One Nation has appointed former senior NSW trade and investment commissioner Mike Newman as its New South Wales leader for the 2027 state election, putting an experienced finance and international business executive at the centre of the party’s attempt to break into the state’s lower house.
Newman, 54, will contest the Labor-held seat of Cessnock in the Hunter Valley, while coal miner and cattle farmer Stuart Bonds will lead One Nation’s Legislative Council ticket.
The NSW election will be held on Saturday, 13 March 2027, with all 93 Legislative Assembly seats and 21 of the 42 Legislative Council positions up for election.
Announcing Newman’s appointment on Friday, One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson said his experience in finance, trade and international investment would bring a stronger economic focus to the party’s NSW campaign.
“Mike is another great addition to the One Nation team,” Hanson said in the party’s announcement.
“He has more than three decades’ experience in financial services across a range of industries including the defence, automotive and aerospace sectors in Australia, Japan, Korea and the United Kingdom.”
Hanson also pointed to Newman’s previous role as NSW Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner for North Asia, covering Japan and South Korea.
Newman served in that position from 2021 until 2024 and was based in Tokyo. Before entering government trade promotion, he spent decades working in financial services and investment banking in Australia and Asia.
His career included senior roles at Macquarie Capital Securities Japan, HSBC Securities Japan and ABN AMRO, where his work covered sectors including automotive, aerospace and defence.
He is currently executive chairman and group chief executive of Ginga Vale Investments, an advisory business he founded after returning to Australia in 2015.
Newman’s appointment signals that One Nation intends to make economic management, business regulation and regional industry central themes of its NSW campaign.
“We’ll be focusing on the issues which matter in NSW like the cost of living, our housing crisis and the neglect of our regional communities and rural industries under Labor,” Newman said.
“We will also prioritise policy settings which create a much better environment for businesses so they can focus on what they do best: create jobs, grow the economy and increase prosperity in our state.”
“We need to make NSW competitive again.”
Within hours of his formal unveiling, Newman also outlined a broader economic and energy agenda that puts One Nation on a collision course with Premier Chris Minns’ Labor government.
Speaking in the Hunter, Newman said he wanted NSW to emulate places such as Texas and Florida, arguing that cheaper energy, lower taxes and less regulation could attract businesses and investment.
“We want to get cheap energy, just like Florida and Texas, back into New South Wales to help make businesses more competitive,” he said.
One Nation is proposing to eliminate payroll tax for businesses operating in regional NSW and halve it for metropolitan businesses.
Newman said payroll tax could discourage employers from taking on additional staff.
“The message we hear out in the market is always the same thing: ‘We’d like to hire more people, but we’re sort of playing off against how much payroll tax we may or may not have to pay,’” he said.
Energy is also shaping up as a major point of difference.
Newman has criticised the planned closure of the Eraring coal-fired power station, describing it as “economic suicide”, and wants coal and nuclear energy to remain part of the state’s electricity mix.
He has also said he would be prepared to consider both a nuclear power station and nuclear waste facility in the Hunter, subject to community consultation.
One Nation also wants to abandon NSW renewable energy zones.
Federal New England MP Barnaby Joyce, who has aligned himself with One Nation, used even stronger language at Friday’s announcement, saying the party wanted renewable energy zones “dead and buried”.
Any nuclear proposal would face substantial legal and political hurdles. Nuclear power generation is currently prohibited under Commonwealth legislation, meaning a NSW government could not simply begin building reactors without changes at the federal level.
Newman’s candidacy in Cessnock is nevertheless politically notable because One Nation has already demonstrated a substantial voter base there.
At the 2023 NSW election, Labor MP Clayton Barr won 48.73 per cent of first preferences.
One Nation candidate Quintin King finished second on 15.27 per cent, ahead of the Nationals on 11.13 per cent. After preferences, Labor defeated One Nation 73.4 to 26.6 per cent.
The seat therefore remains strongly Labor on its most recent election result.
Cessnock has also been held almost continuously by Labor since 1927, with the exception of a single Liberal term following the 1988 election.
But One Nation believes the political environment in regional NSW has changed markedly since 2023.
Recent polling has shown the party attracting levels of support far above its result at the last state election, particularly outside Sydney.
One recent statewide poll reported One Nation at about 25 per cent, compared with Labor on 29 per cent and the Coalition on 23 per cent, while other polling has indicated particularly strong One Nation support in regional NSW. Polling this far from election day remains volatile and does not necessarily translate directly into seats.
One Nation currently faces another challenge: it has no sitting MPs representing the party in the NSW Parliament, despite winning upper house representation at earlier elections.
Mark Latham and Rod Roberts entered the Legislative Council for One Nation after the 2019 election. Latham was re-elected in 2023, while former Labor MP Tania Mihailuk later entered the chamber to fill the vacancy created when Latham resigned his earlier term to contest a fresh eight-year term.
All three subsequently left One Nation.
That makes Newman’s campaign more than a conventional leadership contest.
If he wins Cessnock, he would become One Nation’s first lower-house MP in NSW under its current push and give the party a parliamentary leader in the chamber where governments are formed.
Newman was questioned on Friday about his connection with Cessnock after spending a substantial part of his professional life overseas.
He lived and worked in Japan for more than two decades and speaks Japanese, building much of his career around Australian-Japanese business relations.
Asked whether he would live in the electorate while campaigning, Newman said his role extended beyond one seat.
“I’m not working just for the seat of Cessnock,” he said.
“I’m working for the whole of NSW and rest assured we are going to bring prosperity to these regions by rational sensible economics.”
Pressed further, he said he was “living in the region” and meeting local residents.
Hanson has defended Newman’s international background, arguing it gives him economic and trade experience valuable to NSW.
Newman’s time as trade commissioner also gives him unusual credentials for a One Nation candidate.
NSW parliamentary records show he was selected in 2021 for the government’s senior trade commissioner position covering North-East Asia and Japan following a recruitment process involving senior NSW officials.
During his tenure, Newman worked on investment and trade links involving Japan and South Korea, including hydrogen, advanced manufacturing, energy and regional NSW industry.
In a public account of his time in the role, he cited work involving hydrogen partnerships with Tokyo and Fukuoka authorities, energy projects connected to the Port of Newcastle and efforts to strengthen commercial relationships between NSW and major North Asian investors.
Labor has already begun attacking his candidacy.
Regional Transport Minister and Maitland MP Jenny Aitchison accused Newman and One Nation of inconsistency over local manufacturing, particularly the Minns government’s multibillion-dollar plan to return train manufacturing to the Hunter.
“One Nation’s new leader wants to represent the Hunter, but Mr Newman and his party don’t seem to think there is a future for train manufacturing in the Hunter,” Aitchison said.
“They talk a big game about Australian jobs, but when we make the decision to bring jobs home, they want to send them back overseas.”
Newman rejected that characterisation.
He said his alternative would involve bringing foreign financing into the Hunter while ensuring the actual manufacturing took place locally.
“We could partner with the Korean government, as an example, and they could help fund the infrastructure, where they could provide extremely low-interest loans,” Newman said.
“But the manufacturing, 100 per cent of it would occur in the Hunter.”
Alongside Newman, Hanson has turned to Stuart Bonds to spearhead One Nation’s campaign for the Legislative Council.
Bonds, 40, is a coal industry worker and cattle farmer based in the Hunter.
“Our primary industries like mining and agriculture are under ever increasing pressure,” Bonds said in the party announcement.
“One Nation backs our miners and our farmers. We back our regional communities.”
“We’ll be campaigning hard on policies [that] support these industries and the communities which rely on them.”
Bonds has previously demonstrated substantial electoral support in the Hunter.
At the 2019 federal election, he contested the federal seat of Hunter for One Nation and received 22,029 first-preference votes, or 21.6 per cent, finishing narrowly behind the Nationals on 23.5 per cent.
Labor’s then MP Joel Fitzgibbon saw his primary vote fall by more than 14 percentage points in that election, although he ultimately retained the seat after preferences.
Bonds later split with One Nation over industrial relations policy and ran as an independent in 2022 before returning to the party for the 2025 federal election.
Hanson said the combination of Newman’s finance and international investment background with Bonds’ links to mining and agriculture would give the party a strong regional leadership team.
“Together, they will be a formidable team to lead our party at the NSW election,” she said.
The strategy makes the Hunter one of the clearest early battlegrounds of One Nation’s state campaign.
The region combines coal mining, agriculture, manufacturing and rapidly growing communities facing housing and cost-of-living pressures — issues that both Labor and One Nation are attempting to claim as their own.
For Premier Chris Minns, the challenge is substantially different from the one Labor faced at the 2023 election.
One Nation was then a secondary force in most NSW electorates and had no realistic prospect of forming government.
The party’s recent polling surge means it will now face much greater scrutiny over its candidates, economic policies and the practicality of its proposals, while Labor and the Coalition will have to decide how aggressively to respond to a party competing for many of the same working-class and regional voters.
For Newman, however, the first test is much more straightforward.
Before he can lead One Nation on the floor of the NSW Parliament, he must persuade voters in one of Labor’s longest-held seats to deliver a political upset.
The result in Cessnock on March 13 will provide an early measure of whether One Nation’s growing support in opinion polls can be converted into something the party has so far struggled to achieve in New South Wales — lower-house seats.
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