You may have missed it but this week Barnaby Joyce had his big moment – as a newish Nationals leader releasing his agriculture policy.
It is a fine line between pleasure and pain, as Chrissy Amphlett sang. Just months after making it to the top of the tree in politics, Joyce is trying to simultaneously crisscross the country to shore up his fellow National party candidates while fighting off a challenge from the former independent MP Tony Windsor.
All sides consider the competition between Joyce and Windsor a 50-50 prospect, so it is possible the agriculture minister may have a short shelf life.
But for the minute, the Coalition’s agriculture policy has Barnaby written all over it. He says it is worth $240m but the spending is not clearly set out. It is short on detail, long on broad and airy ideas.
At the heart of it is what has been known around the Nats as the “Barnaby bank”. A future Regional Investment Corporation (RIC) will streamline existing concessional loans already delivered for drought, drought recovery, water infrastructure and farm finance into a single administrator. Those loans are currently worth $4.5bn.
At the moment, loans are delivered (and contributed to) by the states. Joyce’s proposal essentially aims to remove the states’ delivery role while still expecting the states to contribute funding. There is no detail. No guidelines.
Joyce insists such a bank is possible under the constitution, while having previously ruled it out because of the constitution and because the money would go towards “setting up buildings and computers and wages and salaries”.
This week at the launch, he said: “I think it is constitutionally possible.”
“The Commonwealth Development Bank was done in the past. If we can get the Commonwealth Development Bank working, I’m sure we can get this working.”
The backstory is that Joyce’s father got a start with the Commonwealth Development Bank and he has long harboured dreams of a rural development bank.
By way of example, he cites his time employed with the Queensland Industry Development Corporation when the government farm financier provided money to a goat abattoir in Charleville. It is now the largest employer in the town.
But this would suggest that the RIC would morph from a concessional loan facility to a rural development bank but, again, there is no detail on this.
The rest of the agriculture policy can be best described as a grab bag.
There is $2m for a commodity milk price index that would provide dairy farmers stung by the recent price collapse with better information for negotiating contracts. There is $20m to eradicate invasive pests.
There is $3m for Casino Beef Week and $4m for research and development into the potential for a northern rice industry. Another $1.2m for research and development for the thoroughbred industry has been announced, which will be handy for his seat of New England, given one quarter of breeders are in the Hunter. (The upper Hunter has been redistributed into the seat of New England.)
There is a decentralisation policy called centres of excellence in agriculture, which will look at linking regional universities with industry research organisations. There are no examples provided.
But it comes after the contentious decision to relocate the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority to Armidale (also in his own electorate). Scientists and peak farm sector groups are opposed to the plan.
There is $8.3m to complete the global assurance program for the live export industry – a regular issue that lands on his desk.
Other policies, such as the use of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) for agriculture, look decidedly non-Barnaby – given the Coalition wanted to kill the corporation.
It becomes Barnabised when he is asked what sort of agricultural examples could come out of a link between CEFC and agriculture.
“We’re building dams,” he said in Lismore.
“Dams can produce hydroelectricity and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, if it wants to work with us building dams to produce hydroelectricity, zero emissions and the off take is also water, which we can use for agriculture and domestic water purposes.
“We won’t be doing that around here because they don’t like dams around here but there are plenty of other places that do.”
A development bank and dams. What is missing? Here are just two. Anything about climate change, surely the biggest issue facing agriculture. Any detail about a compromise on the backpacker tax, which is causing huge uncertainty in the horticulture industry.
His Labor counterpart, Joel Fitzgibbon, who has yet to release Labor’s agriculture policy, is scathing.
“The definition of madness is doing same things over and over again,” Fitzgibbon said.
“He is obsessed with these loans, so that he can announce the total capital value rather than the government contribution. The single administrator [Regional Investment Corporation] is a policy designed to fail. He has announced it pre-election and when it fails post-election, he will blame someone else.”
By way of preview, Fitzgibbon announced $75m to deal improve productivity by dealing with the challenges of invasive species, pest animals, plant disease and weeds. But still no detail.
“[The policy will deal] with the changing climate and the challenges around that (and) making sure that farmers are adapting and embracing best management practice plans etc and of course lifting productivity,” he told The Land.
While the RIC announcement was at the National Press Club’s leaders address, the rest of the agriculture policy was left to the seat of Page on Thursday, where Nationals MP Kevin Hogan faces a struggle to retain his seat against former MP and Labor candidate Janelle Saffin.
Page represents a shifting demographic on the north coast of NSW. While the inland part of the seat represents the old farm demographic, the coast is much more diverse – alternative lifestyle communities mixed with large regional towns. The state seat of Ballina, which overlays part of Page, moved from National to Green and is now held by Tamara Smith.
But the launch site is in Casino, an inland beef-producing district and Joyce is also there to open Primex, the agricultural field day. He is happy as a pig in poo. This is his crowd and he appears to be loved.
Allan Partridge, a cane farmer and contractor from Condong, looks quizzically when I ask whom he will support in the election.
“The National party – I’m a cane farmer,” he says as if I were a bit thick.
Alan Sivewright is watching Joyce and Hogan from his brahman cattle stall.
“What do I think?” he says. “Bloody good man.”
He calls his granddaughter over.
“Who are you going to vote for?” I ask her.
“When?
“In the election,” her grandfather says.
“What election?”
“You’re old enough to vote now,” Sivewright says. “You’re voting for the National party. That bloke.” He thumbs in the direction of Hogan and Joyce.
“Oh yeah. Him.”
Part of Joyce’s electoral appeal to the agriculture sector is as the non-politician politician. He is scathing of political robots who crop and clip language into neat soundbites and jokes about talking points, the method politicians use to get across the messages of the day in a digestible package.
“I’ve always heard that people wanted a different form of politics where people were more open but what always frustrates me is when you are more open ... when you do discuss things, you get pilloried for it,” he told Four Corners.
“You almost feel like saying back to the fourth estate, ‘Well hang on, when I speak my mind, you ridicule it and when I speak in sort of the garbled media message, palaver, you know, you know, rubbish, you say, well, you’re not being authentic’.”
Certainly no one has his delivery, his often tortured language that, paradoxically, has the capacity to cut through if he really wants to deliver a message. If he doesn’t want to deliver an answer, he is equally effective at scrambling the signal.
But politics is one thing. Policy is another. And on the agricultural policy, there is not a clear cogent answer from Joyce so far. There is simply not enough detail in this election policy, given the portfolio has just gone through a long white paper process.
