Tag Archives: the nationals

Barnaby Eats Greens

14 Apr

The new leader of the Greens wants to increase focus on capturing a rural constituency:

Senator Milne has told a press conference that it’s time rural and regional Australia and the Greens really work together.

“We need environmental outcomes to sustain our economic outcomes, to actually support the kind of socieity and community we want,” she said.

[Well done, ABC sub-editors. Julia’s “Education Revolution” working more wonders, I see.]

“I intend to go out to rural and regional Australia to have this discussion, because rural and regional Australia has a critical role to play.”

She says that’s particularly in the context of food security and renewable energy.

“And I’m going out there as a country person to say to other country people that it’s time the Greens and country and rural and regional Australia really work together.”

Barnaby has some thoughts on that:

Leader of the Nationals Party in the Senate Barnaby Joyce, has described outgoing Greens leader Bob Brown as “an extremely capable politician”, who he greatly respects for his “political capacity”.

“He’s a very astute politician and I have a great respect for his political capacity even though on the vast majority of issues we were at polar opposites.

“Bob for me is like the logic of having water restrictions in Kununurra (Western Australia); it looked great on paper but it’s completely and utterly ridiculous in practice.”

Senator Joyce says he welcomes the new Greens leader Christine Milne’s pledge to work closely with rural Australia, but suggests she has a long way to go.

“I look forward to meeting Christine Milne and she can start by moving her office out to the country where mine is,

“Mine’s 550 kilometres away from the coast, Christine how far is yours?… I think it might be in Hobart.”

And more thoughts from Barnaby, this time in the Australian:

Senator Milne’s rural push provoked a sharp reaction from the Nationals, with Senate leader Barnaby Joyce labelling her an opportunist.

Senator Joyce said that while the Greens’ concern for the rapid development of the coal-seam gas industry was reflected in some rural communities, most other Greens policies were anti-bush.

“The Greens have a problem with coal-seam gas, as does the Coalition,” Senator Joyce said. “But the Greens also have problems with rodeos, irrigation, live cattle exports, and they want a 50 per cent top tax rate and death duties. They would have us living as hunter-gatherers scrambling for survival on the forest floor.

“I would welcome her (Senator Milne) in some of my communities. Any town hall, any time you want. My tactic would be to simply tell people what her policies are. People know in the back of their minds that the Greens’ policies are dangerous.”

Veteran Queensland Nationals senator Ron Boswell went further, warning that the disappearance of Senator Brown would make room for “the far Left” to push forward within the Greens. “Without Brown, the far Left and extremists will steamroll over the others and become the new reigning force within the Greens,” he said.

Interestingly, even some within the Labor party recognise the dangers of the Greens, and, who is their core constituency:

Privately, several senior Labor sources told The Weekend Australian they would closely watch for changes in the Greens under Senator Milne. “I worry about the tone of this obsessive attack on mining companies,” said one senior Labor MP, asking not to be named. “I know it goes down well in the coffee shops, but the resources sector is underpinning the Australian economy.”

The MP said Senator Brown held similar views, but was canny enough to know “when to stop and when to cut a deal”.

Victorian Labor MP Maria Vamvakinou predicted the Greens would struggle to maintain their discipline and would have to articulate the party’s policies in a more practical way. “With him gone they’ll attract a whole lot more scrutiny,” Ms Vamvakinou said. “I imagine people will now be more vigilant about what the party is about because he has gone.”

Interesting times indeed.

Barnaby is right.

Barnaby: Punters Close To Saying ‘A Pox On Both Your Houses’

8 Oct

Great article in today’s Australian, ‘United States’ Of Barnaby:

Joyce is known for his catchy and wild contortions of language. He says the verbal thunderbolts are based on the knowledge he has accrued on the street, in the front bar and from family. Abbott’s present assault on Labor’s carbon tax could have been crafted in the St George pub over a pot or 10.

Listening to Joyce in his Parliament House suite recently, with his pitch-perfect recall of voices, is akin to the United States of Barnaby. He can do his dad, mother-in-law, check-out chicks, a bloke who takes his son fishing in a tinny, an angry pensioner, a Labor apparatchik. Joyce is a one-man forum.

“Just as Gillard got herself into trouble with nutty policies, we had one; it was called Work Choices,” says Joyce, who found himself defending a “bloody weird” policy that favoured big business.

“I remember talking to my old man, who is a tough old bastard,” he says, slipping into the character of Joyce Sr. “Now correct me if I’m wrong, that 16-year-old kid is now going to negotiate with me for the wages I’m going to pay him? Well, that will be interesting because I’ll tell him I’m going to pay him nothing!”

“Where did Work Choices come from?” he then asks, channelling a drinker at the St George Hotel. “What was the problem you had to solve? Not your problem philosophically, your problem with me? Because this is about me.”

“I thought shit, this is crazy,” says Senator Joyce. “People started identifying themselves with a political jumper on and it was against us. I thought, ‘We are going to get smacked here.’ And we did. Bang. Whack.”

He welcomes the input of those urging Abbott to restore parts of the old workplace regime. But a return is pure folly: “It would be the height of insanity for us to say to the Australian people that we didn’t get it, what you said to us at the [2007] election. We have to be absolutely and utterly cautious.”

The punters are close to saying “a pox on both your houses” to the political class.

Joyce blames Gillard and the Greens, who are seen by folks in the regions and outer suburbs as “rich, upper-class white boys and frustrated housewives”.

“The person sitting behind a check-out or a shearers’ cook, it unnerves them. They feel, ‘I’m doing it tough in life. I don’t need any sort of crap.’ Carbon tax, what’s this? Gay marriage, what’s all this bullshit? Shutting down the Murray-Darling Basin. Then you’re shutting down fishing.

” ‘Then I can’t go there because he, Bob Brown, says I can’t put a line in there. Who’s he, who’s he in my life? I’m doing it tough,’ and they think those people arriving on boats, whether it’s right or not, are getting a better deal than them. They say, ‘I pay my taxes, my grandaddy fought for this country, they get better than me. I can’t fix my teeth. Where’s this off to, what are you doing?’

“Sometimes I think that Julia is being advised by a 12 1/2-year-old truant. Never in my wildest dreams would I go out on a podium as prime minister of Australia with the Greens anywhere near me. I’d say, ‘I’m running the show, not them. Me. I run it. On my head lies the responsibility. Get out of my shot, get out of my sight.’ ”

Joyce is startled by the level of animosity towards the Prime Minister and has found himself defending her as a decent person. “It is really sometimes quite scary. People literally run down the street with a mouth full of profanities about a woman that they’ve never met and you think, ‘That’s a bit unnerving.’ It’s almost like a split in a marriage. When it’s going, it’s going well and everything is forgivable. But once it splits, it is just this bile. ‘If I got down there, you know what I would do to that effing c. . .? Knock her head in.’ Calm down, lady, we’re sitting outside a paper shop, you don’t need to talk like that.”

Joyce says Gillard is standing on an ant’s nest about to be eaten by her own people: blue-collar, conservative voters. He then transitions into a low-paid farm worker and concreter: “I’ve got 600 bucks in my pocket for the week. I’m going to drink 50 of it. F . . k it, 80 of it, 100 of it. Missus, or my girlfriend or my partner, she wants 300 bucks. Then we’ve got to pay the rent, then we’ve got to pay the f . . king power. How’s that work? We have no money.

“Oh shit. Bugger. Buy a case of beer and invite my mates around. Still haven’t got money to pay the power. All right, I’m starting to get pissed off. Then someone says, ‘We’re going to cool the planet and we’re going to do that by jacking up the price of power.’ And they go, ‘f . .khead’. Then it works its way around the workshop, the shopfloor; it works its way around the checkout and they get it. They say, ‘Ah and why are we doing this? We’re cooling the planet. Oh yeah, right, like the Chinese are cooling the planet, is that how it works?’ And so a policy attracts intense hate.”

A pox on both their houses?

Indeed!

Barnaby is right about something else too.

It IS time for the Nats to “evolve into something broader” and “broaden their appeal”:

“Over the last year or so I’ve found the National to be very democratic, they are a smaller party and very democratic,” [Angry Anderson] said.

“Particularly in the early days, talking to Fiona Nash and Barnaby, they feel it’s time for the Nationals to evolve into something broader and fiercely represent the interests of rural communities and they want to broaden their appeal and their reach.”

Angry National

2 Oct

Picture: Ella Pellegrini | Source: The Sunday Telegraph

Aren’t we all?

If not, we should be.

Especially over the looming financial assault on the citizens of Australia by this government, via their unconstitutional, 100% dishonest carbon “tax”.

From today’s Daily Telegraph:

Angry Anderson has joined the Nationals and will run for a seat in the next election

He is angry about the carbon tax and he is doing something about it.

Angry Anderson has joined the Nationals with the intention of running for a seat at the next federal election.

“If between the party and I, we can agree, I feel I can best serve the Australian people on the national stage,” the 63-year-old rock singer told The Sunday Telegraph.

“I’ve always liked big stages. We’re in discussions at the moment – listen to me, all of a sudden I sound like a politician” he laughs.

The former Labor supporter said he chose the Nationals because he didn’t feel that he would be free enough to express his opinions in either of the major parties.

“I am a lapsed Labor supporter,” Anderson said.

“I have over the last 10 to 15 years drifted towards the conservative side of politics. I’ve said before I don’t want to be silenced by a major party.”

While Anderson cited the Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce as a key influence, he said it was “good friend” and NSW Liberal Upper House member Charlie Lynn who suggested he consider the Nationals “as more of a better fit”.

The former Rose Tattoo frontman said being drawn into politics was a natural extension of his community service work.

“You can reach a stage like I have where you’ve done as much as you can in your profession in my case music and a political career becomes an extension of the community work I’m doing,” he said.

Anderson has been a prominent campaigner against the carbon tax, appearing at rallies around the country.

The Nationals … and Barnaby in particular … were the first (and still, the only) political party in Australia to see through the global warming/climate change fraud, call BS on it, and outright oppose.

They remain the only political party in the country genuinely focussed on the most important issues this nation faces – such as food and water security.

You know what I’d like to see, dear reader?

I’d like to see the Nationals break their formal coalition with the Liberal Party – who are architects of a sneaky plan now stolen and implemented by the ALP to steal your super by stealth.

I’d like to see the Nationals go it alone … giving them complete freedom to say what they wish, adopt whatever policies they think best, and form post-election coalition/s with whomever they see fit.

Independence.

If we can’t have a Parliament of genuine Independents (rather than political party apparatchiks), each representing the true will of their local constituents, then an independent National Party would at least be a positive step in the right direction.

I’d even consider (sacré bleu!) joining an independent National party myself.

Barnaby Churchill?

19 Sep

Senator Joyce’s speech to the Nationals Federal Council 2011:

Warren Truss Unplugged: “You All Know That The PM LIED To You”

16 May

Brilliant off-the-cuff speech by Mr Warren Truss MP, leader of The Nationals, in Port Macquarie yesterday.

The man is a class act.

A true elder statesman. Speaking from the heart to several thousand fellow Australian elder statesmen and -women.

My opinion – Warren for PM.

Plug him.

Enjoy (apologies for occasional autofocus problems):

“The Prime Minister hasn’t been dishonest with you once, she’s been dishonest with you time and time and time again!”

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