Settle Barnaby, the teal tidal wave’s unlikely to reach Tamworth

Let us, for a moment, take Barnaby Joyce as a serious person. There is good reason for this. Unconstrained by office or position, now teetotal and unable to blame his mishaps on mixing his meats, Joyce is free to say what his Coalition colleagues are thinking. He is Peter Dutton’s Id, that primitive instinct expressing all the unconscious drives that are, for a leader, held back by Ego, Superego and black-framed spectacles.

Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit:

In Joyce’s spring newsletter to his New England constituents, titled “Getting It Done” (no explanation of what “It” is, but that’s all part of being an Id), much is predictable. There are lots of photos featuring a hat. There’s the rough and ready grammar and spelling. Joyce is pictured “Laying the Reath” at a military memorial. And this sentence is a good argument for the desirability of artificial intelligence: “There are some exciting opportunities if a Coalition government is elected for our electorate on the horizon, and one of these is host to secure, reliable energy production.” I might sound elitist in criticising Joyce’s English, but I wasn’t the one who went to St Ignatius College, Riverview.

Money doesn’t buy everything. But to disguise one’s literacy is probably a good play in “retail politics”.

Anyhoo. The thing that stands out like bull’s balls is the fear of teals and independents. After a plug for Gina’s “Iron Ore”, the main missive is a diatribe against independent politicians. If the Great Teal Terror extends all the way to Tamworth, where can it stop?

“A hung parliament, which is generally chaotic, is on the cards,” the former deputy prime minister, last seen on the national stage horizontally using his mobile phone from a planter box, warns. “If independents worked, then we should have 151 independents out of 151 members of our nation’s parliament. The problem with this scenario is who on earth would be the Prime Minister, or the Treasurer, or the Minister for Defence? Would they just take turns and give everyone a go at it?” (No, instead we would give key ministries to random members of the National Party according to a backroom Coalition agreement.)

Joyce’s Teal Terror is a fair argument against having 151 independents, but when it comes to individual electorates, it is only a transparent and somewhat sweaty defence of the entrenched duopoly.

“As much as I don’t want Labor to run the nation,” he continues, “chaos is far worse.” There you go: one duopoly partner sticking up for the other.

This is coming from New England, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest teal and where the local member has made his name as a maverick within the duopoly. Duopoly protectionism is reshaping our politics as Labor attacks the Greens and the Coalition attacks the teals, both having moved so far to the right that their exposed flanks are to their left.

“The teals will be running around telling everyone in their electorates anything they want to hear that makes them feel good at the time,” the jeremiad continues. “What they won’t be telling anyone is who they would be backing if there was a hung parliament, and they were responsible to pick one side or the other. This is the only question that they really can answer is the question they never will answer.”

Beware the teal wave, says Barnaby Joyce.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Once you’ve untangled that last sentence, it’s a fair enough point in theory. A hung federal parliament is likely, and it’s reasonable to ask which side your local independent would back, except that it’s too early for them to answer. They don’t know which major party would have the most seats. They don’t know which side will have policies better aligned with theirs, especially when one side doesn’t have many policies yet. The independents will make up their minds if the day of choosing comes. This discretion, presumably, is what makes them independent.

Unlike Joyce out in New England, those of us who live in independent-voting electorates are not terrified of “chaos”. The so-called teal wave is partly, but not wholly, a protest vote. It has been a repudiation of the duopoly, an expression of a desire to know what policies you are voting for, and, if your independent turns out to hold the balance of power, then all the better for those policies.

Far from voting for someone “weak and precarious” (Joyce’s words), you will have voted for someone in a position of strength. All of these fed into last week’s vote for Jacqui Scruby in Pittwater. The NSW parliament is not consequently in “chaos”, but is instead accountable to a broader spectrum of the electorate than if one major party dominated. Yes, if every parliamentarian was an independent that might be a recipe for chaos, but settle, New England petal, we’re a long way from your Italian doomsday.

The fear of accountability, which is spreading through the duopoly even faster than scurvy, is also a fear of having to take action to stop killing our planet and ourselves. The half of Joyce’s message that is not terrorised by the teals is concerned with rubbishing renewable energy. We get a fair bit about “wind and solar swindle factories”. High inflation is a result of power prices that “are going through the roof because supply has been decimated by the Peter Pan belief in intermittent power from wind towers and solar panels”.

As the talking Id of the federal Coalition, Joyce is free and welcome to say such things. He’s the one Coalition MP who publicly supported Jacinta Price’s independence after she likened late-term abortion to infanticide. He has also shown himself in the past to be sceptical about climate science. The Peter Pan policy of nuclear power is a cynical euphemism for what Tony Abbott has said about man-influenced climate change: “absolute crap” (2009), “probably doing good” (2017) and a “cult” that will be “discredited” (2023). Like Joyce, Abbott is free to say what others think.

And this, judging by our newsletter from New England, is the overriding fear. Teal independents will have the power to pressure government to do more to reach Australia’s 43 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030. If they supported Dutton, they might force him to acknowledge that his nuclear power policy is a Peter Pan fantasy which not even its authors believe, for even if it met its aims on cost and safety, it would still arrive too late. If they obtained the balance of power, the teal independents would press climate back to the top of the agenda. Chaos? Nope. Those electors who have turned teal and independent know exactly what they are voting for.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.