One Nation Victorian leader Warren Pickering must be having a good chuckle, right now. As I reported recently, the Victorian Liberals have finally acceded to political reality and agreed to preference One Nation ahead of Labor – but not without a parting sneer. Unless, Liberal leader Jess Wilson, who more and more obviously regards herself as a premier-in-waiting, sniffed, their candidates “hold offensive views”.
This is all of a piece with the uniparty/legacy media narrative that ‘One Nation are unfit for government’, in this case ‘because they can’t vet their candidates properly’. Or, as Pickering knows from experience, because they underestimate the depths the uniparty and their legacy media bootlickers will go to smear the character of anyone who challenges their rule. But ‘vetting candidates’? Perhaps Wilson should practice what she preaches.
Instead, she’s already behaving with the sort of autocratic arrogance that cost Jeff Kennett the 1999 election.
Three weeks from polling day the woman who lectures everyone else about standards is giving voters a clear look at the alternative: delay the press pack for nearly an hour, refuse to put dates on the big promises and bolt when the questions turn awkward. Two days after she could not tell Neil Mitchell whether her spending plans would feed inflation, the same pattern repeated. Scrutiny is for other people.
The candidate disasters are harder to walk away from. Seventeen days before the election Wilson dumped Williamstown candidate Paul Lindemann over Facebook posts that called mixed-ancestry Aboriginal people “half-breed” and “half casts” and argued they should forfeit Indigenous status.
“And any half-breed should fore go (sic) indigenous statis (sic), they are no longer indigenous they have foreign blood, hence as indigenous as me,” he wrote. “How many full bloods are still in our community?”
In another post, Paul Lindemann expressed “much respect” for full blood indigenous people before attacking those of mixed background: “it’s when you get the half casts [sic] involved, no tradition, no respect, no hierarchy, just greed and hatred, all about the $$$ and what they can extract from the government.”
Crudely put, perhaps, but where is Lindemann completely wrong? What’s less defensible is his behaviour as an under-14 girls’ basketball coach, where he mocked and belittled a young girl. He was ultimately handed a six-week suspension by a Basketball Victoria disciplinary tribunal last March. Astonishingly, Wilson refused to disendorse him over that, waiting on someone to snitch on his comments in a private Facebook group.
Because nominations had already closed, Lindemann’s name stays on the ballot next to the Liberal logo. Party officials claimed the posts “were not previously known”. The same defence was used in May when screening missed a County Court conviction because the man had changed his name.
That man was Periclis Telios. Wilson stood beside him at a media event in Elsternwick and presented him as an ordinary trader crushed by Labor taxes.
“Perry works hard every single day,” she told assembled media. “He’s just asking for the government to get out of his way.”
Or at least leave the cell door open. Telios was jailed in 2013 for stealing $224,008 from an Oakleigh South kindergarten while he was president of the parents’ committee. He gambled the money on AFL and greyhounds. Every clip of the appearance was later scrubbed from Wilson’s Instagram.
A third failure arrived earlier. Upper-house candidate Dinesh Gourisetty secured top position on the Western Metropolitan ticket before it emerged he had written a character reference for a man who pleaded guilty to grooming a child under 16. Wilson declared him ineligible and ordered a fresh preselection. Both the character reference and Telios’ conviction sat in public court records before either man was put in front of voters.
Wilson’s law-and-order pitch sits awkwardly against the record. She promises a one-strike bail rule so that “if you break bail, you will go to jail”, adult-crime-adult-time laws, a new court of criminal appeal and 3,000 extra police. Victorians are invited to trust the same office that placed a convicted kindergarten thief in front of the cameras and left a candidate’s years-old posts unread until the Herald Sun found them.
Victorian Labor is already warning voters to “imagine One Nation holding the balance of power”, when we’ve all seen the rampant criminality of the Labor government. Jess Wilson, who sniffs that One Nation candidates might “hold offensive views”, has spent the year demonstrating that her own party’s vetting process cannot reliably distinguish a kindergarten thief from a local businessman or a Facebook rant from a suitable candidate.
The chuckle in One Nation’s office is entirely justified.
