There is risk and reward for Coalition as Joyce wrestles with irrelevance

3 hours ago 1

Barnaby Joyce’s pending departure from the Nationals is the latest chaotic episode in a two-decade political career that has veered from the sublime to the ridiculous.

For Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, who has had to sack Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and then endure the resignation of Andrew Hastie in the past six weeks, it looks like yet another blow to a shaky Coalition.

Under a new plan, Barnaby Joyce is set to eventually succeed One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

But the mooted defection of Joyce to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation could actually help Ley and improve the Liberal vote in Australia’s major cities. There are potential rewards for Nationals leader David Littleproud, too, but bigger risks to his party.

And, as he weighs joining One Nation, Joyce need only look at the fate of the long line of politicians who have joined and fallen out with the party, from Mark Latham to David Oldfield, to see he faces the biggest risks of all.

Since entering parliament in 2005, Joyce has been a Queensland senator, a NSW MP, a brilliant retail politician, a party leader (twice), the deputy prime minister, an embarrassing distraction and a wrecker at various times.

Starting with his early campaigns against voluntary student unionism and the sale of Telstra, Joyce has never been afraid to defy political consensus on an issue.

But it was not until July 2009, when he warned Australians they would soon be paying $100 for a lamb roast because of Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme, that Joyce landed on the issue that would define his career.

Sixteen years later, Joyce is still campaigning against climate change policy, which has now brought him to the brink of quitting the party.

He has found himself out of favour before. In 2018, then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull effectively forced Joyce to resign his leadership of the Nationals over his affair with now-wife Vikki Campion. And, according to Joyce, Peter Dutton told him he should quit politics for insufficiently spruiking nuclear energy in the last term of parliament.

But neither incident was enough to force Joyce out of the Nationals.

Joyce’s departure would be a godsend for Ley, who is struggling to maintain unity as both Coalition parties have the public policy debates that never took place during Dutton’s three years of leadership.

Joyce’s exit would mean one fewer (loud) voice within the Nationals arguing against net zero by 2050. It may tempt a couple of other MPs into joining him in Hanson’s show, which could dent the Coalition’s numbers. But again, that would be a welcome development for Ley as she fights to re-position the opposition closer to the political centre.

For Littleproud and the Nationals, the picture is mixed.

Yes, Littleproud would lose the greatest threat to his leadership in the Nationals’ party room.

But losing Joyce also means losing the party’s best fundraiser, arguably its best retail politician, a man loved by sections of the party’s rank-and-file membership, and a key connection to billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart.

For Joyce, defecting would mean for the first time in his career, he would be on the crossbench and separated from his Nationals brothers and sisters. That’s a lonely place to be.

It would immediately move him to the political fringes (as former Liberal-turned-defector Cory Bernardi discovered nearly a decade ago) and make him much less relevant in day-to-day political debate because of the numbers in parliament. Regardless, Joyce looks poised to join Hanson’s One Nation.

And yes, that’s the same Hanson who once called Joyce “as useless as tits on a bull” in 2019 amid a dispute about government assistance for Queensland farmers.

(Joyce has given as good as he got, saying in 2012 that Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby, was “only slightly less dodgy than [disgraced former speaker Peter] Slipper”.)

Ashby, for his part, told this masthead on Monday that “bridges were mended many years ago, and I’ve always respected Barnaby for that ability to come and fix a problem”.

At 58, Joyce is young enough to take over from the 71-year-old Hanson one day if he does switch to One Nation.

And while he will still be able to campaign against climate action from the crossbench, it will be more difficult to make anyone from the major parties – let alone voters – listen.

After two decades at the centre of Australian politics, is Barnaby Joyce ready to be irrelevant?

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