Barnaby Joyce wants to pull the horse up while he resaddles
- Written by Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
A pesky journalist broke the story about Barnaby Joyce being in talks with One Nation, and now the apparently-exiting Nationals MP wants everyone to press the “pause” button while he has a chat with family and gets himself and his situation straight.
Or, in more obscure Joyce language, “You don’t start salami slicing your way out of every possible combination and permutation of outcomes”.
“So let’s just pull the horse on this up straight away. No decisions have been made. And that’s where we are right now.”
Joyce said the late-Friday story, by Nine’s Paul Sakkal, broke when he was raising funds for the Nationals. That made his speech a “bit awkward”, he said. And, it must be said, his whole position remains a bit awkward. It’s as if he’d been dreaming about one day heading One Nation, only to be rudely awoken before the dream revealed the next immediate steps.
On Monday he said, “I haven’t even been home. I haven’t spoken to [wife] Vikki. I haven’t spoken to my daughters”. He did, however, speak on Sunday night to Pauline Hanson.
One thing Joyce is clear about: he won’t stand again for his regional electorate of New England, or be in the Nationals party room anymore.
At this moment, he is still formally a member of the Nationals. He will have to sort out by next week, when parliament sits, whether he’ll be moving to the crossbench. Presuming he does (rejecting pleas from some Nationals to stay) will he designate himself an independent, or a One Nation MP?
Joyce is obsessive about net zero, to which the Nationals signed under him in a deal with then Prime Minister Scott Morrison before the 2021 Glasgow climate conference. Morrison promised a lot of loot for the regions but then lost the 2022 election.
Joyce did the net zero deal, but at the same time personally opposed it – which only makes sense to those who have dealt with him over a very long time.
He has put up a private member’s bill for the repeal of the various legislative commitments involving net zero, and the government has fallen over itself to make sure the bill gets plenty of air.
The Nationals are currently headed to dumping the net zero commitment, but Joyce doesn’t seem able to wait for that.
It comes back to Joyce’s (accurate) perception he’s been publicly spurned and sidelined by David Littleproud, the man who pushed him out of the leadership after the 2022 election. Theirs is a poisonous relationship. Littleproud’s style is to freeze people out. Joyce doesn’t regard Littleproud as a conviction politician. .
After the last election Littleproud, Joyce says, moved him off the frontbench in the name of “generational change”.
Joyce understands things in domestic terms. He said in interviews on Monday (making the same point more than once), “If you were my partner and you came home one night and said, ‘look for reasons of generational change, I don’t think this relationship is going well’, you’d think that’s pretty much it. And if they said, ‘well, we don’t want you to go out and campaign anywhere’, that’s like saying ‘well, I also don’t want you to go to any parties with me or to be seen in public with me’. You’d probably say, ‘I don’t think this relationship is going that well’”.
But he stressed, “I’m not gonna throw the plates around. I understand that’s how the world works and we all move on.”
Things move on, apparently, in Barnaby time.
Authors: Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
