Australian Parliament resumes in just over a week and there has been much speculation as to how - or if - Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull intends to reverse his government's fortunes and set a clear, achievable, broadly-acceptable political agenda for 2017.
Less attention has be paid to the junior partners of the Turnbull Coalition government and how their leader plans to address his own party's woes. Fortunately this week has shown that Barnaby Joyce has a clear vision for the National Party in 2017: to embark on an agenda of focussed, high-level victim blaming.
Barnaby started as he clearly meant to go on with his comments on Radio National on Wednesday about how those people moaning about how Sydney was too gosh-darn expensive should just "accept that" and move to the country.
"What people have got to realise is that houses are much cheaper in Tamworth, houses are much cheaper in Armidale, houses are much cheaper in Toowoomba," he helpfully explained in the face of a worrying international study on Australian housing affordability. "I did move out west so I can say this, if you've got the gumption in you and you decide to move to Charleville - you're going to have a very affordable house."
Of course, Barnaby enjoys a very lucrative public sector job with amazing benefits, including largely unscrutinised expenses and a lifetime pension, where he also gets all his commuting expenses paid for by the public - a happy situation which most residents of Tamworth don't share.
It's also worth remembering that ol' Barn is a member of the same government who have been outspoken about how people living outside our nation's metropoli is a "lifestyle choice" - especially for those in remote Aboriginal communities - and that people should stop moaning about how there are no jobs in their region and be prepared to up stumps to the big smoke instead if that's what they have to do. As former Prime Minister Tony Abbott said of Tasmania's unemployed back in 2014, "If people have to move [to the mainland] to get a job, that's not the worst outcome in the world… For hundreds and hundreds of years people have been moving in order to better their lives."
In other words: Can't get a house in Sydney or Melbourne? Move to the country, you house snob! No jobs in the country? Move to Sydney or Melbourne, you job snob! What could be easier?
Joyce's downward-punching theme continued with a spray on 2GB on Wednesday at his old enemy Political Correctness Gone Mad, in which he castigated the selfish people that feel that having our national day commemorate the point when the original inhabitants were dispossessed (and, you know, deliberately and systematically murdered) is an ongoing and divisive insult unbecoming of a modern, inclusive nation.
"They don't like Christmas, they don't like Australia Day, they're just miserable gutted people," Barn inaccurately seethed, "and I wish they would crawl under a rock and hide for a little bit… This is Australia Day and if you don't like it, I don't know mate, go to work, do something else." Something else other than protest, presumably.
And look, it makes good political sense for Joyce to whine about how all these selfish victims of wealth inequality and cultural genocide are failing to accept their victimhood with appropriate deference.
After all, the National Party are under serious threat from One Nation, most obviously in Queensland, where they have taken the Nationals' crown as Australia's most comically reactionary party. So now Barn and Co need to hastily polish up their credentials as the true standard bearers for a very particular and largely imaginary version of Australia's glorious past.
And it's a direct threat to the Coalition generally and the Nationals specifically, because One Nation's support isn't exactly coming from the progressive side of politics. Their base, like a hefty slab of their candidates, are disgruntled former Liberal National Party supporters.
It's a volatile situation too. All it would take would be for a single LNP MP - George Christensen being the obvious candidate - to decide to switch allegiance to One Nation and oh, the chaos that would ensue for our single-seat-majority government!
And don't for a minute thing that the Liberals aren't acutely aware that the Nationals are looking more like a liability than an asset right now.
Recall the incautious words of our Attorney General George Brandis last November, when an unexpectedly active microphone recorded him neatly setting out the growing schism between the Liberals and the Nationals in Queensland (where they have been one merged party since 2008). There he described the state party as: "not very good… I'd say that the state [LNP] opposition is very very mediocre." before suggesting that the Liberals might well examine how to break up with the Nationals altogether.
So you should expect Barn to keep up his program of angry bloviation and injured outrage for the foreseeable future.
After all, the way things are going, it's pretty much the only card the Nationals still hold.
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