One Nation Keeps Picking Candidates Who Embarrass the Party

Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, now a One Nation MP, has had to defend his party after a former election candidate's homophobic comments were broadcast on the ABC on 12 August 2026.

Parminder Singh was third on One Nation's ticket at the 2025 Western Australian election. In an online interview, he said gay people have a mental illness and that marriage equality should not have been legalised. He said people are on earth to create the "next generation," claimed animals are "not gay" and "better thinkers" than humans, and said there are "three sex, male, female and mentally ill" when talking 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).

When the ABC showed the video to One Nation for a response, Singh's profile page on the party's website was taken down. Joyce told the ABC's Afternoon Briefing that removing the page was a "strong statement" and called the comments "highly offensive." He said he did not have the power to formally disendorse Singh (Guardian; ABC).

Joyce then defended One Nation in an unusual way. He called it "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 told about Singh's claim that animals are "not gay," Joyce said of Singh that "he obviously hasn't been around farms" and confirmed he was talking about gay animals (ABC; Guardian).

This is not the first time One Nation has had trouble with a candidate. In March 2026 the party dropped South Australian candidate Aoi Baxter after the ABC revealed a UK warrant for his arrest over an alleged 2024 sexual touching incident. Joyce called the pattern "growing pains" and said the candidate selection process would improve as the party grew (Guardian).

That is a generous reading. Taking down a webpage is not the same as having a proper system to check candidates before they join. And "growing pains" 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 said Singh's comments were "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 facts are against Singh. In the 2017 postal survey on marriage equality, almost 80% of Australians took part, and nearly two-thirds of them voted in favour (Guardian).

Joyce is doing two things at once, and they do not sit comfortably together. He distances himself from Singh's comments, calls them offensive, and points to One Nation's gay members as evidence the party is not defined by them. But he does not address the bigger question: how did someone with these views end up third on a state election ticket in the first place? Removing a webpage does not explain how the candidate got there. "Growing pains" suggests the problem is size. The pattern so far, including the Baxter case, points to something else. A party that grows faster than it can check its candidates will keep handing its opponents, and the press gallery, material they barely have to work for.