On 3 August 2026, Pauline Hanson announced the eight candidates leading her party's campaign for Victoria's state election in November. The group includes party officials, a local councillor, a former police officer, and someone from the animation studio that makes Hanson's cartoon web series Please Explain (The Guardian).

Warren Pickering, One Nation's Victorian president, will lead the campaign and run in eastern Victoria. Colleen Harkin, who used to be part of the Liberal party's internal committee, will run in the South-Eastern Metropolitan region. Mark Nicholson, co-founder of the studio behind Hanson's cartoon, will run in the northern metropolitan region. Chris Burson, a Geelong councillor and former police officer, will run in western Victoria (The Guardian).

Hanson said the party had picked candidates for up to 76 of Victoria's 88 lower house seats (the lower house is where government is formed), chosen from 1,200 applications (Instagram). The party keeps a list of its candidates on its website (One Nation). A meet-the-candidates event with Hanson was held in Hawthorn on 3 August 2026 (One Nation Victoria).

Hanson did not tell reporters from the ABC, The Age, or The Guardian where or when the press conference would be held (The Guardian). Shutting out major news outlets is something parties sometimes do when they want to show their supporters they are not part of the established system.

The polling numbers suggest this campaign is serious. Recent surveys showed between 19 and 27 percent of Victorians were thinking about voting for One Nation in November (The Guardian). An ABC News analysis from June 2026 said One Nation could win a substantial number of Victorian seats and potentially enter government within six months (ABC News).

Victoria's parliament has two houses. The upper house (called the Legislative Council) is elected using a system called proportional representation, across eight regions that each elect five members. Think of it like slicing a pie: instead of one winner taking everything in a district, seats are shared out roughly in proportion to how many votes each party gets. A party doesn't need to win a majority of votes to get a seat — it just needs enough to earn a share. That means a party polling around 20 percent has a real shot at winning upper house seats, even though that same share would usually be too low to win a lower house seat.

One Nation's choice of candidates reflects this. People with name recognition, local council experience, or media skills have been placed in regions where the party's vote is concentrated enough to possibly reach the threshold for a seat.

The candidate mix also shows who One Nation is trying to reach. Harkin's Liberal party background suggests the party is trying to attract voters who feel let down by the Coalition (the Liberal–National alliance). Burson's police and council work targets regional voters who care about law and order and feel frustrated with the political establishment. Nicholson's role in the party's own cartoon studio points to One Nation's focus on creating its own media content instead of relying on mainstream news.

The broader context here is whether One Nation can turn polling interest into actual seats. Thinking about voting for a party is not the same as definitely voting for them, and that gap can be large. But even at the lower end of the polling — 19 percent — the party's presence would change how votes get distributed and redirected (through a process called preferences, where voters rank candidates and lower-ranked candidates' votes flow to higher-ranked ones). In the lower house, One Nation's preferences could help decide who wins in close races, even if One Nation doesn't win those seats itself. In the upper house, the party could end up negotiating with whoever forms government, which is the scenario the ABC flagged as a possible path to joining a coalition.

The November election will show whether the candidates and polling numbers translate into real results. One Nation's last serious Victorian campaign didn't live up to expectations, and the party has historically been weaker in Victoria than in Queensland or Western Australia. This effort, with candidates for up to 76 lower house seats and organised upper house tickets across all eight regions, is bigger than anything One Nation has tried in Victoria before. Whether shutting out mainstream media from the launch helps or hurts depends on what the party believes about voters: that energising its core supporters through its own channels works better than traditional news coverage, or that conventional media still matters for winning over undecided voters in the final stretch.