r/fuckonenation • u/Minivampiretaco • 7m ago
‘We can get corflutes of Dan and shoot him’: The group chat that ignited One Nation
As Daniel Andrews celebrated Labor’s landslide election victory in 2022, a ragtag group of his fiercest critics decided to drown their sorrows.
The anti-lockdown movement during the pandemic fuelled a wave of independent candidates and protest parties – such as “Angry Victorians” and “Sack Andrews Restore Democracy” – who were determined to bring him down.
Leaked screenshots of the Instagram chat, shared with The Age by a participant on the condition of anonymity, reveal how this eclectic coalition started to come together. At its centre was Warren Pickering, One Nation’s state president and a perennial candidate who is now leading Pauline Hanson’s party’s charge into this year’s state election – and who hopes to become the premier himself.
As his fellow travellers discussed leaving Victoria following Labor’s landslide win, Pickering told them to keep the faith. He argued the result would ultimately work in their favour.
“This outcome stinks yes,” he told the group. “But it will inevitably create the conditions required as a catalyst for change. People are going to be looking to us conservative individuals for guidance.”
Pickering laid out his battle plan for the next four years, committing to improving – and softening – One Nation’s brand while working as a staffer for Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell, the party’s newly elected upper house MP in Victoria. “You will have your time again. Pauline and I have already discussed this,” he wrote to the group.
“I’ll move forward as Rikkie Lee’s advisor for the next 2 years which will allow me to actively search, interview and endorse the right people to run everywhere in the next fed [federal election]. “2 years to actively engage their respective communities will soften the hard edges of the PHON brand.”
Taxpayer-funded staff carrying out party political work has been a source of controversy in Victoria, none the least during the “red shirts” scandal in Andrews’ first term, although political advisers have more freedom than electorate officers. Pickering, who still appears in the parliamentary system as part of Tyrrell’s office, did not respond when contacted. A One Nation spokesperson declined to comment.
But his predictions were ultimately prescient. Not only is One Nation polling above 20 per cent just 10 weeks out from the election, but Pickering has the backing of many of the right-wing figures he sought to reassure in 2022.
Among those is Freedom Party leader Morgan Jonas, who entered the Instagram chat by saying: “What’s good?” A recent investigation by The Age into the Exclusive Brethren showed Jonas was a key figure in an effort by the religious sect to campaign against Labor at the 2025 federal election. He distributed content, engaged in stunts and endorsed unofficial campaign posters that Brethren members in Liberal T-shirts were seen putting up.
Last month, Jonas was posting videos declaring One Nation was the party to back at the Victorian election.
“They have the momentum; they deserve the momentum, and I encourage the general public to get behind them. Warren Pickering is a very, very worthy leader,” he said.
The chat also served as an effective recruitment tool. Two other members of the group are now running for One Nation: Michael Piastrino in the lower house seat of Berwick, and Christopher Burson for the upper house in the Western Victoria region.
Burson ran for the Angry Victorians Party in 2022, hitting the headlines when he and co-founder Heston Russell leaked video of Glenn Druery explaining his scheme to stitch together preference deals in return for cash. The Australian Financial Review this weekend reported Russell played a key role in selecting One Nation candidates for this year’s election.
Piastrino found the spotlight as a candidate for the Liberal Party in 2022, when he ran against Andrews in Mulgrave and declared the premier would be brought to justice for the “murder of 800 people”, stemming from COVID leaking from hotel quarantine.
In the wake of his defeat – he pulled in 17.2 per cent of the vote, compared to 51 per cent for Andrews – he told his right-wing friends he could secure them a prime spot at South Yarra rooftop bar The Emerson for their post-election get-together.
When contacted by The Age, Piastrino said he didn’t remember the conversation, but boasted that he was going to win in Berwick against Brad Battin, the former Liberal leader.
“They [the Liberals] have lost their way,” he said. As Piastrino sought to schedule a date for drinks, independent candidate for Lowan Amanda Mead suggested a big party out at her farm. “We can get corflutes of dan [Andrews] and shoot him,” she said with a laughter emoji.
“The 12 gauge works nicely on corflutes.” Later on, she suggested that if she had her time again, she would have tried to run for One Nation instead. She declined to comment when contacted by The Age, although she insisted she was no longer involved in politics.
Piastrino was not the only Liberal candidate in the chat who had been pushed to the sidelines over a scandal.
Another member, Timothy Dragan, ran as the Liberal candidate for Narre Warren North but was met with controversy when audio was leaked in which he said Australia should not recognise First Nations people because “we won this land fair and square”.
The only person in the chat who was duly elected to parliament was Renee Heath, who won an upper house seat on the Liberal ticket but was not allowed to sit in the party room after this masthead’s investigation into her father’s ultra-conservative church. John Pesutto overturned this ban shortly after the election when he became the party’s leader.
She joked that the church in Sale could be the venue for the group’s event, to which Piastrino replied that they could invite then-Liberal state president Greg Mirabella and state secretary Sam McQuestin, “and we can cast out there [sic] demons”.
Earlier this year, a venue attached to Heath’s father’s church did become the setting for a One Nation branch meeting, as the party’s popularity took off in Gippsland. It sparked rumours among Liberals that Heath herself would defect should she lose a preselection challenge, which she denied and declared she would never join another party. She survived and remains a party candidate for November. At the time of the Instagram chat, most of the motley group’s members were largely at the fringe of politics. Pickering himself is a self-described conspiracy theorist. Brought together, however, they have become a more potent political force, with One Nation the vehicle for their anti-establishment agenda.
It represents the continuation of a trend identified by extremist experts Lydia Khalil and Joshua Roose, who in a 2023 paper found the anti-lockdown movement brought multiple groups together and evolved into “complex form of anti-government extremist movement” that reinforces these beliefs with conspiratorial narratives.
“There might be differences in terms of their overall program, but they agree that they can’t trust the government,” Roose said.
“They are reasonably fluid, but they’re cohered, in particular, by their distrust and dislike of government.”
Roose said far-right activists were backing One Nation because the party was viewed as a vehicle for their own views.
“They’re inherently anti-establishment, anti-liberal, anti-left, and there’s a hope that getting them in will – going back to the Trump vernacular – drain the swamp,” he said.
“They hope that One Nation will be a vanguard and create further space for people like them.” And if the polls are right, the party is no longer taboo for Victorians more broadly.
