Charles Dickens often created characters whose physical appearance reflected their personal values. Barnaby Joyce, the Akubra-wearing, tomato-red champion of mining and agricultural capital, could have emerged from a Dickens novel set in the VIP section of the horse races. Joyce’s long career in Australian politics is full of scandals and gaffes, including when he was filmed sprawling, drunk, on a Canberra footpath in 2024, or most recently screaming at his dog mid-interview with the ABC. But Joyce is no mere buffoon; he is a calculating politician with strong ties to Australia’s right-wing establishment and some of its most powerful capitalists.
The recent defection of the former leader of the Nationals and three-time deputy prime minister to One Nation has been an important boost for the surging far-right party. Most notably, Joyce played a vital role in securing Gina Rinehart’s high profile, and lavish, support. The two have enjoyed a long political partnership. Joyce was flying on Rinehart’s private jet as early as 2011. In 2017, Rinehart gave him $40,000 as part of a “champion of farming” award. According to Joyce’s 2018 memoir Weatherboard and Iron, it’s a real problem that Australia has only one of her—we need twenty.
Joyce’s role in bringing establishment connections to One Nation has not stopped at Rinehart. In an interview with the Saturday Paper earlier this year, he bragged: “I can assure you of another thing: she ain’t the only one. I’ve got a lot of substantial supporters and they are approaching me. I don’t have to approach them”. The National Party is dominated by agribusiness, mining capital and rural business owners. Joyce wants to bring his connections to these layers, built over two decades as a leading Nationals powerbroker, to One Nation. He is also crucial to the party’s effort to peel off more of the Nationals membership and voter base.
That Joyce has walked away from his former colleagues in the Coalition and thrown in his lot with Pauline Hanson comes as no great shock. He has long been one of the country’s most prominent far-right figures.
The Nationals are bitterly hostile to workers and the oppressed, and are the political embodiment of rural reaction. Joyce personified this. He championed every piece of anti-worker legislation and pro-rich policy of the Coalition. He, like much of the Australian right, bemoans “big government” and government interference in the personal lives of citizens. But it’s classic right-wing hypocrisy. Joyce wants mining bosses and farmers to be able to do whatever they like, free from any pesky regulation, yet he consistently argues, and votes, to restrict the rights of workers and the oppressed.
Joyce has always been an odious bigot. In 2006, he opposed adding Gardasil to the vaccination schedule on the basis it would give his then “twelve-year-old daughter a license to be promiscuous”. Gardasil protects women from HPV, which causes 70 percent of cervical cancer cases. Joyce is one of the most vocal opponents of abortion rights in the country, speaking at anti-abortion rallies as both a Nationals and One Nation MP in 2019 and 2026 respectively. He also campaigned against marriage equality.
Joyce was a key opponent of net zero policies within the coalition, fitting his role as mouthpiece for the mining bosses. His hostility to even the most cynical of greenwashing, alongside his relegation to the backbench, was partly behind his shift to One Nation. In 2012, he said even talking about the climate is an “indulgent and irrelevant debate”. In 2019, he posted a bizarre Christmas Eve video claiming that all who do not understand that God is the solution to climate change are “fools” who are “going to get nailed”. He opposes any measures that limit the ability of rich farmers to drain the Murray-Darling for cash crops. This all fits neatly with the drill-baby-drill politics of One Nation.
Joyce has long espoused the politics of racial grievance that is core to One Nation. In Weatherboard and Iron (in which he comes across as equal parts Donald Trump, John Howard and Boggis from Fantastic Mr Fox), he paints himself as a champion of poor white people against the woke inner-city elite. Joyce was a prominent part of the racist “No” campaign against the Voice to Parliament. In an interview with Andrew Bolt, he compared constitutional recognition for Aboriginal people to Nazi race laws, specifically the Civil Service Act of Germany in 1933—one of the earliest pieces of antisemitic legislation passed by the Nazis.
Now in One Nation, Joyce is turning up the bigotry. He recently compared Muslim migrants to cattle in a racist rant, stating: “If you’re getting cattle in from a certain seller, and there’s an unreasonable number that just don’t work when they get off a truck, well, you don’t buy them anymore”. Such dehumanising Islamophobia was Joyce’s attempt to defend One Nation from accusations of racism.
Joyce’s defection to One Nation is both caused by and accelerating the recomposition of the Australian right. Sections of far-right politicians, donors and voters who were creatures of the Coalition are now jumping to One Nation, whether through personal grievance, a shift to the right, or the sense that the Coalition is heading nowhere fast. Joyce and those like him are a reminder that there has long been a far-right scene in Australian politics—One Nation is cohering that scene into a more aggressive force.
