Three mastheads came after Warren Pickering within 48 hours of him being made One Nation's Victorian leader, and on the evidence they were right to be frightened of him. He was raised on a potato farm in Gippsland, served his apprenticeship as a bricklayer and was in the CFMEU in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He had his daughter at 21, joined the army at 29 as a combat engineer with multiple operational deployments behind him, and raised her on his own from the time she was about 14. On Monday he was announced as the party's candidate for Pakenham.
On Paul Murray Live after that launch he was asked what raising her alone had been like, and went where almost nobody in politics goes. "There certainly seems to be a lot of stigma against men trying to gain custody of their children as a sole parent," he said, before calling for a hard look at what he described as the blatant misuse of police and family law courts. A tradie, a veteran and a sole custody father who will talk about family law courts is exactly the candidate Labor and the Liberals least want winning a seat in November.
So The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald ran the same story on Tuesday evening, by the same reporter, timestamped to the same second. The ABC followed on Wednesday with a so-called “exclusive” of the same story.
Between them they reversed his words, cut the part where he said who he meant, asked two academics whether he really meant Jews, turned a reader's comment into his own position, ignored every checkable complaint in the post, and filed him under a topic page called Conspiracy theories. Pickering wrote about 15-minute cities on 26 September 2024 and the post is still sitting there, public, on his Facebook page, which nobody seems to have thought would be fact checked.
What he actually wrote on 26 September 2024
The post runs to roughly 400 words. It opens like this:
“It feels like it was only 5 short minutes ago we were all conspiracy theorists for suggesting this concept was being tested for viability. Now, all of a sudden, we're supposed to believe it's a mainstream idea of common knowledge amongst the wider community.”
That is the closest he comes in 400 words to putting “conspiracy theorist” anywhere near himself, and he is describing a label thrown at other people. None of the three outlets quoted it.
What follows is a list of complaints about Victorian government policy: the metro rail link, high rise near transport hubs built against the will of local councils, a tax on non-electric vehicles, gas banned in new buildings, 129,000 businesses he says closed, went into administration or moved interstate in 2023, and the government becoming Victoria's biggest employer. Every one of those is a real policy you can look up, and none of it made the coverage.
Near the end he writes this, in a single sentence:
“This is all part of a concerted effort from unelected globalist bureaucrats at the U.N and WEF who wish to dictate to us our social and economic policy.”
Here is what The Age printed:
“This is all part of a concerted effort from unelected globalists bureaucrats. Make no mistake Australia, we're in the fight of our lives.”
Those two sentences sit two paragraphs apart in the post, in the reverse order, with the cashless economy and the misinformation bill in between them. They were printed inside one set of quotation marks with nothing to tell a reader the order had been changed. The first one also stops dead at “bureaucrats”, 16 words short of where he finished, and what went missing is “at the U.N and WEF who wish to dictate to us our social and economic policy”.
Those are the words where he says exactly who he means. Naming them makes the claim checkable. Removing them makes it look like a conspiracy theory. The World Economic Forum says on its own website that it brings leaders from business and government together to shape progress, and it publishes on both 15-minute cities and digital identity.
With those two organisations gone from the quote, The Age was free to ask two academics whether globalists is a code word for Jews. Deakin University's Josh Roose said the term had historically been a euphemism for "Jewish" in conspiracy theory circles, then added it was "not being used overtly in this particular instance". Researcher Kaz Ross said it was "getting very, very close to" it. Both hedges ran in the copy, and neither made the headline. A globalist, in ordinary use, is anyone who backs international cooperation, open trade and global economic systems, which is exactly what the two organisations he named do.
Type “who is Warren Pickering” into Google and the ABC answers for him, wrongly
This is what makes it a hit piece rather than a story. Most people will never open the article. They type a name into Google, read whatever sits at the top, and form a view from that, which is where a piece like this does its damage. Type "who is Warren Pickering" into Google. First result, his own party page. Second, the ABC: One Nation's new Victorian leader promoted conspiracy. That is what a voter in Pakenham finds before reading a word he wrote.
Search the label and you'll find The Age, the ABC, a second Age piece and The Guardian fill the top stories. Below them, ABC Melbourne's Instagram at 2,100 likes and its Facebook at 980 reactions. Then the Sydney Morning Herald, not with a story but with a topic page headed Conspiracy theories, his name filed underneath.
Google ranks on authority and speed, so two of the country's biggest news domains running the same line a day apart will own a new name outright, and pushing it through their own accounts feeds the ranking again. Nobody has to prove he is a conspiracy theorist, they only have to publish it fast enough and in enough places that it becomes the answer to the question.
Victoria has had a 20-minute neighbourhood policy on the books since 2017
The ABC got this wrong, and not by a small margin. It told its readers the 15-minute city was a debunked conspiracy theory, and never mentioned that the Victorian government has had one on the books since 2017.
Planning Victoria says Plan Melbourne 2017 to 2050 "is guided by the principle of 20-minute neighbourhoods", built around "living locally" and meeting most daily needs within a 20-minute return walk from home. The Minister for Planning launched a pilot program in January 2018 to embed it across government, and there's a checklist tool so councils and developers can apply it properly.
It is not a theory and Pickering did not imagine anything. It's legitimate Victorian planning policy, published by the state, three years older than the pandemic. The ABC branded him a conspiracy theorist for writing about it, and never told its audience the policy exists.
The "great reset" phrase came from a reader's comment, not from Pickering
The Age's opening paragraph says Pickering endorsed the idea that the world economy was deliberately crashed to trigger a "great reset". He never used the phrase. Read further down their own article and you find where it came from: a follower wrote it in his comments. The Age took a reader's words and printed them as Pickering's position.
The ABC called it an exclusive the day after The Age published the same quote
The ABC's version, by chief digital political correspondent Clare Armstrong, went up on Wednesday 5 August under an Exclusive tag, describing the material as "the previously unreported comments". That would have been accurate the previous evening. The Age had already run the same "manageable 15 minute zones" quote, from the same post, on Tuesday 4 August.
One Nation locked these newsrooms out on Monday, and this is why they're banned
At Monday's candidate launch Pickering warned he would sue over what he called blatant character assassination attempts of candidates, and was written up as a man running from scrutiny. Within two days the three of them showed everyone what he meant. Quotation marks carry one promise, which is that the words between them are the words that were written, in the order they were written. On Tuesday 4 August, in a story about one man's credibility, that promise wasn't kept.
