Source : the age
Let’s go out on a ledge here.
Normally, a leader of a right-wing political party admitting to popping pills, taking speed, smoking dope and, in this drug-induced haze, swapping beds between his partner and other likely lads would not be good for their electoral prospects.
But as we keep being reminded, these are not normal times in Victorian politics and One Nation’s Warren Pickering is not leading a normal political movement.
His claim on Tuesday to be inexpert in the dark arts of politics was perhaps stretching the truth. He has been cunning enough to climb the greasiest of poles within Pauline Hanson’s organisation and November 28 will be the third time he has stood as a candidate for team orange.
Everything else about his press conference confession ached with authenticity. It was raw, sad and bizarrely, uplifting – like watching a Jerry Springer Show episode when all the members of a dysfunctional family hug at the end.
He told us way more than we needed to know. And it will speak to One Nation voters in a way that the political establishment cannot understand.
Pickering, by laying bare the private, painful details of his life – shacking up as an 18-year-old brickie with the widow of his boss who had just died in a car crash; exploring his uncertain sexuality when high on drugs; raising four kids in a household tormented by a “junkie” mother; and eventually kicking the drugs and enlisting in the army – turned what might have been a career-ending scandal into a powerful origin story.
It also feeds one of the most potent, toxic narratives coursing beneath One Nation’s rise – that behind the hard luck story of so many men, there is a woman to blame.
In Pickering’s case it is Joanne Scott, the previously drug-addicted mother of his daughter and the three other children the leader of One Nation in Victoria helped raise.
It was Scott who levelled a series of allegations against her former partner on social media. Those were subsequently investigated and published by The Australian newspaper.
The central allegations published have now been broadly confirmed by Pickering – he took illicit drugs and indulged in what he described at the time as “sexual deviance”. He remains ashamed of things he did. He denied that he smoked ice, but admitted to taking other powerful stimulants.
The political impact of the story, in Pickering’s telling, has been turned on its head. Calls for One Nation to explain what it knew about his past have been replaced by outrage that such personal experiences were recounted with malicious intent.
This will reinforce a view already entrenched in One Nation loyalists that mainstream media outlets, including this one, cannot be trusted to report fairly on the affairs of their party.
Pickering’s daughter Jhett tearfully described how her father was always there for her in a way her mother wasn’t. She lives in Melbourne and has no relationship with Joanne, who runs a fitness gym in Townsville.
Scott’s eldest son, Johnny, was less restrained. Where Pickering was a man who had escaped his past, Joanne Scott remained stuck there, Johnny claimed.
“She’s got a vendetta against Warren and has for many years,” he said. “She’s been a junkie, an alcoholic.
“I am one of four kids. I haven’t spoken to her in years. Neither has Jhett. What does that tell you?”
What it tells One Nation voters and particularly, people who believe the system is stacked against men, is that Pickering is on their side. His failures, from the drugs to drink-driving to the sexual experiences he would rather forget, are relatable to One Nation’s core constituency – people who feel screwed over by someone or something.
Hanson’s long-time consigliere James Ashby leant into this idea on Tuesday. “One Nation do not grow our candidates in Petri dishes like Labor and the Liberal Party,” he said. “They come from lived experience.”
Until this press conference, few people outside Victoria would have heard of Warren Pickering. Now, in the One Nation order of merit, he’ll be up there with Hanson, Barnaby Joyce and accused war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith.
This was, in the weirdest possible way, the best day One Nation has had since it began its first serious tilt at Victorian politics. Who would have imagined that bad choices made a long time ago could turn out so good?
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Chip Le Grand leads our state politics reporting team. He previously served as the paper’s chief reporter and is a journalist of 30 years’ experience.Connect via email.
