Inside the world of the self-described conspiracy theorist anointed One Nation’s Victorian leader
Patrick Hatch
August 4, 2026 — 7:56pm
One Nation’s new Victorian leader, Warren Pickering, is a self-described conspiracy theorist who has claimed Australian government policy is controlled by a cabal of foreign “globalists”, and endorsed the idea that the world economy was deliberately crashed to trigger a “great reset”.
Extremism researchers say Pickering’s repeated references to a tyrannical global elite running the world tap into long-running conspiracy theories that have historically had antisemitism at their core.
Scrutiny of the new Victorian party leader, who was formally endorsed by Pauline Hanson this week, comes after One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts was condemned last month for sharing material riddled with anti-Jewish tropes.
In Melbourne on Monday, Hanson announced nine candidates for the November state election, including Pickering, who will contest the lower house seat of Pakenham in Melbourne’s outer east, which Labor won at the 2022 election by a few hundred votes.
Recent polling has shown One Nation attracting a primary vote of 22 per cent, which, if repeated on election day, would be likely to result in the election of all seven upper house candidates.
Pickering, who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in the 2025 federal election and as a candidate in the 2022 state election, said on Monday, “We are officially putting the major parties on notice. We are contesting to govern.”
Although the One Nation brand is closely associated with Hanson’s anti-immigration and xenophobic views, Pickering’s elevation underscores the influence of the anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination “freedom movement” on the party’s local arm. The movement largely grew out of the Victorian government’s COVID measures.
Pickering, the state party leader and president, grew up in Gippsland and worked as a bricklayer before serving as a combat engineer in the army, which included deployments to the Middle East.
The 43-year-old single father has said in interviews he lost his job at a BHP coal mine in central Queensland during the pandemic after the mining giant mandated COVID-19 vaccines for employees.
He has opposed vaccines since at least 2017, according to social media posts he shared at the time questioning their safety. In an interview in 2022, he said he moved to Victoria in late 2021 with the intention to join One Nation. Following the move, he became involved in the “freedom movement”, which held regular rallies opposing lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
In May 2024, Pickering organised a rally on the steps of the Victorian Parliament to protest over the federal government’s digital ID system, at which he suggested the plan was being imposed from a global level.
“My primary concern – looking at everything through the lens perception of a conspiracy theorist, as we all should – is that this bill’s come from higher up,” he said. “Which then raises the highly conspiratorial question: well, who’s higher up than the Australian government? We know who that is. The WEF , UN . All that lot.”
At the same event, Pickering invited former Neighbours actor Damien Richardson to speak. Richardson told the crowd a “globalist agenda” was deliberately using immigration to change the ethnic make-up of Australia in order to “to get away with all the other things they’re trying to do … leading to an ultimate tyranny”.
“They need immigration to break down the community that will stand against it,” Richardson said, noting that the crowd was made up of “heritage Australians”.
Richardson was found guilty of performing a Nazi salute at an event later that year run and attended by white supremacists, and where Richardson also questioned the Holocaust.
Pickering did not respond to questions about whether he agreed with Richardson’s views or regretted inviting him to the May event.
At a rally in December 2025, Pickering claimed immigration policies – as well as disinformation laws and climate change policies – were being “pushed through the parliaments of every Western nation of the planet right now.
“We all know who it is. We know it is a concerted effort by a well-funded, well-organised bunch of unelected bureaucrats that seek to dictate to us our social and economic policy,” he said at the event.
He went on to say that Australia was “in the grips of a bunch of unelected foreign bureaucrats” and “we will not capitulate to the whims of tyranny or the crippling tenants of globalism. Let’s tell those globalists … what it means to be Australian.”
Pickering also posted on Facebook about the “15-minute city” – an urban planning concept that people should have access to daily necessities close to home, but which has taken off in some conspiracy theory circles as a plot to confine citizens and strip them of their freedoms.
“Under the pretense of ‘sustainability’, the powers that be would love to see our populations consolidated into manageable 15-minute zones,” he wrote in September 2024.
The government was trying to achieve this by building high-rise apartments near train stations, banning residential gas connections, and killing small businesses while increasing government employment, he claimed.
“Once our population is entirely dependent on its government for food and shelter, it’s no longer in a position to pushback on this increasingly tyrannical dictatorship,” he wrote.
“This is all part of a concerted effort from unelected globalists bureaucrats. Make no mistake Australia, we’re in the fight of our lives.”
In other posts, Pickering appears to endorse the “great reset” theory, which took off during the pandemic and generally revolves around the belief that there was a concerted plan to crash the world economy.
After Pickering posted about an impending financial crisis, a follower responded: “it’s all a part of the Great Reset. Bring down the global economy.”
“I know you know it’s been deliberately facilitated,” Pickering responded.
Josh Roose, a political scientist at Deakin University who has studied right-wing populism and the “freedom movement”, said Pickering’s views were deeply conspiratorial.
“ embedded in an old, but still very current, conspiracy theory about globalists running the world, unelected bureaucrats making decisions for everyone, international organisations,” he said. “These conspiracy theories have historically been antisemitic in orientation, albeit not presenting in the same way now.”
Roose said the term “globalist” had also historically been used as a euphemism for “Jewish” in conspiracy theory circles, but noted it was “not being used overtly in this particular instance”.
“For the political leader of an aspirationally major party to be referring to a hidden cabal of globalist elites, and appearing to support the premise of a ‘great reset’, raises significant questions about political judgment and economic judgment,” Roose said.
“He’s also associated with individuals that have, in turn, been associated with the extreme right.”
Kaz Ross, a researcher into far-right extremism and conspiracy theories, said Pickering was promoting “all the conspiracies wrapped up in one little neat package, with one group of people to blame, which are the so-called unelected ‘globalists’.
“And you have to be asking, well, who are these globalists?” Ross said. “That’s, to me, getting very, very close to ‘the Jews’. Because, ‘we all know who it is, wink, wink, nod, nod’.”
Ross said the “freedom movement” started as a broad church of people concerned about COVID-19 restrictions but was overwhelmed by followers of the QAnon theory, which is based on a belief in a “big secret agenda” behind everything, and eventually funnelled some people into explicitly antisemitic conspiracies.
On Monday, Pickering defended the party’s decision to not announce its full list of candidates and policies for another month.
One Nation banned The Age, the ABC and The Guardian from attending its candidate launch event at Melbourne’s Savoy Hotel on Monday. Pickering used the event to threaten to sue media organisations that published “blatant character assassination attempts” of candidates.
Pickering did not respond to a request for comment when contacted by this masthead.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/inside-the-world-of-the-self-described-conspiracy-theorist-anointed-one-nation-s-victorian-leader-20260804-p60l7s.html
