Hunter political identity Stuart Bonds has confirmed he is being lined up to help lead One Nation's campaign into the next NSW state election.
Mr Bonds said One Nation was "definitely in the driver's seat at the moment", and that policy announcements would begin rolling out as soon as next week.
However, there is a long road ahead for the party with no candidates or policy yet presented to NSW voters.
The confirmation follows comments by One Nation's federal chief of staff, James Ashby, on 2GB, in which he named Mr Bonds as the likely leader of its state campaign.
Mr Bonds, the party's three-time candidate for the federal seat of Hunter, said that with no other candidates yet locked in, "it's time to start getting things in order" ahead of the poll.
He said One Nation was in a "policy development phase", with vetting under way across the state as members applied to run in seats. But he said the party was being deliberately cautious about the timing of its rollout, as it was wary of the state election clashing with a tight contest in Victoria and of rivals lifting its ideas before it announced them.
"We don't want to give the opportunity for the other parties to take our policies, as they've done so many times with Pauline," he said.
One Nation would let voters "see our policy suite and have a look at our candidates" according to its own timeline.
Mr Bonds pointed to energy as an issue that the major parties had got badly wrong at state level. He said promises of cheaper power and a manufacturing boom under the renewable energy transition had not materialised, while industrial users faced rising costs.
"Every major industrial base in the country, every smelter, is on life support - it's on a government bailout at the moment," he said.
He also criticised the approval process for renewable energy zones, saying it was "tearing people's communities apart".
Health, education and easing the tax burden on business, were the party's other priority areas, he said.
One Nation would look at reducing payroll tax while working with the federal government on funding, and it wanted to cut red tape for nurses and teachers.
"Every nurse that you talk to says the amount of administration that they need to do now is just [bogging] them down," he said.
"They're not hands on the job... there is opportunities there where we can make some life easier for our nurses and teachers."
Mr Bonds said the party also intended to run candidates in Sydney's growing outer suburbs, not just its regional strongholds, citing congestion and rapid housing growth in areas including western Sydney and Lake Macquarie.
He would not be drawn on whether he saw himself as a future premier, saying he hadn't decided whether he would run for the upper or lower house. He emphasised that leadership would be a team effort.
"I'm definitely not putting myself into the premier shoes at this stage," he said.
Mr Bonds singled out the Hunter as a key battleground, given Labor's hold on seats in Newcastle, Maitland, Cessnock and Lake Macquarie, and said increased major-party attention on the region, including repeated recent visits by Premier Chris Minns, showed One Nation was already having an impact.
"Chris Minns ... has been up here over and over again lately," he said.
"That can only be a good thing, because the people of the Hunter ... punch well above their weight for what we contribute to the state, and we've been neglected, taken for granted, for a long time."
His comments echoed those made separately by Mr Ashby on 2GB, who said Labor was privately worried about losing seats such as Cessnock, and claimed internal polling showed One Nation with 50 per cent of the primary vote there despite not having preselected a candidate.
Mr Ashby said the party's slower approach to preselections reflected past problems with MPs quitting after being elected, and confirmed Mr Bonds as the frontrunner to lead the state ticket, "a strong character within the party for a very long time" who he considered "very capable and credible".
Any formal confirmation of Mr Bonds in a leadership role would put a candidate with a long history of controversy at the head of One Nation's state campaign.
During his first run for the federal seat of Hunter in 2019, old social media videos surfaced in which Mr Bonds made derogatory remarks about gay people and women, and questioned the official accounts of the Port Arthur massacre and the September 11 attacks.
He later described the comments as jokes taken out of context, and denied holding homophobic, misogynistic or conspiratorial views.
In February this year, Mr Bonds drew condemnation from state and federal Labor figures after posting on social media that two men filmed at the Bengalla coal mine near Muswellbrook had been looking for explosives - a claim NSW Police publicly rejected, saying the pair had visited hoping to see former colleagues.
The post prompted calls from within the Hunter community for Mr Bonds to stand down as a candidate, and a pointed rebuke from Assistant Multicultural Affairs Minister Julian Hill, who called on Ms Hanson to remove him from the party.
Mr Bonds has also previously fallen out publicly with One Nation leadership, quitting the party in 2021 over its handling of casual miners' compensation rights, running as an independent in 2022, and briefly holding talks with the Nationals before returning to One Nation ahead of last year's federal election.
Asked whether he was ready for the heightened scrutiny that would come with a more prominent leadership role, Mr Bonds said he believed the party's policies would hold up.
"Our policies are going to be able to be read and understood by your average punter," he said, contrasting this with what he described as overly complex legislation such as the state's biodiversity laws.
"We are being governed to death... the more bureaucrats, the more forms, and it's more paperwork and it's more legislation, it's more licensing fees."
