Australian family farmers and small businesses are being rolled by forces that have grown powerful in the absence of dissent, Barnaby Joyce believes.

The self-confessed agrarian socialist and leader of the Nationals in the Senate says he is economically to the left because people have bastardised the free market to mean anything goes for the major player in town.

This ultimately leads to small business, whether they are farmers or otherwise, being squashed, Senator Joyce says.

Look at the ridiculous fight we’re having trying to get Australian branding onto home-grown fruit and vegetables and foodstuffs. The majors are saying you can’t have branding because it discriminates against imported products. That’s exactly what I want to do!

He applauds moves by the upcoming Obama administration in the United States to implement reciprocity in trade. “You put a tariff on your product, I’ll put a tariff on mine,” as the senator puts it.

We’re prepared to pull down our strides (on international free trade), while the rest of the world is fully clothed.

Carbon trading promises a similar deal for agriculture, except that it will be a fully home-cooked disaster, he argues.

Maybe we are having an effect on the climate, but I think it has been turned onto a moral precedent for social engineering.

If you dare dissent against climate change, you are a heretic, a witch to be burned at the stake. I think the world will look back on this as a form of tulip mania, where in Holland in the 1600s people were paying what today would be hundreds of thousands of dollars for a flower.

The Senator says he’s open to the argument that fossil fuel use should be curtailed, and energy efficiency improved, to enhance the efficiency of capital.

I’m not open to the argument that government is the benevolent source of all knowledge, and that it form another tax and avoid all dissent on the premise that it has a moral duty to do so.