Barnaby Joyce’s long-telegraphed defection to One Nation is now official, completed not with a press conference but via a free-wheeling podcast chat in which the former deputy prime minister donned an Akubra, questioned unemployed people having babies, and suggested migrants who don’t like Australia should return to the “sh*tholes” from whence they came.
Speaking to Karl Stefanovic on his new podcast, Mr Joyce offered a blunt, homespun take on immigration policy, arguing Australia should only accept people it can “actually absorb”.
“They should be saying, how many houses have you got free at the moment? How many hospitals are working well, how many schools are not crowded?” he said, before moving briskly to workforce planning.
“What sort of people do you need? Do you need unemployed people having babies, or do you need builders?”
Under Mr Joyce’s proposed system, migrants would be selected on skills and issued what sounded suspiciously like a contract.
“You cannot be in the crime pages or on social security,” he said. “If you wanna be in the crime pages or on social security, you cannot come.”
Geography, he added, was no shield.
“I don’t care if you are coming from the Vatican, Central America, central Africa, or the middle of Europe,” he said. “I don’t care if you are coming from the Vatican, Central America, central Africa, or the middle of Europe. “If you’re gonna turn up and … cause problems. Then you stay where you are. If you pine for where you came from and say, ‘I really want Australia to be just like the sh*thole I came from’, you go back there.”
Despite the hard line, Mr Joyce said the public reaction to his move to One Nation had surprised even him, recounting a recent attempt at a simple street walk that collapsed under the weight of enthusiastic supporters. “We were just not getting anywhere,” he said. “They shut it down. We got back to the office and they said it was like going for a walk with a frigging pope.”
Stefanovic was quick to intervene. “Barnaby Joyce is comparing himself to the Pope now. I mean, a little more unholy.”
“No, that was them,” Mr Joyce replied, insisting the moment proved that support for One Nation was “phenomenal”.
Asked where Canberra had gone wrong, Mr Joyce blamed what he described as the “sanitised” nature of modern politics, arguing today’s MPs were products of a political petri dish rather than real life. “They grew up in a petri dish of either the union movement, solicitors’ firms, or politics itself,” he said. “There’s a lot of bullsh*t – a lot of pretending to be somebody you’re not.”
He lamented the loss of labourers in Labor, farmers in the Nationals and shopkeepers in the Liberals, suggesting he himself was the last federal National who actually owned a farm. “That’s just not there anymore,” he said, adding that past parliaments were filled with ex-servicemen who had actually served.
Mr Joyce said his break with the Nationals after 30 years was also deeply personal, pinning it squarely on his relationship with party leader David Littleproud. “My relationship with David was completely dysfunctional,” he said. “Probably more David, to be honest.”
He described feeling isolated and cornered in parliament before deciding to walk away, likening the move to ending a marriage beyond repair. “When it becomes apparent you can’t, you walk,” he said, adding that the relief was immediate and profound.
“The greatest relief I’ve ever felt in my life,” he said, recalling the moment it hit him while driving between Walcha and Armidale. “Thinking, ‘Why didn’t I do that a year ago?’”
The conversation eventually drifted, as Barnaby conversations tend to, into reflections on how much tougher politics used to be, before mobile phones and constant scrutiny. By way of illustration, Mr Joyce recounted a story about former prime minister John Gorton, who once drank so heavily before a flight that he vomited in front of an air hostess, before the plane had even taken off.
“Now, that was the Prime Minister in the past,” Mr Joyce said. “Believe you me. It was vastly more robust than it is now.”
Robust, unsanitised and unmistakably Barnaby – much like his new political home.
Images: The Karl Stefanovic Podcast
