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- Barnaby Joyce
Hard to see Barnaby and Tony sitting quietly on the back bench
Of course there is a chance that when Barnaby Joyce is replaced as the Nationals leader and deputy prime minister on Monday he will return to the backbench to quietly serve the people of his seat and the interests of his party.
This is what one would once have expected of a party leader, but it is not what people are expecting of Joyce. Loosed of the (slack) bonds of cabinet solidarity, we can now expect Joyce to join Tony Abbott on the backbench and focus on two of his key concerns - Malcolm Turnbull, and the causes that Malcolm Turnbull stands for.
When he first left Queensland for a lower house seat in New England, Joyce quoted Cicero in his inaugural speech. “Of all the occupations by which gain is secured,” he declared, “none is better than agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more becoming to a free man.”
This notion that his constituency has an unfettered moral right to the endless exploitation of Australian resources has long been a key theme of Joyce’s.
He put it in more familiar terms before an errant hot mike during a political meeting in a pub last year.
“"We have taken water, put it back into agriculture, so we could look after you and make sure we don't have the greenies running the show basically sending you out the back door, and that was a hard ask," he said in the recording.
"A couple of nights ago on Four Corners, you know what that's all about? It's about them trying to take more water off you, trying to create a calamity. A calamity for which the solution is to take more water off you, shut more of your towns down."
“They” in this rhetoric, are the enemy, the urban elites who would clamp down on water theft and illegal land-clearing, those who would regulate live animal export and mining, who would seek to prevent catastrophic climate change. “They” have always been represented by men like Malcolm Turnbull.
It should not be forgotten that the key reason Joyce’s new backbench buddy, Tony Abbott, ever came to power was because Joyce led an insurrection against the functioning carbon trading scheme that Turnbull endorsed.
When Abbott was finally felled and Joyce elevated to Deputy Prime Minister he could no longer train his rhetorical guns directly on the PM or his policies, so instead he signalled tough-guy credentials to his constituency by casting himself as a sort of Trump-lite teller of tough truths.
This is what he was doing when he baffled a national TV audience who tuned in to watch his resignation on Friday by talking about “weatherboard and iron” and his upcoming book.
He expanded on this theme in a recent interview with Fairfax Media, in which he explained, "A lot of it will be politically incorrect - I want to shock, I want to startle people into action.”
The book, he explained, would look at, "the social opprobrium attached to poor white people in Australia's towns and regions."
And then this: "People feel they can denigrate them with impunity. You can't denigrate Asian Australians or Muslim Australians or gay or lesbian or transgender Australians, but if they come from a country town you can call them a hayseed or a redneck and it's OK.”
It could be that this project will prove to be a considered discussion of Australian social and economic division. It could be just another contribution to the already stuffed genre of Trump-esque populist apologia.
Either way, it doesn’t look like Joyce is going to sit quietly on the backbench.
Nick O'Malley is a senior writer and a former US correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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