Which Barnaby Joyce will prevail? The pragmatist or the maverick

Will he see his job as managing his supporters’ expectations? Or will he run an insurgency from inside the Cabinet? James Campbell asks.

Interviewing Barnaby Joyce is not like talking to other politicians. Actually, that’s not quite true. There are plenty of other candid MPs and senators.

It’s just that most of them are toiling away in backbench obscurity or howling at the moon in minor parties like Mark Latham. What makes Barnaby different from the other tell-it-like-is, BS-intolerant tribunes, is he’s not a nobody or a has been, as of this week he’s the deputy prime minister of Australia. For the second time.

As a so-called ‘populist’ Joyce has been likened to Donald Trump. But the comparison doesn’t really work. Throughout his career Trump was obsessed with always appearing dignified. Barnaby couldn’t give a toss.

In fact, he’s much more like Boris Johnson, another politician happy to look scruffy and play the fool in public. Like Johnson, Joyce too is much more-widely read and thoughtful than his public image suggests. And like the British PM despite being a complete political insider he has also risen to the top by successfully posing as the anti-politician.

arnaby Joyce enjoys a beer with locals in the St George Hotel. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

What makes talking to Joyce different from his cabinet colleagues, is that in interviews with them it quickly becomes clear there are roped-off-areas in which they are reluctant to stray. It’s not that you won’t get an answer, you will, but it won’t be much use: just a recitation of whatever the talking points are that day for the subject at hand. Speaking to Joyce is an unnerving experience because when you ask him something he appears to think about the question and then give you an answer that shows he has clearly engaged with it. Or he gives a good impression of having done so, which for a newspaper reporter’s purposes amounts to the same thing.

In the moment Joyce’s stresses and intonation and hand gestures make his lines of thought easy to follow. The problems start when you get home and start to transcribe his words. What makes sense on the tape, often makes no sense on the page. Still, it’s great fun. Most of the time when you interview politicians you do so with a growing sense of panic as the time ticks by and the subject still hasn’t said anything that would hold up a story.

This isn’t a problem with Barnaby. Towards the end of my sit down this week, the talk finally got around to the pandemic and the whether we need to get over having zero cases.

His answer was as follows: “It’s like saying I want zero cases of flu. It’s not possible. It’s like saying I want zero cases of measles mumps. We’re going to shut the borders for that? It’s just not possible. You have to learn how live with it. How to manage it. What happens when next year we need to get universities going again, what, you close all the f----s down do you?” CUT. Thanks for having me. I’ve got all I need. But it got better. I then ventured that this a problem for my hometown of Melbourne where the CBD is a disaster zone.

To which he replied: “Of course. But in country areas we couldn’t really give a shit. We’ve got record exports of coal. Record exports of beef. But we look at Melbourne, and go, you can almost smell the burning flesh from here.” And that wasn’t even the best of it! Had Scott Morrison given him a warm welcome back?

“Aaahm. Look, yeah well we’ve both been in the game a long while. We understand politics. Um. It’s um. It’s…. We’ve known each other for a long while.”

If that was calculated it’s hard to imagine what it was calculated to achieve. The serious question that we will have to wait a while for an answer to is what Joyce intends to do now he has got the leadership back. Does he seriously think he and his consiglieri Matt Canavan can simply announce their demands and expect them to be met?

Even if Scott Morrison was inclined to indulge them, he can’t do so without risking a major breakout on the party’s left flank.

The so-called moderates are already feeling unhappy by the way he has overlooked them for promotion – a mistake John Howard was too canny to make – if Morrison starts making concessions on coal-fired power-stations and other exciting Nat dreams, it won’t be long before they start acting up.

In other words what is Joyce going to do when he is told no? Will he see his job as managing his supporters’ expectations, figuring that he has credibility in the bank to disappoint them and survive? Or will he use the time until the next election running an insurgency from inside the Cabinet.

The evidence from his interview this week is mixed. On the one hand he expressed sympathy with those Nats who want to rip up the Murray Darling Basin agreement but conceded there was no chance of it being revisited.

On the other, he was as blunt as could be that he isn’t up for net zero because he doesn’t think it can be achieved without damaging the economy. Only time will tell which Barnaby prevails: the pragmatist or the maverick.

Originally published as Which Barnaby Joyce will prevail? The pragmatist or the maverick