That might work for them,

do you think? Well, you know, you talk about candidates embarrassing One Nation.

I think One Nation are unembarrassable and it's part of their brand to bring in people who are kind of misfits or, you know, certainly not professional politicians.

And it almost works in their favour, I think, to have candidates Partially because, you know, what the public will see is, well, here's another outsider, and if we're voting for One Nation, we like outsiders, we like unconventional people who are going to come in and shake things up, and this characterisation of Warren Pickering only adds to the picture of One Nation as being a kind of an insurgent force.

And I also think it works in their favour...

A little bit in that it diverts the electorate from what really matters about Warren Pickering.

You know, his belief in conspiracy theories, his losing his job with BHP over his vaccine, COVID vaccine scepticism, his belief that climate science is a hoax, his views on immigration.

Is this likely?

So where the hell did this idea for The First Friend come from? It's kind of quite amazing.

Look, to be honest, Greg, I don't know.

I think about 2020, I had written a novel called Bluebird, which I really felt I'd put everything I had and everything I knew about novel writing into that book.

And everything I'd done up to that point, um culminated in bluebird meaning uh writing domestic drama contemporary australian set in in you know a beachside suburb um you know a world that i was familiar with um bluebird really felt to me like an end point and once i'd written that i just didn't know where didn't know what would happen next didn't know Didn't know where to go.

Didn't know if I had another novel in me.

And then at some point during the COVID pandemic, I began to brood on, you know, brood on the world, the state of the world.

And I...

I'm just kind of, I was kind of wondering through it, you know, what actually kept them in this cauldron of friendship and