When the Taroom cattle farmer Colin Einar Boyce was elected to the Queensland parliament in 2017, his strongest opposition came from One Nation.
Three years later, Boyce’s plain-spoken first term as a Liberal National party backbencher – which included crossing the floor on a mining rehabilitation bill and a climate speech that claimed we should “celebrate” global heating – had won over One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.
The minor party endorsed Boyce and declined to stand a candidate in his seat of Callide. His vote went up 24%. On ABC radio at the time, Boyce quoted the Chinese military general Sun Tzu.
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without going to battle,” he said. “That is exactly what I have done in Callide.”
This week Boyce announced a tilt at the Nationals leadership, claiming he was “furious” at the implosion of the Coalition. He said events in Canberra had left the Nationals “the nothing party”.
“I am not happy about it one little bit,” Boyce told 4CC radio in Gladstone.
“It could have been avoided but it wasn’t, but egos and personalities reign supreme unfortunately. A complete debacle.”
Boyce had been a steadfast backer of the former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, who recently defected to One Nation. Despite speculation he would also defect to One Nation, Boyce says he won’t leave the party he joined as a 20-year-old in the 1980s, but that it was “a distinct possibility” that others would defect.
Critics of Boyce – and there are many, including within his own party – say his position on the leadership makes little sense. They say he will likely have little support in the party room.
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Boyce was one of seven Nationals MPs who crossed the floor on the hate speech legislation that prompted Nationals resignations from the shadow cabinet, and ultimately caused the Coalition split.
He says his call for a leadership spill seeks to keep the Coalition together, but has also appeared to endorse a move against the Liberal leader, Sussan Ley.
“I don’t know how you salvage it in respect of the Liberal party leadership … but I’m quite sure the Liberal party people are reviewing the situation,” he told 4CC.
Boyce left the Queensland parliament in 2022 and won the federal seat of Flynn. In both parliaments, he has been a steadfast opponent of net zero climate policies and renewable energy.
He said of his decision to cross the floor over a bill to establish a mining rehabilitation commissioner: “For me it was the Alamo – make a stand, fix bayonets and over the top.”
At the 2020 state election, Boyce ran Facebook advertisements calling renewable energy a “fantasy”.
The following year, after an explosion at the Callide coal-fired power station, he said the argument against building new coal plants was “driven by the mind-numbing, eco-Marxist millennials and upper middle-class ‘wokes’ who have been indoctrinated with some quasi-religious belief that coal is bad and carbon dioxide is poisoning the planet”.
Boyce is a founding member of the Saltbush Club that promotes climate science denial and claims there is no climate emergency. Before the 2024 election, Guardian Australia revealed that Boyce told a group of climate science deniers that blackouts were “a big political opportunity”. He also said he had urged fellow MPs to adopt a “do nothing strategy” that would allow power outages and build opposition to net zero policies.
Boyce, 62, has never previously been viewed by his colleagues – in Queensland or Canberra – as a serious candidate for the frontbench. His opponents have pointed this out, too.
“I will at least give Colin Boyce his due,” the former Queensland deputy premier Cameron Dick said in the state parliament in 2022.
“Colin Boyce was a crank, but at least he never pretended to be anything else. Colin Boyce was a member of the LNP who gave comfort to those who deny science and spout conspiracy theories, but he did so from the backbench.”
