One Nation names eight Victorian election candidates as Hanson bars ABC and Guardian from press conferences | Victorian politics

One Nation has named its first candidates for the upcoming Victorian state election, as the party leader, Pauline Hanson, has vowed to ban the ABC and the Guardian from attending her press conferences during the campaign.

Guardian Australia understands reporters from the ABC and the Age were refused entry to Hanson’s press conference on Monday, where she announced seven of the eight candidates who will lead One Nation’s upper house tickets.

The Age has been contacted for comment while the ABC declined to.

Reporters from the ABC, the Age and the Guardian were not told the time or location of the event in advance. One Nation has previously said the ABC and the Guardian were not welcome at the party’s events and press conferences.

Asked whether all media should have access to press conferences in a democracy, particularly given her ambition to form government in Victoria, Hanson replied: “Democracy doesn’t happen on the ABC at all.”

She said it was not the first time she had excluded the national broadcaster, claiming she denied ABC journalists access to her events for “eight months” in 1996.

“The same will go with the Guardian,” she added.

“I’m not putting up with the spin, gotcha moments, wanting to have a go at me … [and they] treat us totally different to what you do the other major political parties. Enough is enough.”

In a later follow-up question, another reporter asked: “Aren’t you cutting off your nose to spite your face here? Don’t you need your message to get out to regional Victoria in particular, and you need the ABC, the national broadcaster to be able to carry it?”

To which Hanson responded: “We’ve got Rebel News here, I am happy with them.”

Rebel News Australia is run by Avi Yemini, a former Israeli soldier and self-styled investigative journalist.

Warren Pickering, One Nation’s Victorian president, said the party “expect and invite a healthy amount of scrutiny of our candidates and our policy positions”.

“However, any blatant character assassination attempts based on fabrications of our candidates will be met with swift legal action,” he told reporters.

A Guardian spokesperson said it was “disappointing that One Nation continues to prevent the Guardian and other news outlets from reporting on its press conferences”.

“Holding public figures to account is the role of a free press and an essential part of the democratic process,” they said.

“Journalists should be able to ask questions in the public interest and not be deterred from doing their job.”

They added that the Guardian has published important public interest journalism about Hanson and her party, which it stands by.

Candidates announced

In a media release prior to Monday’s press conference, Hanson announced Pickering would lead the party’s campaign and run as its candidate for the eastern Victoria region in the upper house.

But at the event she said he would instead be running in the lower house seat of Pakenham, an ultra-marginal electorate southeast of Melbourne where One Nation has set up an office.

Pickering ran One Nation’s campaign in the 2022 election, where it won 0.22% of first-preference votes in the lower house and 2% in the upper house. He also unsuccessfully contested a Victorian Senate seat for One Nation at last year’s federal election.

But since then, the party has surged in the polls, with latest figures showing between 19 and 27% of Victorians are considering voting for One Nation.

Colleen Harkin, a former member of the Liberal party’s administrative committee, will contest the south-eastern metropolitan region. Harkin quit the Liberal party in June to join One Nation.

Harkin, who is the director of education at the conservative thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs, has been a vocal supporter of Moira Deeming and led a supreme court challenge against the Liberals’ decision to grant John Pesutto a $1.5m loan after he lost a defamation case against the MP.

She drew controversy during the 2022 federal election campaign as the Liberal candidate for Macnamara when she said describing global warming as a climate emergency was “almost” child abuse. She also sought Liberal preselection for the neighbouring seat of Goldstein in 2024 but lost to Tim Wilson.

Mark Nicholson, co-founder of animation house Stepmates Studios – which creates Hanson’s cartoon web series Please Explain and her satirical, “anti-woke” movie – will stand in the northern metropolitan region, while Geelong councillor and former police officer, Chris Burson, will contest western Victoria.

Burson, who also has served with the Australian Defence Force, ran unsuccessfully for the Angry Victorians Party at the 2022 state election and the Australian Values party at the 2022 federal election.

He told a podcast in June he worked with the close personal protection team guarding then premier Daniel Andrews and his wife, Catherine, as they faced increased threats during the pandemic.

“We’d be sitting there kitted up, ready to go in case there was an attack. You’d have your guns ready, you were in your vest,” Burson said. “You’d be like, ‘how do we have six [counter-terrorism officers] looking after him and two people looking after the city of Melbourne?”

One Nation’s only current MP, Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell, will seek re-election in northern Victoria, while Fiona Lopez, Aaron Sandford and Natalie Adams will head the party’s tickets in the western metropolitan, southern metropolitan and north eastern metropolitan regions.

With Pickering running in the lower house, it remains unclear who will contest the eastern Victoria region for the party.

Monday’s announcement comes after new Victorian premier, Ben Carroll, introduced legislation to parliament last week that will scrap group voting tickets (GVTs). The change means if One Nation maintains its current polling, the upper house candidates in the number one spot on each ticket are the party’s most likely prospects to win seats.

But Hanson said One Nation will be fielding candidates in every seat at the election, with the party to release policies in coming weeks.

She also said Yemini should “take credit” for the decision to scrap GVTs, after he registered the“Free Palestine party” earlier this year, with the intention to funnel votes to conservative parties.