Barnaby Joyce Profile 2008

byline: Matthew Cawood

In the closing days of 2005, when Rural Press first caught up with Barnaby Joyce for an extended interview, it was widely expected that political friction would wear down the unexpected edge the small-town Queensland Nationals senator brought to Federal politics.

Three years on, he’s tireder and heavier, but the edge that makes Senator Joyce so appealing to wide swathes of the conservative electorate and so aggravating to some of his Coalition colleagues not only remains, but has been honed and tempered by experience.

Not everyone agrees with Senator Joyce’s politics, which he describes as socially right, economically left, and which contains such apparently contradictory elements as a belief in the decentralisation of government and retailing power, but a defence of the single desk system for wheat sales.

But it is hard to argue with his adherence to his principles, which on several occasions have taken him across the parliamentary floor in defiance of the party line.

In late 2005, Senator Joyce had some bruises after skirmishes over the privatisation of Telstra, but his belief in the power of a principled individual to effect change was undimmed.

If all you’re delivering is someone else’s agenda, you may as well go home, he said at the time.

In the last days of 2008, when Rural Press again caught up with Senator Joyce during another working sabbatical on his parents’ farm at Woolbrook, NSW, there was a sense that the battle-tired politician is now looking for something more from his supporters than the 8000 emails that appeared in his inbox overnight during the industrial relations debate.

These days, his message is “get involved”. In past decades, he observes, the magnitude of the political challenges now confronting the farm sector would have brought out a swift and noticeable political response.

Today, Senator Joyce says cautiously, agriculture’s presence in Canberra is sometimes uncoordinated and quiet.

Agriculture has been sucked into inside lobbying, he says, in common with what he describes as the great unknowns, or the majors, the giant retail and industrial interests that lobby Canberra from the inside.

That’s a mistake, he believes.

Inside the room, you’re quietly strangled. You have to be more vociferous.

You’ve got to be brave enough to get up and realise that after you’ve really and truly had your say, you’re not going to get invited out to tea. They aren’t going to like you.

As his track record suggests, the senator is a believer in the power of high-profile dissent.

The last thing we want in this nation is the centralisation of political thought, but that’s what we’re getting, he says.

Our freedom of expression is endangered because if anyone stands up for you, they’re a renegade and a maverick to be dispensed with. The centralisation of political power corrupts politics like the centralisation of retail power corrupts the retail market.

The lack of individual dissent coming out of the Labor Party should serve as a warning to the electorate, he says. It means all the power is in one office. It’s a usurping of your democratic right you can’t hear alternate thought.

And now the same thing is happening on the conservative side. We [the Nationals] provide a minor amount of dissent; 99 per cent of the time we vote with the Liberals. But people still call for dissolution of the Coalition. Why? Because they want us to vote 100 per cent with the Liberals. But 100 per cent is totalitarianism.

I don’t think anyone is 100 per cent infallible, and I think it is the desire of the public to hear the debate expressed in the same dynamic as at the pub or at dinner last Sunday.

If people don’t want to participate in the political process, there will be a tendency for power to flow from two offices, the leaders of the Government and the Opposition, and the major direction of the nation will be affected by those who have the power to influence those two centralised offices.

In Senator Joyce’s reckoning, the farm sector is currently not one of those interest groups with influence.

In Canberra, “rural” is seen as a nostalgic legacy, he says.

Even if you don’t like the National Party, the rural vote should be somehow caucused into a bloc that has the willingness to say no, and the willingness to change its vote, to use as a position of leverage that allows the rural sector to be heard.

They have that in the United States, in the European Union, in China. We don’t have that in Australia.

ends