Mark Nicholson, the Melbourne animator who runs the studio behind Pauline Hanson's Please Explain cartoons, has named the two experiences that took him from criminal law to a One Nation ticket: Victoria's courtrooms, and trying to hire staff.
Nicholson was announced on Monday as One Nation's lead upper house candidate for Northern Metropolitan, one of eight candidates Senator Hanson unveiled in Melbourne for the 28 November state election. He spoke that night to News24 host Andrew Bolt.
Nicholson says he stood in Victorian courtrooms watching criminals treated as patients
Before animation paid the bills, Nicholson practised criminal law. He told News24 that what he saw from the bar table is what first put him on the path to One Nation.
"As a criminal lawyer I stood in courtrooms where I saw criminals not treated as criminals," he said. "They were treated as patients, and they were patted on the head and told that they were sick."
The second experience came when he started employing people. Nicholson said government regulation made it harder to take staff on and grow the business, and that he'd felt the weight of it himself.
"I've experienced what it's like to have government pushing down on you, stopping you from employing people and growing," he said.
He said he eventually found his political home with One Nation because the party and its leader held the same values he did.
"Every decision she makes is in the best interests of Australia," he said of Senator Hanson.
Nicholson hasn't held public office before. He told Bolt that representative democracy depends on ordinary people putting their hands up for their own communities. That's close to the argument Senator Hanson made on Monday, when she said the eight names came out of about 1,200 expressions of interest.
The founders who built Stepmates from a shed to a series on 7mate
Nicholson runs Stepmates Studios in Fitzroy with Sebastian Peart, and the studio's own account of how it started isn't the usual production company story. The pair pooled their savings for a first camera, lost it off the back of a speeding car, and went all in on animation instead. They were self taught and self funded, animating before dawn each day before clocking on at other jobs.
The break came from Seven. Their series Regular Old Bogan went to air on 7mate in late 2020, with Nicholson producing and voicing characters. It taught them how to hit a broadcast deadline with no money and no margin, which turned out to be the skill the next job required.
Please Explain was a six episode job for One Nation, and it hasn't stopped since
Pauline Hanson's Please Explain launched in November 2021 with Senator Hanson voicing herself as a schoolteacher marking the rest of federal parliament. The studio says it was hired for six episodes and has now run past 100, delivered fortnightly on six day sprints and rebroadcast on News24.
The cartoons do real work for the party. They put One Nation's argument in front of millions of viewers on its own channels, with no newsroom deciding which few seconds of it the public gets to hear. It's the same instinct behind Senator Hanson barring the ABC and The Guardian from Monday's press conference and letting Rebel News stream the whole thing instead.
The most recent target is a name One News readers know. In Don't Be Hastie, posted on 24 July and watched more than 120,000 times, Anthony Albanese convinces Liberal deputy leader Andrew Hastie that One Nation is behind the abuse in his comments section. Hastie declares war, takes the Liberal leadership, and puts Angus Taylor in a coma. The real Hastie told his party room in June he'd rather be taken out in a box than bend the knee to One Nation, and the prime minister backed him in question time days later.
Video: Pauline Hanson's Please Explain. Don't Be Hastie, the 24 July episode made by Mark Nicholson's studio.
The series has also drawn the scrutiny that comes with an audience. When it was reported in June that the animation work was being sent offshore, One News found no public record supporting it, and the work is run out of a Fitzroy office by two Australians.
Canberra pulled the film Nicholson wrote, then a stink bomb went off at its Crown premiere
Stepmates turned the series into a feature. A Super Progressive Movie runs 86 minutes, was written by Nicholson with Peart, directed by Peart and produced with One Nation's James Ashby, who has since become the party's national director. It follows four progressives dragged out of their inner city bubble into an Australia where Pauline Hanson is prime minister.
A launch event at Australian Parliament House in Canberra in November 2025, built around the trailer, unreleased footage and a question and answer session with the team, was cancelled by the Department of Parliamentary Services. The department pointed to an events policy requiring that content not be "likely to cause offence to any part of the Australian community". The film came out on Australia Day this year regardless, and the premiere at Crown drew a protest that ended with a stink bomb let off inside the cinema.
Video: News24. Mark Nicholson unveils A Super Progressive Movie after Parliament House pulled the launch.
Nine months later, the man who wrote the film that couldn't get a room in Canberra is asking Victorians to send him into their parliament.
Northern Metropolitan gave One Nation 0.94% in 2022, and Mark Nicholson lives in it
Victoria's upper house has 40 members, five for each of eight regions, and a candidate needs roughly one sixth of the vote after preferences to take a seat. In 2022 that worked out at 75,406 votes in Northern Metropolitan, or 16.7%.
The region covers 11 lower house districts: Brunswick, Northcote, Preston, Richmond, Melbourne, Pascoe Vale, Essendon, Broadmeadows, Greenvale, Kalkallo and Thomastown. It's Labor and Greens country. Labor took 33.06% of the region in 2022 and the Greens 18.42%. Richmond, the district that takes in Nicholson's Fitzroy studio, went to the Greens' Gabrielle de Vietri, who won it off Labor.
One Nation's vote in the same region was 4,251 first preferences, or 0.94%. That's the number Nicholson starts from.
Two things have changed since. RedBridge polling for Victorian Trades Hall in July put One Nation first in Victoria on 27% of the primary vote, ahead of a Coalition and Labor tie on 26%. And Labor is legislating to scrap group voting tickets before November, which ends the backroom preference deals that used to elect micro parties off tiny primaries and hands the advantage to whoever actually gets the votes.
A statewide 27% clears a quota in every region with room to spare. Whether it reaches into Brunswick and Northcote is the question Nicholson's campaign has to answer. His pitch on the party's candidate page is community safety, government waste and debt, small business and honest government.
Pauline Hanson's launch was moved off the Spring Street steps, and Nicholson says they'll be back
One Nation had planned to open the Victorian campaign outside state parliament on Spring Street on Monday morning. Nicholson said the party was forced to move it over security concerns, and the event went ahead at a Melbourne hotel instead, with Senator Hanson naming the ticket there.
He told Bolt the party would be back.
"Mark my words, we'll be back on the steps of Parliament on the 28th of November," he said. "We'll be on those steps, but we'll be going inside."
Victorians vote on 28 November. One Nation is contesting up to 76 of 88 lower house seats, and in the region covering Melbourne's inner north, the name at the top of its upper house ticket belongs to the man who has been drawing its politics since 2021.
