“We want the REZs dead and buried in the swamps with the mammoths.” That was Barnaby Joyce, the federal MP for New England, at a Friday press conference on 28 August 2026 where Pauline Hanson introduced Mike Newman as One Nation’s leader in New South Wales.
Newman, an investment banker and the son of former ABC chair Maurice Newman, will run in the Hunter Valley seat of Cessnock at the March 2027 state election, the Guardian reported. He spent three years as Investment NSW’s senior trade and investment commissioner in Tokyo, and since 2024 has been North Asia chief representative for HunterNet Co-op. Hanson said he has “always kept his eye on politics here in Australia” despite 25 years living in Japan, and told Premier Chris Minns he now had “a fight on his hands”.
Texas, Florida and cheap power
The pitch, as ABC Newcastle described it, is to remake NSW along the lines of Texas and Florida: fewer business regulations and more money for coal and nuclear. Newman pointed to California. “In California, which runs a very heavy net zero, very left-wing kind of style of government, since COVID they’ve lost 1.2 million people who’ve fled to other states,” he said, adding that many of them ended up in Texas for cheap energy and low taxes.
He called the plan to close the Eraring coal-fired power station “economic suicide”. He said he would be happy to host a nuclear power plant and a nuclear waste dump in the Hunter, subject to public consultation, and said he had worked closely with the entire nuclear supply chain. On Labor’s criticism he said the government ran “the three-eyed fish narrative”.
On tax, the party promises to scrap payroll tax for regional businesses and halve it for those in metropolitan areas. Newman said employers keep telling him the same thing: they would hire more people, but they are weighing it against how much payroll tax they might owe. The platform also freezes the number of public servants and brings private sector style key performance indicators into senior public service roles. “If you say you’re going to build 20,000 homes, if you don’t build 20,000 homes, you don’t get paid,” he said.
Joyce said the party would also dump the state’s renewable energy zones. He took aim at the federal and state deal to save the Tomago aluminium smelter, a $2.5bn package that included 3GW of new renewable energy.
Trains, and the Cessnock problem
Newman has already drawn fire from the state government. It wants to spend $12 billion reviving train manufacturing in the Hunter, which it says would create 550 ongoing jobs. Regional Transport Minister Jenny Aitchison said Newman and his party “don’t seem to think there is a future for train manufacturing in the Hunter”.
Newman’s answer is that the trains could be built there for $3 billion with foreign investment. “We could partner with the Korean government, as an example,” he said, with low-interest loans funding the infrastructure, while “100 per cent of it would occur in the Hunter”.
First he has to win Cessnock, which Labor has held almost without a break since 1927. The Liberals took it for a single term in 1988. Labor’s majority is now more than 23 per cent, up from 19.7 per cent in 2019. Sitting member Clayton Barr won the 2023 two-party preferred contest against One Nation by 23.4%, after the Nationals disendorsed their candidate.
Pressed on whether he lives in the electorate, Newman said he was “living in the region”. Asked which seats One Nation is targeting, he answered “every single one”. A Sydney Morning Herald Resolve poll in July had the party at 25% in NSW, ahead of the Coalition on 23% and behind Labor on 29%.
Sources
- One Nation’s new NSW leader Mike Newman is an investment banker who wants to ‘get rid of wokery’ | One Nation | The Guardian
- One Nation's nuclear plans for NSW to become more like Texas and Florida – ABC News
