Barnaby Joyce has a big job he wants to get on with. He's writing a book to set out his agenda: "A lot of it will be politically incorrect - I want to shock, I want to startle people into action," he tells me. To do what, exactly? "To give greater economic and personal advancement to the people in the weatherboard and iron in the regional towns."
It's about their economic wellbeing and their social standing. "I'm writing a comparative analysis" that looks at "the social opprobrium attached to poor white people in Australia's towns and regions." Joyce doesn't use the word, but it's about recovering respect. Respect for the people who live outside the big cities and feel overlooked.
It's the same constituency that put Donald Trump in the White House, took Britain out of the European Union and put the Alternative for Germany Party in the Bundestag. He wants to know why it's considered socially acceptable to dismiss them, to be rude about them: "People feel they can denigrate them with impunity. You can't denigrate Asian Australians or Muslim Australians or gay or lesbian or transgender Australians but if they come from a country town you can call them a hayseed or a redneck and it's OK."
"It's a form of antagonism, being on the outer and they resolve that in familiar ways including voting for One Nation. How do we have a cogent way of dealing with this - you can't just close your eyes and hope they go away."
Illustration: John Shakespeare
Is he proposing to take this constituency away from One Nation and bring them back into the mainstream? "Yes," replies the leader of the National Party."I will draw on my own experience growing up. People don't understand what it's like for kids to go to school where some of the kids are too young to be there - three or four years old. They shouldn't have kids in the classroom who are still defecating in their pants."
Why are they there? Because there's no parents at home - if they don't work, they're poor, and there aren't the child care places to look after them."
His nemesis, Tony Windsor, has a particularly low regard for Joyce. The man who tried to take Joyce's NSW seat of New England at last year's election thinks that he is a "clown". He thinks Joyce sells shallow, short-term policies that don't truly help the lives of country people. But the former independent MP does give Joyce some credence on his ability to pursue One Nation: "Barnaby is good at all that retail politics stuff," concedes Windsor.
And he points out the long-standing utility of the Nationals as the junior partner in the Coalition: "It's the old John Howard scenario. Privately Howard would say, 'We leave those blokes [Nationals] out there - we don't want to amalgamate with them - and they clean up these One Nation people for us." They helped Howard defeat Pauline Hanson and her movement the last time she was in Parliament.
Another National, Senator Fiona Nash has been booted.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
A separate party, in other words, with a separate identity allows the Coalition to cast a wider electoral net. The Liberals can appeal to the urban aspirational classes and social moderates while the Nationals offer bucolic boondoggles and social conservatism.
There is a long-standing question about the Nationals. How effective are they? How can they win support for their priorities when they clash with those of their dominant Coalition member? Can Joyce give an example where the Nationals have prevailed over the Liberals on a major policy? "We never supported a clean energy target," he says. "We were certainly instrumental in moving the agenda to keep coal-fired power."
Former Independent MP Tony Windsor won't stand against Barnaby Joyce.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
The Turnbull government's decision to dismiss the recommendation of Chief Scientist Alan Finkel to set up a clean energy target was widely regarded as a surrender to the angry agitation by Tony Abbott and a small number of other Liberal conservatives such as Craig Kelly.But Joyce is proudly taking credit - or perhaps responsibility - for the Nationals.
It wasn't a love of coal, however: "I didn't give a toss for where power comes from, but one of the greatest afflictions for people in the weatherboard and iron is they can't afford power, and they suffer the social humiliation of being poor."
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has his back to the wall.Credit: Andrew Meares
This, incidentally, is the sort of right-wing populism that drives Tony Windsor, himself a former member of the Nationals, absolutely crazy. The renewable energy target and all other "green scheme" policies are the smallest of five factors that have pushed up power prices, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's comprehensive report published this month.
The ACCC found the average cost of power rose by 63 per cent in the last decade. By far the biggest contributor was the cost of new spending on the transmission system - the so-called gold-plating, or overinvestment, in poles and wires. That was responsible for 48 per cent of the rise. The rise in wholesale electricity prices was next at 22 per cent. So called "green" schemes added a mere 7 per cent. And, in future, renewable energy is expected to be the cheapest source of new electricity. Whereas the expected cost of climate change in the country will be incalculable.
Barnaby Joyce in Parliament on Friday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
"Even four or five years ago, a lot of farmers said, 'oh climate change, that's a load of bull', so it was easy for Tony Abbott and Barnaby to get away from dealing with it," Windsor tells me. Indeed, dismissing climate change has been a hallmark of Joyce's political career. "But now, in Moree, for instance, which isn't in the New England electorate but it's not far, there were 55 days straight where the maximum temperature was over 35 degrees. Plants can't grow in that environment. The extremes are growing more common."People are starting to wake up. If you have 10, 20, 30 days of extra heat or frost or torrential rain, the dynamics of dryland country change dramatically.
"We are the ones in the front line. If you live in Sydney or Melbourne you just put in a bigger airconditioner. In agriculture it's going to be very difficult to deal with. We don't have the soft European climate to begin with. People are saying, 'if this stuff is real, we need to start doing something about it.'"
But Joyce, says Windsor, is not interested in long-term causes and solutions. " Decentralised power" - meaning solar and wind - "can create new jobs in the regions." But Joyce by sticking with coal, is "burning up another few years on this bullshit." He acknowledges that Barnaby's "bullshit" is appealing for many voters, nonetheless. "In a shootout", a byelection in other words, "Barnaby goes straight to the retail stuff, straight to the price of electricity, and that suits a lot of people."
It's these sort of frustrations that have kept Windsor angry and energised. "I'm bloody ashamed of what's going on down there in Canberra, I'm still interested in the issues. By and large the issues haven't changed" since he entered an agreement to support the Gillard government from 2010-13 as the independent member for New England. "Climate change, renewable energy, the Liverpool Plains, the NBN, Gonski-type needs-based school funding."
Illustration: Jim Pavlidis.
But Windsor isn't ashamed or interested enough to stand against Joyce again. He announced on Friday that "my heart isn't quite in it", mainly for personal reasons. And the votes weren't in it. According to the Coalition's internal polling, Joyce has a primary vote of 57 per cent, an enormous advantage, against 16 per cent for Windsor. Polling conducted last month for a less sympathetic organisation, the centre-left Australia Institute, isn't quite so emphatic but still gives Joyce a commanding lead - a primary vote of 45 per cent against 27 per cent for Windsor. Labor registered a mere 8 per cent.
Joyce's priorities are very different to Windsor's, even beyond power and climate change. Infrastructure, such as building the inland rail freight line from Melbourne to Brisbane, is at the top of the former deputy prime minister's list. The government is allocating $840 million to begin the project. "If you get the rail corridor right between the major cities, you get growth in the smaller cities in between," he says.
Decentralisation is another priority. Labor describes Joyce's decision to move the Australian Pesticides and Veterinarian Medicines Authority from Canberra to Armidale in his electorate as a disaster - wasting tens of millions of dollars, losing the expertise of staff who are leaving rather than relocating with only 11 out of 216 showing interest, endangering human and animal health. Joyce says it's a great success: "They're starting to improve the time taken to consider pending applications and 450 people have applied for jobs in Armidale. The cost of the relocation is the same as building a new fence around Parliament House. We're spending money in Canberra but we're investing in the regions too."
And he says that he is keen to keep driving overseas new trade deals "on things like nectarines that people thought didn't matter, but when the deputy prime minister of Australia asks, 'Can you help us out with this?', then it does matter."
Note that all these agenda items are in territory where a member of an incumbent government - especially an incumbent deputy prime minister - has an inherent advantage. It's the government that controls infrastructure spending, decentralisation and trade negotiations. Joyce will campaign on his choice of turf, territory where an insurgent can't compete. An insurgent has to campaign on anger and protest, and that's One Nation's specialisation.
Pauline Hanson's party didn't run a candidate in New England last time and it's not clear whether it will this time.The Australia Institute poll last month found 10 per cent support for a notional One Nation candidate. With Windsor out of contention, however, the field is more open. And anything is possible in politics.
Joyce will not be able relax. It's an unpredictable business and the Murdoch newspapers have carried unsourced rumours of unspecified marital difficulties. "The campaign will be dirty," he predicts, "because it's such a great prize to knock off a deputy prime minister". Especially such a shrewd one.
His approach is bifurcated. He is deputy prime minister and takes advantage of incumbency to promise more government-directed benefits for his electorate - infrastructure, decentralisation of government agencies, trade deals. Yet he also talks like an angry outsider appealing to the alienation of "poor white people". He is the very embodiment of the establishment, promising largesse, yet he musters anti-elite anger as well, appealing to both the satisfied and the seething, the fattened and the forgotten. All at once, all things to all people. This is designed to shut One Nation out. They can seethe but can't satisfy - they are a party of protest.
He won't make a lot of progress on the book for the next five weeks. It's not much use knowing where he stands if he has nowhere to sit. He's concentrating everything he has on winning. "Hell yes, the job's not done."
Peter Hartcher is the political editor.