Victorian Premier Ben Carroll has intensified his claim that Opposition Leader Jess Wilson is “rolling out the red carpet” for One Nation, accusing the Liberal leader of leaving the door open to Pauline Hanson’s party as Victoria heads towards an increasingly unpredictable November election.
There is just one problem with the Premier’s attack.
Four nights earlier, Wilson stood in front of Carroll, around 1,200 members of Victoria’s Indian community and political leaders from across the spectrum at the Premier’s annual Diwali State Reception and publicly declared that there was only one coalition she was taking to the election — the Liberal and National Coalition.
Carroll was sitting at table one, barely three metres away.
Wilson could hardly have delivered the message more directly.
“Before I finish, I want to leave you with one final thing,” Wilson told the gathering.
“People will stand before you tonight and every day between now and November with a baseless scare campaign about the Coalition government.
“But I want you to hear the truth directly from me. There is only one coalition running for government at this election, and it is a Liberal and National Coalition.
“And our coalition is with you, for you and for all Victorians.”
It was an unusually pointed political intervention for a Diwali reception, but its target was obvious.
Wilson was responding directly to Labor’s increasingly aggressive attempt to tie the Liberals and Nationals to One Nation.
Yet on Thursday, Carroll was back before the cameras advancing essentially the same argument Wilson had rejected in his presence days earlier.
The exchange came as pre-election policy announcements accelerated across Melbourne.
Carroll announced that a re-elected Labor government would spend $167 million on 150 new fire trucks by 2030 — 100 tankers for the CFA and 50 vehicles for Fire Rescue Victoria. The announcement followed sustained criticism from firefighters over ageing vehicles and shortages.
The firefighters’ union welcomed the commitment but said more needed to be done. Only days earlier, it had publicly called on Carroll to act, saying there were “not enough trucks” and warning that another hot and dry fire season was approaching.
The Coalition, meanwhile, was promoting new cancer-care commitments, including $10.4 million towards establishing proton beam therapy at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and $95 million for the next stage of an integrated cancer centre at Goulburn Valley Health. Herald Sun
It should have been a day dominated by competing health and emergency-services policies.
Instead, One Nation again became part of Labor’s attack on Wilson.
Carroll’s argument is not new.
During an ABC interview in Melbourne’s west last month, he said he would “fight every day against the Liberal Party and One Nation coming together”, adding: “That is what will happen in November if Labor is not successful.”
Asked in the same report whether she would rely on One Nation to form government, Wilson said the Coalition was running to win majority government.
When pressed on whether she would work with One Nation if she fell short, she declined to engage with what she called a hypothetical.
“I am running to win majority government at this election,” Wilson said.
That distinction is important.
Wilson has now explicitly said there is only one coalition running for government — Liberal and Nationals.
But she has not provided the kind of categorical post-election undertaking Carroll has given regarding the Greens.
Carroll has said he would rather “throw the keys back” than govern through an agreement with the Greens if Labor failed to secure a majority. Wilson, by contrast, has rejected the proposition of a formal Liberal–One Nation coalition but has stopped short of ruling out every conceivable confidence-and-supply arrangement in a hung parliament.
That leaves Labor with political room to ask questions.
It does not, however, establish that a Liberal–One Nation coalition exists.
No such coalition has been announced.
There is no publicly disclosed agreement between Wilson and Victorian One Nation leader Warren Pickering.
Wilson told ABC’s 7.30 last month that she had not spoken to Pickering and said she was focused on securing majority government.
That makes the language being employed by Labor increasingly important.
There is a substantial difference between saying Wilson has not ruled out accepting support from One Nation in a hypothetical hung parliament and suggesting she is actively “rolling out the red carpet” for the party.
The first is supported by her refusal to eliminate every possible post-election scenario.
The second implies a degree of active courtship or cooperation for which no public evidence has yet been produced.
And that is where Carroll risks turning a legitimate political question into a scare campaign.
The Premier has good reason to make One Nation part of the election conversation.
The party is no longer a marginal presence in Victorian polling.
The Australia Today’s own Multicultural Voter Survey paints an even more striking picture among culturally diverse Victorians. The survey of 1,268 multicultural community members, conducted between 5 and 28 September 2026, put the Liberal-National Coalition on 31 per cent of the primary vote, with Labor and One Nation tied on 26 per cent each. The Greens were on 9 per cent and Independents on 8 per cent.
The result suggests One Nation is not merely drawing support from traditional conservative voters, but is polling at the same level as Labor within this surveyed multicultural sample.
Other recent polling has similarly placed One Nation above 20 per cent, transforming what was once a two-party contest into a much more complicated electoral landscape.
Carroll is also particularly focused on the potential impact of One Nation in multicultural electorates.
Speaking to The Australia Today after the Diwali reception, the Premier said Victoria could not allow One Nation to gain a foothold in multicultural communities and raised concerns about the party’s positions on multiculturalism.
That is a legitimate political case for Labor to make.
One Nation should be scrutinised on its policies, its candidates and its statements, just as Labor, the Coalition and the Greens should be.
But that is different from asking multicultural voters to believe that voting Liberal automatically means voting for a Liberal–One Nation government.
At the very event where Carroll was speaking about the importance of multicultural Victoria, Wilson looked at an audience of about 1,200 people and rejected precisely that proposition.
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