Barnaby Joyce has warned that anti-Islamic statements could harm Australian trade deals and declared that he would give instructions not to preference Pauline Hanson’s party before the Liberal party in federal seats.
In an interview to mark his first year as National party leader, Joyce said that, as agriculture minister, he had to deal with a lot of Islamic countries that buy billions of dollars’ worth of Australian exports.
“So just be a little bit cautious about what you say at times because I have to go to Indonesia, I have to go to Saudi Arabia, they are the biggest buyers of our wheat, they are the biggest buyers of our cattle,” Joyce told Guardian Australia.
Asked whether One Nation was causing the government a problem in trade, Joyce said: “If you were articulating some of those views while you were trying to move product to them, yeah, they would probably bring it up with you.
“The thing is I can go to Saudi and never once has someone said to me, ‘Barnaby, you’ve got to become a Muslim,’ and I have never said you have got to become a Christian, but you do understand – don’t insult a person while you’re sitting down to dinner with them.”
Joyce has been vocal in his criticism of the Liberal party deal to give One Nation preferences in the Western Australia upper house in return for One Nation preferences flowing back to the Liberals in some lower house seats in the coming state election.
Following the Liberal deal, the WA National party retaliated by giving preferences to the Greens before the Liberals in some seats. Joyce said the WA preference deal – which only affects votes if voters follow the party’s how to vote cards – had angered Liberal voters as well as Nationals.
“I know so many Liberal party supporters and they are equally furious about this,” Joyce said. “They say mate, we might have our differences but we clearly understand if it wasn’t the Liberal party we were voting for, I can tell you who we would be going to on the ballot paper.”
While Joyce has previously said he would not put One Nation last at the next federal election, he committed not to preference One Nation before the Liberals in his own seat and said he would give instructions for that not to happen in other National seats.
“I am not going to do that,” Joyce said. “And my instructions are for it not to happen. Now where it goes from there, I don’t know.”
Joyce said he had not received any corresponding commitment from Malcolm Turnbull that the Liberals would not preference One Nation before the Nationals in federal seats.
In determining preference flows, Joyce said parties needed to work out who was the worst and then “work your way through less and less crazy”.
“People say you should put Labor last and I say no, no, I don’t think they are the worst people to run the country,” he said. “I think they are very very bad but I don’t think they are the worst. Go and have a yarn to some of these other lunatics especially on the Senate ticket and you will find crazier people.”
In spite of trenchant criticism for his decision to move the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority to his own electorate, Joyce and his deputy, Fiona Nash, will press ahead with a broader decentralisation agenda in 2017. Last week the Nationals established a Senate inquiry to examine the issue of decentralisation, calling for every town in Australia to make a bid for government agencies.
He said the Senate inquiry was the first part of a plan to spread the “largesse” of government across the nation and provide well-paid jobs with affordable housing in regional areas.
Joyce said there had been a huge amount of government investment provided to cities such as Sydney but, if the same money was invested in Dalby, the house prices in Dalby would be “through the roof”.
“We’ve got to have a belief that the largesse of government has a right to be spread more evenly across the nation,” Joyce said. “When you work in the public service, you work for the taxpayer. In regional cities, I am not asking them to move to Goodooga, there’s an opportunity to [pay off a house].”
He used the example of Canberra, a planned city which started “as a few huts on the edge of the Molonglo River” that currently had less that 40% of its economic activity connected with the public sector.
“Now we have got 380,000 people here and now apparently the place is so established that people don’t want to leave here,” he said. “Back in 1945, they didn’t want to move here. It is government policy that created Canberra and God bless it.
“You have got to show the money going to regional areas and we represent regional areas and we are going to try and see what we can do to decentralise.”
