One Nation leader defends vetting after candidate resigns over offensive tweets

One Nation state leader Warren Pickering has defended the party’s vetting system after one of its candidates resigned following the revelation he had posted highly sexualised and offensive tweets.

Matthew Collins, who has previously promoted anti-Muslim rhetoric and COVID-19 conspiracy theories online, withdrew his candidacy on Friday after it was revealed he had shared pornographic jokes and offensive statements on social media.

In a series of posts on X obtained by this masthead before Collins shut down his account, and made before he was selected as a candidate, he posted in February 2020: “I’ve never once asked any woman for any form of consent, ever.”

“It’s all implied by a woman’s actions and attraction levels which any astute man will be paying attention to.”

In another post, Collins suggested sexual consent was “cringe” and joked about the number of times he had previously asked a woman for consent.

In a statement released on Saturday night, the 35-year-old, who had been running in the Greens-held seat of Melbourne, said the comments were unacceptable.

“They are not reflective of who I am as a person now, and I deeply regret ever having made them,” Collins said.

Speaking to the media on Sunday afternoon after addressing an anti-immigration rally, Pickering said he was appreciative that Collins had stood down, and described the tweets as “very vulgar” and “not in the public interest”.

Pickering said One Nation’s vetting processes for its 120 candidates were strong. He suggested the party’s opponents had spent months trawling through its candidates’ social media histories looking for dirt.

“We’ve taken a very detailed approach,” he said.

One Nation had not had to disendorse any other candidates “because we have done our due diligence as best as possible with the resources we have available”, Pickering said.

A One Nation spokesperson said the party had been made aware of a number of “offensive comments” posted on social media by Collins and had accepted his resignation.

Collins’ social media posts have also previously called to “decolonise” parts of the Muslim world and referenced Christian military campaigns against Muslims in parts of what is now Europe.

On Sunday Pickering appeared as a guest speaker at an anti-mass immigration rally in the Fitzroy Gardens.

He told the crowd of about 400 people that One Nation had long been the flag-bearer for cutting immigration, and it was heartening to see it become a mainstream issue ahead of the November 28 Victorian election.

“Let’s make this a November to remember, and starting with Victoria, let’s take our country back,” he said.

The rally was preceded by a march of about 400 people from Flinders Street Station. Attendees yelled phrases such as: “Shut the gate, re-migrate.”

There were also brief chants of “Australia for the white man,” a phrase associated with neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Network. A small number of neo-Nazis were spotted in the crowd.

Pickering said that that language was “absolutely not my position at all” and also sought to distance himself from the rally itself.

“At the end of the day, like I said, I did not organise this rally,” he told media. “We need to appeal to cross-sections of our whole community.”

He added: “You can’t directly attribute the views of others to … me or my party and what we represent because that is simply not true.”

Pickering previously shared a stage with Neo-Nazi associates at the March for Australia protests earlier this year. He told The Age at the time that he “specifically asked if there’d be neo-Nazis there” and that he was furious at the lack of transparency from organisers.

The latest Resolve Political Monitor conducted for this masthead shows One Nation was polling at a 23 per cent primary vote, suggesting the party will for the first time have a significant presence in the next Victorian parliament.

With Patrick Hatch