Matt Canavan: the 1980s kid in the cabinet

The meteoric of the youngest member of Malcolm Turnbull’s cabinet is attributed by fellow Nationals to Barnaby Joyce.

Resources and Northern Australia Minister Matthew Canavan, pictured in Townsville, was a youthful socialist turned Liberal Party member before joining the Nationals. Picture: Cameron Laird

Federal cabinet’s newest — and youngest — member, the Nationals’ Matthew Canavan, is derided by some as an urban intellectual who flirted with communism and then became a Liberal.

And that’s just the criticism from within the Queensland senator’s own party.

Tonight, the public gets its chance to decide if the 35-year-old’s promotion to cabinet after just two years in federal parliament is merited. The Minister for Resources and Northern Australia — the first cabinet member born in the 1980s — is due to be blooded on the ABC’s Q&A program.

Canavan appears to be a mass of contradictions. Despite his youth, he is in many ways a traditionalist at heart — a social conservative, a practising Catholic and a dedicated family man with four boys and a fifth child on the way.

Some pundits see the economics student and former Productivity Commission staff member as the future hope of the Nationals, a party not known for its free market advocacy.

Yet he is regarded with scepticism by many colleagues, who say he doesn’t understand party culture, and that his extraordinarily rapid elevation was only secured through the patronage of his mentor, Barnaby Joyce.

“He’s referred to as Barnaby’s favourite, unfortunately,” says one Nationals MP. “It’s a feeling that’s deeply held across the party. He’s not a real National. He’s an urban intellectual who flirted with communism, then became a Liberal. He doesn’t understand the National Party.”

Once sympathetic to the writings of Karl Marx, Canavan eschewed his socialist roots to join the Liberal Party, only to turn down a job with Andrew Robb in order to work for Joyce, then finance spokesman in the Abbott opposition.

Canavan spent most of his working life in the public service town of Canberra, entering politics on the back of a friendly bet with an investment banker mate.

His elevation was facilitated by the strong showing of the Nationals at the election — an outcome that guaranteed the party a fifth seat around the cabinet table. “He’s come very fast, very quickly. Everybody in the party recognises his talent and ability. But there’s been a number of casualties as he climbed over people and he’s going to have to do a lot of work to mend those relationships,” says one Nationals source.

His meteoric rise and the apparent paradoxes surrounding his political birth cast an enigmatic veil around Canavan. But this masks an underlying story — one of drive, loyalty and intellectual curiosity combined with the lure of political opportunity.

Born on the Gold Coast in 1980, Canavan grew up in the Logan area south of Brisbane in Slacks Creek. Raised in a hardworking lower-middle-class family, Canavan was educated at the Chisolm Catholic College, which sowed in him the seeds of a religious faith that would come to exercise a major influence over his personal and intellectual development.

His father, Bryan, was a manager at Woolworths who became a sales representative for Nestle, while his mother, Maria, stayed at home to look after her three children before joining the Commonwealth Bank as a teller.

Canavan credits his high school history teacher Chris Gruelich with instilling in him an interest in economics, but also acknowledges it was about this time he became attracted to communism and the views of Marx.

“Mr Gruelich had obviously been influenced heavily by the Cold War in Germany. He taught us all about the Cold War and communism and capitalism. I just got reading Marx in grade 10 and thought, ‘This is the go: the means of production owned by everybody, share the wealth. Sounds brilliant,’ ” Canavan says.

His attraction to socialism waned when he attended the University of Queensland in 1998 and found himself arguing with a student over a front page banner in a left-wing publication branding John Howard a racist — a statement with which Canavan strongly disagreed.

It was the desire to hold down a decent job that led Canavan to study economics — and he read widely, taking an interest in prominent 20th-century thinkers including George Orwell, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and John Kenneth Galbraith. “I joined the Liberal Party in my honours year,” Canavan says. “I started to read a bit wider, things like Michael Oakeshott and Edmund Burke and these sorts of people who convinced me of the important principles of conservatism.”

It was his faith and pursuit of Catholic values that led Canavan to his wife, Andrea. The couple met at an Edmund Rice Camp — a Christian Brothers initiative providing holiday experiences for young people, usually from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Canavan would go camping and bushwalking with the attendees, many from violence-afflicted broken homes. He also spent time with the Christian Brothers in Melbourne working at a dry hostel for alcoholics — an experience that had a profound impact in shaping his thinking.

“The men were old and kind of on their way out. And they were really just managing their addiction and we were giving them a dry place to come to ... None of these guys really came across as people who were marked out for alcoholism from birth,” he says.

“We sort of think that people can be defined, or we can explain human outcomes, by traits at birth — ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation — rather than the events that happen in your life that cause you to lose control. We just emphasise so much those identity politics. But bad things can happen to all people.”

Following university, Canavan received an offer to work for the Productivity Commission. He was 22 when he and Andrea moved to the nation’s capital, arriving just a few weeks before the devastating 2003 bushfires.

The pair spent five years in Canberra before Canavan took up an offer with KPMG in Brisbane at the end of 2007. But the young family struggled to adapt to Brisbane life and Canavan successfully applied to return to the Productivity Commission as a director. It was at this time he started to consider a future in politics. “I really liked Tony Abbott because I was socially conservative, but all of this was before anyone thought Tony would be leader,” he says. “I emailed this bloke, an investment banker friend, and said that if Tony Abbott was made leader I would apply for a job with him. We thought that was unlikely.”

Shortly after they made the bet, Abbott won the Liberal leadership and Canavan cold-called his office to ask for a job. “Tony didn’t need anybody but Barnaby had just been made shadow finance minister and so I was encouraged to consider that,” he says.

Canavan recalls that when presented with the option of working for Joyce, he was initially hesitant. “I thought, ‘Man, I’m a Lib, not a Nat.’ After reflecting on it, I thought: ‘What have I got to lose?’ I was less than 30.”

When Joyce was dumped from the finance portfolio, Canavan was offered a role with Liberal heavyweight Andrew Robb — a former federal director of the party who would go on to serve as trade minister in the Coalition government.

Canavan made what seemed like a counterintuitive decision for a Liberal Party member: he opted to stick with his Nationals boss.

“I really liked Barnaby. I also consider myself very loyal. I build up a relationship with people and I would go into the trenches for them. And he’d given me a go,” Canavan says.

There was more than a touch of irony to that decision when, only weeks later, Joyce joked that he used Productivity Commission reports when he ran out of toilet paper.

Canavan reflects that some people at the Productivity Commission would have taken a dim view of his career choices. “There’s no doubt some people at the commission would have been saying, ‘What the hell is this guy doing? He’s giving us all a bad name.’ ”

But Canavan was unperturbed. He credits Joyce with teaching him about politics and says he learned the importance of humility and the value of not taking oneself too seriously. It was Joyce who planted within him the seeds of political ambition.

“I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t gone to him. I almost certainly wouldn’t have joined the Nationals. It’s made a huge difference in my life,” Canavan says. “I think we worked well together. He taught me a lot about politics, the pressures of it, how to communicate, the people you have to manage.”

Canavan can still pinpoint his “road to Damascus” moment when he truly committed to the Nationals’ cause. It was 2010, and he was driving back from Cubby Station at the height of the debate over the emissions trading scheme, convinced that increases in electricity prices would cancel out the benefit of the micro-economic reforms introduced by Labor and continued by the Howard government.

Canavan uses the sugar industry to explain how he reconciled his economics background with the Nationals’ philosophy. Economics lacks a compelling theory of power, he says. “In cases like sugar, where the mill is the only entity that can use a farmer’s sugar — who is going to have more power in that relationship? Well, the mill is.”

He asks rhetorically: “And is the mill not going to abuse that power if left to their own devices?”

After the 2010 election that hobbled Julia Gillard’s Labor Party into minority government, he joined the Nationals and agreed to stay on with Joyce until the 2013 election, this time as a true believer. His timing was fortunate — at the past two elections, a clutch of senior Queensland Nationals retired from parliament, including Ron Boswell, Paul Neville, Bruce Scott and Warren Truss.

It was Boswell who encouraged him to run for the upper house and an initially reluctant Canavan decided to try his hand. In early 2012, he moved his family back to Queensland, this time to the regional city of Toowoomba.

Boswell says that although Canavan does not come from a traditional Nationals constituency, that should not hinder his future in the party.

Canavan chose to locate his Senate office in Rockhampton, disregarding Boswell’s advice. “I told him to open an office in Brisbane, which he refused to do,” Boswell says. “But he was right to open an office in Rockhampton in the most difficult seat and his presence there I believe assisted Michelle Landry over the line in Capricornia. And that seat helped the Coalition win government in 2016.”

Once elected to parliament, Canavan quickly set about making a name for himself. He advocated to change the tax treatment of single-income families, pushed for better access to the US market for Queensland sugar producers and took the attack to environmental activists opposed to developments such as the Carmichael coalmine.

Last February he was promoted to the outer ministry as the Minister for Northern Australia and, following the election, has gained responsibility for resources and a cabinet elevation.

Canavan says it’s important to remember that mining is part of Australia’s historical story and remains critical to the ability of thousands of Australians to pay their mortgage and put their kids through school.

Looking to the future, he says the Nationals will play a more muscular — but considered — role within the Coalition under the leadership of Joyce, who enjoys a “superstar national profile”.

“We will have good times, difficult times and differences of opinion to work through. But the record is we have established at the federal level an extremely good relationship. There’s no real reason why that can’t continue.”

Canavan’s leader is quick to defend his rapid elevation. Joyce dismisses arguments his protege doesn’t understand the Nationals. “Matt will go really well. He’s been seen as a person who has advanced very high and very quickly. There’s a reason for that. He has a very strong intellect,” Joyce says.

“He’s driven by policy outcomes and not by personality cult issues. Growing up at Logan, he has an empathy for people who have done it tough.”