One Nation in NSW is starting to feel like a clearing house for bitter exes

When Stuart Bonds first burst onto the national stage as One Nation’s poster boy at the 2019 election, picking up 21 per cent of the primary vote and giving Joel Fitzgibbon the fright of his life in the previously safe federal Labor seat of Hunter, he did so by leveraging a straight-talking persona which felt authentic because it was.

A coal mine worker with an anarchy symbol tattooed on his chest, Bonds is the Hunter Valley incarnate.

Beyond the everyman aesthetic he had a finely honed bullshit radar and a seemingly preternatural mistrust of authority, which spoke to an electorate that felt neglected by Labor as it stared down the barrel of a global shift away from coal that posed – and still poses – an undeniable threat to its future.

The context of 2019, when Donald Trump’s first-term “drain the swamp” mantra was filtering into the Australian political ecosystem, is obviously relevant, and part of his appeal was a reaction against the political class, which someone like Fitzgibbon had come to personify. But Bonds’ Facebook profile at the time read: “Rule Number 1: F— what they think”, and his anti-authority mantra extended well beyond just politicians.

Bonds was anti-union, not because he didn’t want miners to have good wages and conditions but because the CFMEU had cosied up to multinationals and struck deals with labour hire firms which, he believed, had sold out workers. He was just as vocal about going after the “corrupt corporations” as he was the politicians who had “sold this nation out”.

When he left the party in 2021 after its eleventh-hour decision to support Morrison-era industrial relations changes that gutted several legal claims against mining companies brought by casual mining workers, it only served to confirm his bona fides as an outsider unwilling to compromise his values.

“It is not enough to fight for mines and mining companies, you must fight for the miners inside the mine as well,” Bonds said at a One Nation function at the time.

Seven years later, as One Nation rides the crest of a much larger wave of the same type of dissatisfaction, Bonds is back in the tent. This time, though, he’s increasingly at risk of looking like a prop. As the Herald reported this week, the list of potential candidates for the party’s NSW campaign is increasingly packed with dumped former Coalition MPs and unsuccessful candidates. So much so that it is starting to feel like a clearing house for bitter exes.

Hollie Hughes, a former federal senator turned One Nation devotee, may have moved to the regions and bought a pub after she was shunted from a winnable spot on the Liberals ticket at the last election, but before that she was a longtime factional player who served on the party’s powerful state executive for years. She continues to work as a “strategic counsel” to a Coalition-aligned lobby shop. Her new status as an outsider, like many of those putting their hands up for One Nation, smells a lot like self-interest.

But it’s not just the personnel. While One Nation is clearly benefiting from the broader electorate’s anger at the majors, the party’s populist, anti-woke mantra increasingly just feels like window dressing for a stridently pro-business agenda that, for the Hunter in particular, sounds very different from the rhetoric of the past.

Perhaps alive to some of these threats, there are increasing whispers of resistance from within the party’s state executive at the idea of letting Hughes run for a winnable upper house seat, and instead pushing her to take on the much less cushy task of challenging the Nationals in a lower house seat. There are certainly those in One Nation aware that they cannot afford to be perceived as a reincarnation of the Liberals. But such is the close-hold on information in the party that it’s anyone’s guess what shakes out after the election. For example, even though Bonds is the lead candidate for the upper house, there are persistent rumours Libertarian MP John Ruddick will jump ship and lead the show in that house for One Nation next term.

Ruddick didn’t deny as much when it was put to him on Wednesday, though he said no decisions had been made. “Who the hell knows what the next parliament is going to look like,” he said.

There is no doubt, though, that behind the populist mantra, One Nation, particularly under its NSW leader Mike Newman, is increasingly, unashamedly, pro-big business. Newman, a former investment banker from Sydney who formerly worked as a trade commissioner in Japan, plans to run in Cessnock. He makes no secret of his love for the private sector and has frequently railed against what he sees as the failings of the public service. Asked, for example, about his fix for the issue of bed block in the health system during his surprise visit to NSW parliament on Wednesday, he said One Nation would have “people from industry who will be running these departments”.

The party has already said it would remove independent assessment of large mining projects – long a desire of large mining firms – and on Wednesday Newman said One Nation would attract funds for a coal-fired power station by giving investors such as Japan and Korea “three decades of untrammelled access to our coal, which we will not mess with”.

Perhaps the momentum currently carrying One Nation is enough that it no longer matters, but that type of unfettered open-market evangelism is a far cry from the politics of the middle finger, which made someone like Bonds so appealing to the Hunter back in 2019.

Michael McGowan is state political editor for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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