Tongue twisters were a staple in my childhood home. Fox in Socks by Dr Seuss was a favourite. My grandmother taught us “she sells seashells by the seashore” and “around the rugged rocks the ragged rascal ran”.
It was probably too early when she recited “I’m not a pheasant plucker but a pheasant plucker’s son”. She delivered it anyway, much to our delight.
Reading Barnaby Joyce’s latest community newsletter, I suspect he was raised on similar fare. I know he loves language. Certainly he has performed memorable linguistic feats in his years in public office.
The newsletter, caps lock on, continues that fine tradition.
“FOREIGN INTERMITTENT POWER SWINDLE FACTORIES SUPER-POWERED AT THE COST OF DISEMPOWERING THE PEOPLE OF THE NEW ENGLAND”.
Try saying that 10 times fast.
Swindle is a wonderful word that comes from the German schwindler or “extravagant maker of schemes”. Alternatively, schwindeln is to “be giddy”. Also to “tell lies”.
The seasonal news Joyce delivers to his electorate is that “we are in the firing line for becoming the government’s swindle factories playpen”.
“No one in Canberra can hear you from Wollomin or Walcha, no one in Canberra cares about what happens at Doughboy Mountain,” he tells constituents. “You are only scary when you are up close and prepared to do something about it.”
I thought ensuring people in Canberra could hear community concerns was literally his job. Leaving that aside, he says: “These are people who are about to make billions and billions of dollars from the rollout of intermittent unreliable power to make money.
“Think of the money you’re going to lose when the value of your asset is diminished because you are surrounded by an industrial swindle factory and crossed over by transmission lines.”
Let’s unpick this, starting with the claim of foreign ownership. In his history in public life, Joyce has been known to support both foreign ventures and the odd windfarm. There’s the $400m White Rock windfarm, owned by Goldwind Australia, a wholly owned Chinese subsidiary, and China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Wind Power. He turned the sod on the Glen Innes project in his own back yard in 2016 as part of what he described as an “investment and jobs boon” for his local economy. He was deputy prime minister when he headlined White Rock’s press release.
The following year he touted White Rock’s solar farm on his website and delivered $6m of federal government funding to show how serious the Coalition was “about supporting renewable energy production to help secure the national grid”.
His statement at the time said: “With other projects like the Sapphire Wind Farm going ahead, it also shows that the New England is leading the way in renewable energy production and I will continue to advocate for the region as a growing power supplier for Australia.”
I could go on, listing his support for Indonesian investments in cattle stations. Or the $79m water deal done during his time as agriculture minister involving Eastern Australian Agriculture, then a private company controlled by overseas investment funds.
Or indeed quote him as agriculture minister, saying: “We are going to have foreign investment for as long as we are here. We are always going to be attracting capital because we don’t have as much as we need of our own.”
(It’s also worth noting that not all of the windfarms Joyce opposes are foreign owned: he’s so upset about “Twiggy” Forrest’s Squadron Energy that he’s stopped wearing his boots.)
But I would be applying logic and that would be a mistake. Logic doesn’t come into it when it comes to Barnaby or politics. We vote with our gut and our family culture a lot of the time. The sense I have in years of reporting from his electorate is of a community that is defensive of their local member, even though he is not universally loved. The emotion is closer to this: “He may be a dickhead sometimes but he is our dickhead.”
Joyce’s self-reflections can be instructive. In a 2016 interview he identified the genius of Donald Trump in harnessing the scorn of opponents and riding it to greater glory, notwithstanding Trump’s “cruel and nasty” political positions.
“With some people, you throw poo at them and it scares them,” he said. “But other people just use it as fertiliser.”
And right there is the point. A little fun at the man’s expense – especially in an august organ such as this – will help him enormously in his own electorate. But I live to serve our country readers, and he is an influential member of the National party. Some attention must be paid.
The best conspiracy theories are built on a sniff of a fact and a general vibe. The truth is that a portion of rural people are pissed off with the fast and hard rollout of renewables and transmission lines. Companies are scrambling to harvest Australia’s inordinate sun and wind resources to decarbonise and make a buck after a decade of climate denial and dissembling – by Joyce’s own Coalition.
It doesn’t matter that the frantic pace is of their own making; the Coalition is more than ready to harness the resultant community grumblings.
Hence the nuclear option. I once lived with a builder who joked with clients, “I may be expensive but I am rough and slow.” As scientists have noted, nuclear power is expensive and slow. Peter Dutton says the first will be built in 13 years. It’s as optimistic a timeline as a client on Grand Designs vowing to be in by Christmas. But whether it is 13 or 15 or 20 years, it is enough to keep kicking cans down the road for long enough that voters will never know whether their power bill is higher unless they majored in comparative economics.
By all means build nukes if the market will do it and communities want it, but swift relief from energy bills it is not.
That may not matter. We never did get the $100 lamb roasts predicted by Joyce as a consequence of a carbon price all those years ago but Labor lost the election all the same.
The newsletter issues a similar call to arms: “You must take the action to defend your asset, use the anger to change the next election outcome and I will put anything on the line I have to in trying to get a resolution to this.”
As the Trump playbook shows, the facts don’t matter if you can declare your performance “a big victory”.
And if the media calls it out? You can turn that into fertiliser, once again.