Pauline Hanson walked into the Tower Hotel in Hawthorn on Monday night behind a line of Victoria Police Public Order Response officers, the state's riot squad. Mounted police were on the road and the streets around the pub were closed off, because as many as 100 protesters had turned up to shout down One Nation's Victorian campaign launch.
A dozen or so got past the police blockade and reached the One Nation supporters queueing to get in, chanting "unite to fight the right" and "put the racist in the bin", The Australian reported. Others screamed "racists out" as Senator Hanson arrived. The placards read "smash racism anti-colonial class war 4 liberation", "no nazi never again" and "f**k Israel".
Inside, about 150 people had paid $120 a head to meet the candidates who'll carry One Nation into the 28 November state election. Outside, riot police stood between two groups of Australians on the corner of Camberwell and Burwood roads. Most of the protesters left once it started raining, and a small group was still there at 7.30pm.
One Nation is a registered political party that already holds a seat in the Victorian upper house, and a mega poll has it capable of forming government here. Its leader still needed a police escort to walk into a pub function in Hawthorn.
The speech inside was about safety on the same suburban streets. Senator Hanson said she couldn't believe the graffiti she'd seen driving around Victoria or the number of shops that have closed, and she said police can't do their job any more and need the law changed so they can bring safety back. She pointed to gangs, machetes and sentences she called shocking, and said Victorians have a right to walk the streets at any hour without being robbed. She put that back on the people writing the legislation and on the way judges apply it.
Mark Nicholson called the protesters banshees and told the room his side is the civil one
Mr Nicholson opened the speeches inside the Tower Hotel by contrasting the room with the street.
"What a stark contrast this room is to the banshees outside. In this room is the beginning of something very special. We are the civil ones and we are going to bring this state back."
He told the crowd One Nation would rebuild the budget, make Victoria the toughest state on crime and restore trust in government. Senator Hanson told the same room that a treaty with Indigenous Australians would be the first thing she'd get rid of in government, and that she doesn't rate Mr Carroll.
One Nation says 40 Victorian police stations sit empty, and Warren Pickering wants them staffed
Mr Pickering hasn't released One Nation's crime policy yet and said the detail starts arriving in the next couple of weeks. The shape of it is already on the record, and it comes down to police numbers. Victoria has police stations that exist on paper but have nobody rostered into them, and he says a One Nation government would put officers back into all 40 of them.
"We (will) fill the 40 unmanned stations and will ensure we have a reserve force on hand for times of increased activity."
A reserve force means officers kept spare and ready to be sent wherever something big happens, which is what Monday night in Hawthorn was. Victoria Police had to send the riot squad and the mounted branch to a suburban pub so that one party could hold a dinner, and every officer standing on that corner was an officer who wasn't somewhere else in Melbourne.
The people Mr Pickering leads will be out campaigning in those suburbs until polling day. Seven of them are running for the Legislative Council, Victoria's upper house, the chamber that reviews and can block the laws a government tries to pass. Mr Pickering is running for Pakenham, a lower house seat in Melbourne's outer south east.
The upper house seven are the party's sitting MP Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell in Northern Victoria, former Liberal Colleen Harkin, Mr Nicholson, criminal lawyer Aaron Sanford, Geelong councillor and former police officer Chris Burson, office manager Natalie Adams, and human resources manager Fiona Lopez.
Every one of them is entitled to campaign in every suburb of Victoria between now and 28 November, on the same terms as Labor, the Liberals and the Greens. Doing that in Hawthorn took the riot squad, mounted police and a road closed to traffic.
James Ashby says Pauline Hanson's security is now heavier than Anthony Albanese's
James Ashby, One Nation's national director, told News24's Peta Credlin the security around his leader has reached a level that should worry everyone.
"We've been told that the security around Pauline Hanson is greater than that of our Prime Minister, which is a frightening thought that democracy has got to these levels."
He said protesters screamed at the people lining up outside the dinner.
"We have those protesters out the front of that dinner, who were screaming at attendees who were lining up to go, 'your kids want you dead'. That's the kind of people we are dealing with in Victoria."
Mr Ashby also said the morning press conference launching the party's upper house ticket had to be moved off the steps of Victorian Parliament because of safety risks. He called it the work of "the minority in Victoria who are ruling the roost and making it unsafe, not only for our politicians, but for everyday people out there", he told News24.
Warren Pickering, One Nation's new Victorian leader, held that press conference somewhere else instead. The ABC and The Guardian were locked out.
Senator Hanson made the same point to the room that night, and pointed her supporters at the outlet that was filming it.
"If you go home and turn on the ABC you won't see this on the ABC. If you want to get the real news, go to Rebel News."
Labor's 2015 repeal put demonstrators back outside the reach of move on powers
Three months into its first term, the Andrews government introduced the Summary Offences Amendment (Move-On Laws) Bill 2015 on 10 February that year, which stripped out the five extra grounds the previous Liberal government had given police to move protesters on. Attorney General Martin Pakula said at the time that "Victoria doesn't need Bjelke-Petersen-style laws designed to silence dissent and outlaw peaceful protests".
Police kept the power to order someone to leave a public place over a breach of the peace or a risk to safety, and the five extra grounds went. That wording decides how a night like Monday gets policed. Section 6 of the Summary Offences Act 1966, in the version now in force, says the move on power "does not apply in relation to a person who" is "demonstrating or protesting about a particular issue". The same subsection covers anyone "speaking, bearing or otherwise identifying with a banner, placard or sign".
A protester standing outside the Tower Hotel with a placard is therefore outside that power by the express words of the Act. Police can still hold a line and still act on any offence that's actually committed, which is most of what they did on Monday night.
Jacinta Allan's protest laws created an offence for places of worship and stopped there
Victoria isn't short of new protest law. The Justice Legislation Amendment (Police and Other Matters) Act 2025 passed on 4 December 2025, announced by Jacinta Allan, who quit last week and handed the premiership to Ben Carroll. Police can now order a protester to take a mask off where they reasonably believe an offence has been or is about to be committed. Refusing without a reasonable excuse carries a fine of 5 penalty units, which the government put at more than $1,000.
The 2025 Act also bans the glue, ropes, chains and locks protesters use to attach themselves to things, carrying up to 12 months in prison. It wrote two fresh offences into the Summary Offences Act for anyone who sets out to intimidate, menace or harass, or to hinder or obstruct, people arriving at, attending or leaving a religious service. Each carries 15 penalty units, three times that fine, or 3 months in prison, and the prosecution doesn't have to prove that anybody was actually intimidated or obstructed.
So Victoria now has two criminal offences covering people going into a synagogue or a church, and no equivalent protection for anyone going into a political meeting. There's also nothing in it that gets a candidate onto the steps of the Parliament they're asking voters to send them to.
Labor had reasons for stopping where it did. The Human Rights Law Centre called the package draconian and said it would chill free speech without keeping anyone safe. Amnesty International warned it would catch people who simply march past a place of worship.
January's One Nation film screening at Crown ended with a stink bomb and a police charge
This has happened at One Nation events in Melbourne before. When Mark Nicholson's animated film A Super Progressive Movie screened at Crown on 29 January, protesters blew whistles outside and cinema staff walked off the job. Victoria Police said the only charges they expected to lay were against a 32 year old man who allegedly set off a stink bomb inside the cinema. Nicholson is now One Nation's candidate for Northern Metropolitan.
In June, the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism and the Refugee Action Collective drew the NSW Police Riot Squad to a brain cancer fundraiser at The Star in Sydney. Senator Hanson and Gina Rinehart were on the guest list at that Charlie Teo Foundation ball.
Labor and the Greens launch their Victorian campaigns without a police escort at the door
The traffic runs one way. Labor and the Greens will both launch state campaigns in Melbourne between now and November, and One News could find no case of One Nation supporters gathering outside one of them, pushing through a police line to reach the people going in, or making a rival party shift a press conference off the steps of Parliament.
One Nation answers policies it doesn't like with press releases, Senate speeches and Mr Nicholson's cartoons. The party that spent Monday night behind a police barricade isn't the one turning up at other people's events.
