is a party trying to fight a state campaign on its signature anti-immigration platform while its own chosen leader has told listeners that the centrepiece policy is a fantasy. Pickering endorsed the goals of abolishing multiculturalism and deporting 75,000 people, but his simultaneous insistence that mass deportations "won't happen" in any Western country sits uneasily with a party that has made deportation rhetoric central to its pitch. Hanson's enthusiasm and Roberts's specific figures — 100,000 visa overstayers to be "remigrated" — are pitched as commitments. Pickering's words, delivered on a friendly conservative podcast rather than in a hostile press-gallery interview, read as an admission that the headline policy is aspirational rather than operational.

Then there is the ghost-candidate confession. Pickering's description of running "non-active candidates" to lift upper-house vote share, combined with the known public-funding incentive, is an unusually candid account of a party gaming the electoral system while presenting itself as an anti-establishment alternative. For minor parties, the Legislative Council Group voting ticket system rewards quantity of candidates, and public funding is tied to vote share. Running candidates who do little more than exist on the ballot is a feature, not a bug. But it is rare for a party leader to say so out loud.

For the Victorian campaign, the question is whether Pickering's comments become a liability or simply fade into the noise of a state election where minor-party preferences and upper-house arithmetic will matter more than policy consistency. One Nation voters are not typically drawn to the party because of its policy white papers. Still, a leader who publicly calls his own party's flagship policy unrealistic, and who has labelled older politicians "dinosaurs" while serving under a 72-year-old senator, presents an unusual profile for a standard-bearer.