There was something revealing about Pauline Hanson’s unveiling of Mike Newman as the candidate for Cessnock and One Nation’s new leader in New South Wales. Newman, a NSW trade commissioner who has spent 25 years in Japan, began answering a Japanese journalist in fluent Japanese. Hanson interrupted. ‘Excuse me. I think everyone else might….’ Mike promised to translate. The press conference became less assured from there. Mike was unsteady when he spoke about ‘locals’ and renewables. Barnaby stepped in and Hanson remained close at hand. The performance looked manufactured, because, well, it was.

Mike Newman has been installed as leader of One Nation in NSW before he has won a seat in Parliament – or even addressed a preselection committee. Unlike Campbell from Queensland he has not even been a mayor. He is presented as the man who might become premier. Mike is no doubt a good bloke. After all, he is Maurice’s son. He is articulate, the CV is impressive. But some political experience counts, and so does local knowledge. At least that has always been the rule.

Cessnock is old Labor: working-class, mining and unionised. Labor holds it by about 20 per cent and people there have a strong sense of who belongs. One Nation supporters in Cessnock could be forgiven for being, to borrow Hanson’s vernacular, a little pissed off. A former senior public servant who has spent a quarter-century in Japan and lives in an unspecified suburb has been parachuted in. Over in Secret Harbour Hanson was hammering the fact that the Labor candidate lived just outside the electorate, yet her putative premier won’t say where he lives.

Mike, still unpacking from Japan, will be travelling NSW and talking to the media before he has learnt the names, grudges and lay of the land in Cessnock. For a party that rails against remote elites imposing their choices upon ordinary people, it is quite a choice.

Let’s face it, Mike has not been sent to Cessnock because he belongs there. Cessnock has been chosen for Mike because Hanson needs it. One Nation has been pretending to conservative voters that it merely wants to “work with” the Coalition to defeat Labor. Hanson paints herself as someone who has just accidentally turned up and found herself ahead of the Coalition. The claim that she wants to work with the Coalition is and has always been implausible.

At the 2025 federal election, on average One Nation polled 6.1 per cent in Labor seats, 8.4 per cent in Liberal seats and 14.9 per cent in National seats. Since then it has recruited Barnaby Joyce, hunted for candidates and members across Coalition-held electorates and endlessly attacked and trolled senior Coalition figures. One Nation is not attempting to work with the Coalition. It is attempting to replace it. There is no path to Hanson becoming prime minister unless she demolishes the Coalition, but she does not want you to know that.

This makes Cessnock politically useful. One Nation was originally established to take working-class votes from Labor. As I have written before, its bizarre constitutional manifesto, with its economic nationalism and protectionism, reveals roots deep in the old economic left. Cessnock has plenty of that. Mike Newman almost certainly does not.

But launching Mike as party leader in an old, unionised mining seat performs yet another useful piece of theatre. It allows Hanson to present One Nation as the party coming for Labor’s forgotten working class. In reality, Cessnock is one of the few NSW electorates in which that story is plausible. For One Nation Cessnock is really a clever alibi: it disguises a party mainly stalking Coalition seats as one appearing to come for Labor.

There is nothing wrong with that. No political party owns the franchise, but conservative voters are entitled to understand the magnitude of the project.

The alibi may be too clever by half. That Hanson has decreed that square-peg Mike shall fill the round hole in Cessnock reveals a related and more serious long-term problem: One Nation imposes from the top what it cannot build from below.

The One Nation constitution names Pauline Hanson as party president for as long as she wishes. When she resigns, she appoints her successor. The national executive can disband branches and remove office-holders. State leaders, even candidates, or local branch executives do not emerge victorious from a vote, preselection or party-room vote. They are simply announced by Hanson.

We have watched some of this unfold at close quarters in our region. New One Nation supporters have attended meetings intended to establish something resembling federal and state electoral conferences. One Nation flying squads have arrived from Queensland with kooky speeches and zero knowledge of the electorate. A local executive was formed, only for its members to resign within weeks when they realised Queensland headquarters demanded total control. The complaint from a few who attended several meetings is that, for a so-called grassroots party, it has no interest whatsoever in the grassroots.

Meanwhile, following redistribution in NSW, the Liberal party’s federal electoral conferences have been reconstituted. Members have elected executives and begun discussing candidates for the next election. It is all on a shoestring, boring and unglamorous. Candidates will need to persuade local party members who have a nose for the electorate that they can win. But power is dispersed to the troops.

None of this means One Nation will fail at coming elections. It may succeed spectacularly. A tightly controlled party is agile: it can move quickly and enforce a message the majors cannot because of internal processes. The cracks will appear in time, when locals don’t get a say, centralised vetting is a disaster, disagreements become public and rogue members of parliament leave the tent.

This is a party that promises to return power to the people, yet is conspicuously designed so that its own people – leaders, MPs and members – have no power. Long term, this is not strength. It is a house of cards.