Barnaby Joyce is consistently lauded as a “retail politician”, and one thing the last week has shown us is that he is certainly all about making transactions.
After re-ascending to the top Nationals job, he moved quickly to punish his foes and reward his friends. Barnaby 2.0 also swiftly made it clear that he would be pushing for deals to favour coal, and carve out agriculture from climate change action. He is nothing if not industrious when it comes to selling out the rest of the nation in favour of his voting base.
And he and other Nats saved some of their most blustery bullshit for a shambolic stunt over the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
For more than a decade, as the plan was formulated and its compromises negotiated, Nationals (and some Liberals) would sneer to me and others that South Australia was never going to get the 450 gigalitres (GL) of water it needs to keep the Murray healthy.
Meanwhile, scientists say even the 2750GL at the base of the plan is not enough to save the system — with many telling a South Australia royal commission that it wasn’t based on the science. One whistleblower even said that it was understood the figure had to have a “two” at the start of it — with that number being linked to Barnaby Joyce’s postcode.
When those ill-fated but clearly targeted amendments were moved in the Senate last week, the Nationals’ talking points were widely circulated.
There was fearmongering about job losses, even though the Murray-Darling Basin Authority has found that “drought, population decline and on-farm technology are the major factors leading to job losses”.
They say that science “no longer supports SA needing fresh water”. Which is, in fact, the opposite of what the science says. The science says without water flows down to SA and the Murray Mouth, salinity will build up. That salt is deadly to plants, fish, and farmers’ crops.
The whole river system would be affected — by the salt, by algae outbreaks, by the deaths of plants and animals.
Saying SA doesn’t need fresh water — as though down here we’re eager for upstream irrigators to go to the wall so we have nice clean water for our coal-powered barista machines — is bunkum. As is the claim that “rising sea levels will mean the SA Lower Lakes will not need environmental water”.
What effrontery from the climate change laggards in the Nationals, to suggest that climate change could in fact be the cure for the Lakes. It’s rot, of course, possibly based on debunked theories that the lakes were once saline.
Underlying all of this is the cynical binary perpetuated by the Nationals — and the Coalition more broadly — that Australians are either latte-sippers or salt-of-the-Earth farmer types. Spoiled inner-city whingers or authentic country folk.
Joyce said regional jobs were “just as important” as jobs in Adelaide, as though that’s the trade-off. It’s not.
Millions of people rely on having a healthy Murray-Darling system. Farmers, of course. More than 40 Aboriginal nations. Not to mention dozens of native fish, hundreds of other plant and animal species, the internationally protected wetlands in the Coorong, and the ecosystem more broadly.
All those and more are done a deep disservice by the bullshit divisiveness and bodgy science being bandied about. And by the relegation of the water portfolio — along with its minister, Keith Pitt — to the outer ministry.
Joyce says Keith Pitt will “remain over this portfolio like a bad suit”.
That sounds like Joyce wants to send out a charlatan salesman in ill-fitting polyester to make dirty deals — done dirt cheap.
What do you think? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au and don’t forget to include your full name if you’d like to be considered for publication.
Barnaby 2.0 is totally off his meds, and blazing a trail of divisiveness that Ted Cruz would admire.
And it only started a day after his speech about how having a few years in the wilderness had made him a better man! I read into that “I have learnt how to fake not being a colossal w*nker” but nah, he’s gone the opposite, and decided that oz politics needs a straight dose of “Barnaby the Destroyer” rather than “Barnaby the Reflective”.
Is he right? I can never tell with Joyce, on the one hand he’s quite a savvy operator, and very effective at cutting through, but his ability to rally a mob then gets scuttled by him being a complete jerk – reminds me a bit of Trump in that respect! A loose cannon who, depending on the state of his hangover, can run circles around his opponents or blast huge holes in his own pirate ship.
And not just his own ship, the Coalition’s too. I wonder how Joyce’s “take no prisoners” strategy is going to work alongside Morrison desperately trying to put out all the spot fires of his own making?
These grubs have obviously never heard “Ask not what your country can do fof you but what you can do for ypur country”. What they are doing to their country is blatantly self-serving, which would get them shot/hanged in some countries.
You do realise that is an old fascist slogan?
You do realize that the Nationals are the natural home of the neo fascist!
Actually President John F Kennedy, but please, continue.
The words were uttered by him but the sentiment, and message, is pure fascism – “you only have legitimacy through, and to, the State“.
None of that individual freedom or responsibility nonsense.
You’re too kind calling them grubs. Psychopaths more like it. Tony Windsor on the NFF fossil fuel union:
National Farmers Federation and Carbon Tax negotiations (Page 136):
During the MPCCC process I also had two meetings with the National Farmers’ Federation and a couple of private meetings with President Jock Laurie. I had known Jock for years and he was a constituent of mine. On one occasion I explained that direct emissions from agriculture—emissions of animals, fugitive nitrogen from fertilisers, farm machinery— would be excluded and I asked for guidance as to the initiatives that they believed could assist the farming community. But its position was climate change didn’t exist so it didn’t want to be involved. I argued that some form of emissions reduction scheme was likely to happen and their organisation had an opportunity to be constructive in its establishment.
The only help I got was a piece of screwed-up paper handed to me on my way out by Andrew Broad, who represented Victoria on the Farmers’ Federation. It read, ‘Don’t let them impose the (tax) on long distance road transport.’ There were no other suggestions from the other delegates. His advice, though, reinforced the view I had already raised with the MPCCC.
When the Treasury worked out the sums for the MPCCC the removal of transport fuel was costed at $2.5 billion. Andrew Broad contributed to the national debate but the Farmers’ Federation did nothing, even though their constituency were potentially the greatest victims of climate change.
They were blindsided by the politics but Broad could see an opening. Broad went on to be the Nationals member for Mallee.
The Farmers’ Federation continues to be a useless organisation.
And those hangovers are a daily event.
I can understand the Nationals/Coalition being prepared to cut SA and those towns, people and the environment loose below the Upper Darling – to benefit the irrigators on the Upper Darling – it’s all right there in their form guide.
And that that’s something Labor will have to hammer from now to the election.
A changed man? The alleged changes appear to be all bad.
Jethrospeak :- “A changed nappy”.
June 28, 2021
”Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is renting out a four-bedroom house with a pool in Tamworth for $625 a week, but failed to declare the rental income to Parliament for months until contacted by news.com.au.
Under House of Representatives rules, MPs should declare “the nature of any other substantial sources of income” and the explanatory notes for the register of interest say MPs should declare income above $1000 a year.
But the property was described as “residential” on the official register until Tuesday, after news.com.au first contacted Mr Joyce asking why rental income was not being declared.
For two days, Mr Joyce and his office have declined to answer news.com.au’s questions over whether he needs to update Parliament’s register of interests over the property he owns in Loomberah.”
The man is a psychotic inebriated shonk.
Water Licences???
Interest from off-shore investors to buy up Australian agribusinesses is increasing as the world’s population grows to over nine-billion people by 2050.
In recent years there has been a 10-fold increase in foreign investment in ownership and control of agricultural supply lines, and with over 75% of our produce being exported ….that’s a lot of environmental damage and water use to get GDP export dollars, the cost benefit analysis of the degradation of the land makes this unsustainable.
Its soul destroying seeing the amount of land cleared in outback QLD & NSW in the last ten years. I doubt this land will ever recover. Ten years of intensive farming & all that will remain will be dust. A quick goole of outback NSW & QLD reveals the damage. Criminal enterprises destroying any future for us, our children & the planet.
The ‘carrying capacity’ (sic! Hi, Leventy!) of most land in the Western Division NSW has been falling since 1825 when the first hard hooves hit it, from 10-15 acres per ewe to 25+ now.
For cattle, the figure (aka precipitous decline) is worse.
The Interior is called ”the Overflow” for a reason – a drainage system the size (area, not, alas, volume) of the Missouri-Mississippi, 4 rivers & tributaries, inundates the Corner Country (NSW,SA,NT,Qld) about every 20-25yrs, due to errant monsoons wandering west of the GDR in FNQ, Atherton Tablelands etc.
Prior to 1776 (NB) the landscape would have been one of serial aridity in a lush wetland bigger than Europe.
The Centre was often misnamed the Dead Heart.
It is very, very ill but not,yet dead.
There is no shortage of resources, mineral & financial to revivify it, or at least attempt to so do.
Just the will and a stroke of the pen.
The plughole of the Australian continent is Lake Eyre, 6+mts below sea level (the Dead Sea is 306…, jes’ sayin’) and every drip or drop of moisture that falls west of the GDR in Qld (and south of the Barkly ranges) begins an inexorable journey, down the natural inclination if the Artesian basin (1/7 of Oz land mass).
Whether it reaches home base – to begin an equally inexorable evaporation process (10cumtrs per sqmt pa) beneath the prevailing SW-NE winds – was always debatable.
The removal of vegetation, actively or passively has reduce the natural sponge effect of living soil so that inundation tends to scour rather than augment.