As a young journo in Queensland in the mid-1980s, in the last years of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s coherency-challenged, multi-decadal reign as an ultra-conservative premier, I recall the media protecting him as a matter of course – even though he derided talking to them as “feeding the chooks”.
In 1985 Sunday Mail writer Ian Miller published a 1500-word political column quoting a speech by Sir Joh in Darwin verbatim, interspersed only with the occasional “… and Sir Joh went on”.
It was a linguistically-twisted, logic-deprived trainwreck. The Premier’s media minders were outraged, and so were many journalists.
Quoting what he actually said? It just wasn’t the done thing. George Orwell would have been amused, however.
If Sir Joh has a rhetorical successor, and agrarian socialist fellow traveller, it’s Barnaby Joyce. (To be entirely fair, though, Joyce is a lot more articulate, and has a touch of oratorical timing, but it’s just that he’s equally bizarre.)
Once the National Party Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, Joyce is still a federal Opposition frontbencher (Veterans Affairs), and a politically influential figure after what can only be described as a turbulent career.
It’s a long way from Walcha, Joyce’s home territory in his country NSW electorate of New England, to the Guildford Leagues Club in western Sydney, in the federal seat of McMahon, held by the Labor government’s Climate and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen.
But that’s where Joyce turned up last Sunday, as a surprise extra speaker at what was a pale imitation of a MAGA gathering.
“Making Australia great again” was very much on Joyce’s mind. And these days he’s highly fixated on the perceived evils of renewable energy, or “intermittent power” as he lampoons solar and wind.
So we should quote him verbatim, in selected snippets at least, and noting that while we haven’t fact-checked the following, this doesn’t mean we or you should accept all or any of it as being factual.
Here we go.
Warming up the small but partisan crowd…
What we are trying to do, ladies and gentlemen, is stop our nation being driven into the dirt. What they are doing is they are driving our economy into the dirt.
Introducing the geopolitical fear factor…
We have one job in this nation, with the circumstances that are before us, which are so evident in places such as the South China Sea, that are so evident in the United States saying they are not going to be importing any more Chinese electric vehicles. The world is changing, the comparative power that used to be there, Pax Americana, where America just reigned supreme, it’s still by far the strongest, but the comparative power is changing.
Hold on, there was “one job”…
So we have one job, one job, and that job ladies and gentlemen is to make Australia as powerful as possible, as quickly as possible. As powerful as possible, as quickly as possible. That is our job.
You can see Joyce has the dramatic repetition thing down pat. But there’s a problem…
Now what we have, ladies and gentlemen, is insanity. We have decided to destroy our country. We have shut down our baseload coal, and we have now decided to transition, as insane as it sounds, to Australia running on intermittent power. That no other nation on earth can do. We can’t even make the things that are going to run on intermittent power, but somehow we are going to run the nation on intermittent power.
Fortunately, Joyce was paying attention back in his Catholic school days…
I’ll tell you an old Jesuit trick. I went to a Jesuit school. Here’s an old Jesuit trick. Very clever the Jesuits. What you do to win an argument is you define the topic. You define the topic. You define the topic and you can win any argument.
Joyce points at the speaker’s lectern…
I can say that is a podium. The first thing I say is a podium is an animal with four legs and a horn, and now I can have the debate and I’d win.
There is a point coming here…
You see what they did with this intermittent power is they gave us the [unintelligible word] beautiful terms, it’s renewable, it’s renewable, and we all started repeating them, we did the worst thing out, we started repeating them, saying it’s renewable. There is nothing renewable about it. It is future obsolete landfill… it is not renewable, they are intermittent power.
Time to rile them up via the hip pocket nerve, Joyce points to audience members…
That intermittent power, underwritten by you, by you, in things called capacity investment schemes, which you can’t see, you’re the taxpayer, you can’t see them, they’re commercial in confidence, and these intermittent power precincts are owned overwhelmingly by foreign multinationals and domestic billionaires.
Now rub it in…
You good people, in McMahon in Sydney, you’ve given these people a rolled gold annuity. An annuity that even if they produce no power, they get paid. They get paid. What a trick on you. On you. That’s why it’s certainly not renewable. It’s not really even power. They’re a massive swindle. They’re swindle factories. They’re, let’s do the Jesuits’ trick, and redefine them. They’re now swindle factories.
As the Donald might say, it”s SAD, VERY SAD…
Most importantly, where it really hurts, is you see a person. This is Australia. We are so blessed, we are so lucky, so fortunate, coal and gas and uranium and iron ore, and manganese [unintelligible words]. You name it, we’ve got it, and we have people who’ve been forced out of their houses to live in a car, with a job, with a job, they’re living in a car in Australia. We’ve done this to them because of this new cult-like attachment to intermittent power.
A call to action from the bush orator…
I think that’s the message we’ve got to resonate around Sydney. We’ve gotta, you’ve gotta take the country back, and it’s gotta start with you because everyone else has drunk the Kool Aid on this one… We’ve gotta crack the glass. We’ve gotta crack glass, smash glass, push button on reality, boom. Smash glass, push reality button. Because it’s not going to emanate from Canberra, it’s not going to emanate from Canberra, it’s going to emanate from you.
If you are feeling powerless, Jesus is the answer…
There was this bloke once, you might have heard of him … He lived in this busted-arse village, a long time ago. Not much was really happening in that area, it was a long way from the place that really mattered, which at that time was Rome. Anyway, his name was Jesus Christ, and he had 12 mates, and they completely changed the world, right, so don’t think you are powerless, just get motivated. Get motivated.
People power and a place in history…
If we turn this show around, you’ll think about the time you went to Guildford, to the Guildford Leagues Club, and you rallied with other people, and you can say I was part of the process that got my nation back. I was part of a process that started to have that epiphany of the Australian people that you cannot run it on intermittent power, that you must become strong.
A legacy for future generations…
We are driving our economy into the dirt and we have before us the most precarious times in our nation’s history, and you are either going to hand on to your children and your grandchildren a stronger nation which they have a chance to be safe in, or you are going to stand by and do nothing, and hand your children and your grandchildren weakness. And that is an incredibly selfish thing to do, to say I had a safe life, but to say to my children and my grandchildren, you won’t, you won’t.
In case you missed it, intermittent power and Chris Bowen are to blame (mocking tone)…
And you want to know why? Because I had a fascination in intermittent power, and I, single-handedly, was going to change the temperature of the globe, but I’m a God, and I can do that. I was going to do it from this room in Canberra. I can’t change the flag on the flagpole, if I got a flat tyre I’ll have to ring the NRMA, but I can change the temperature of the globe, and you know what, everyone believed him.
A final message, anticipating his address being picked up in the news, and dissected by Bowen…
You’ll all be crazy people, and I’ll be, you know, Barnaby the hillbilly, but it’s all right, because we’re going to win.
FOOTNOTE: Barnaby Joyce made his unscheduled appearance in Guildford at an Environment and Energy Forum, hosted by the anti-renewables and pro-coal, pro-gas and pro-nuclear National Rational Energy Network (NREN). Joyce’s wife, political journalist Vikki Campion, was the advertised moderator for two speaker panels. The event overtly aimed to bring right-wing anger from the bush to the big smoke, on Chris Bowen’s doorstep. Less than 100 people attended. Joyce was by far the most entertaining speaker.
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Looks Good.