Senator Andrew Bartlett
Saturday, April 16, 2005
 
James Joyce’s son enters the Senate

On my recent visit to Birdsville, I met the newly elected Queensland National Party Senator, Barnaby Joyce and had the chance to have a short chat with him (as described here). There is a profile piece on him in today’s Age which gives a few insights into his character and how he might behave.

The Senate changeover which occurs on 1st July will not just see the Coalition government gain full control for the first time in 24 years. It will also see a higher number of new people entering (and incumbents departing) at a Senate changeover since proportional representation was introduced in the 1940s - a fact that does not seem to have been widely noticed.

There are 76 Senators, 36 of whom will commence new terms on July 1st. 15 of those seats will be held by newly elected people (full list at end of this piece)[1]. This makes it even harder to predict the Senate dynamics, but early indications are that Barnaby Joyce could be one of the most pivotal of the new Senators, at least in the early stages. While I don’t believe anyone can really predict how the new Senate will behave, I doubt there will be much floor-crossing. However, there have certainly been enough statements made to suggest there will be sufficient support from Coalition Senators to enable the Senate to continue to perform some degree of independent scrutiny of the Government.

The list in The Age of Barnaby’s priorities – “getting the same phone services for the same price in the country as in the cities, different tax rates for people in regional zones, ethanol in every petrol tank, and weakening the power of Coles and Woolworths” – are all ones that I could support and indeed mostly ones the Democrats have a strong record on (although I’m not sure absolutely identical phone services between city and country are feasible, but far greater parity certainly is). On the other hand, I’m not so keen on his support for the current level of water extraction for irrigation of crops like cotton and I suspect he will take a far more conservative approach on social issues than I am comfortable with.

However, the key question is not what he believes but how will he behave? I wouldn’t want to draw too much out of a single conversation with him, nor divulge more than would be appropriate, but I do think he will be someone who will take an independent approach. The two key quotes from the Age article are that he won’t be like Bob Katter (which I take to mean he won’t chuck bombs around just because he’s unhappy about something), but he also thinks that fellow Queensland National Senator Ron Boswell is a ‘lost cause’ whose ‘way of doing things is over’. I’m not quite sure where the middle ground is between those two statements, but I think that’s where Barnaby will be genuinely aiming for.

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[1] Only 8 of the 15 outgoing Senators were directly defeated at the election, all but two of them minor party or Independent Senators, but many of the others were defeated in party pre-selections or announced retirements in the face of inevitable pre-selection defeats. The full list of incoming and outgoing can be found at this site. One of the retiring Senators, NSW Liberal John Tierney, has retired a couple of months early and his vacancy will be filled by the person elected last year, Concetta Fierravanti –Wells.


posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Saturday, April 16, 2005 Permalink
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