Five strange things about Australia’s next deputy prime minister
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Ross Caldwell • 10th February 2016
Flickr / Apple and Pear Australia Ltd (CC BY 2.0)
The Nationals’ Barnaby Joyce is widely tipped to be Australia’s next deputy prime minister. Uh oh.
The Nationals’ Member for New England, Barnaby Joyce is set to become Australia’s second most powerful politician.
Oh boy.
Once deputy prime minister Warren Truss stands down from the leadership, it looks like there will be more of this to look forward to…
1. That time he talked about mining Antarctica
Back in 2006, Barnaby went down to Antarctica for a month-long visit and returned extolling the beauty of “the vastness of nature itself”. See, Australia has staked a claim to nearly 5.9m square kilometres of Antarctica and has even signed an
agreement not to mine in Antarctica.
But that didn’t stop Barnaby from floating the idea of mining Antarctica, telling
ABC World Today that “we can really realise that [mining’s] the game… or we can stick our head in the snow”.
“Do I turn my head and allow another country to exploit my resource… or do I position myself in such a way as I’m going to exploit it myself before they get there,” said Barnaby.
Uhuh.
If someone else wants to mine a pristine landscape we may as well get there first rather than, you know, try to stop them…
2. Opposed a lifesaving cervical cancer drug
The year 2006 was definitely an exciting time for Barnaby. In addition to mining Antarctica, another of Barnaby’s bright ideas was to oppose the approval of a world-first cervical cancer drug, Gardasil.
Nowadays Gardasil is regularly administered to girls and boys during their first year of high school under the national immunisation program. Testing has shown the vaccine to be 100 per cent effective in vaccinating women against multiple strains of human papilloma virus that collectively cause 70 per cent of cervical cancers.
Quoted in
The Australian on 27 January that year, Barnaby warned about approving the vaccine due to “the psychological implications or the social implications”.
“There might be an overwhelming (public) backlash from people saying ‘don’t you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a license to be promiscuous’,” said Barnaby.
3. Doesn’t believe in climate change (and defended himself by invoking the Holocaust)
Barnaby has a long-standing opposition to the science behind climate change (by the way,
97 per cent of climate scientists agree that climate change is very likely due to human activity).
Barnaby has spoken quite a lot about climate change. He’s
told the Senate that he has “serious doubt about our ability to change the climate” and that “the climate change debate is an ongoing debate”.
Barnaby, it’s only an ongoing debate because people refuse to accept the science.
To Barnaby’s “credit”, he at least acknowledges he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. When
speaking to Jane Cadzow in 2010, he said he doesn’t believe that global warming is as bad as everyone says.
“Why do I say that…not because I have the factual premise to debunk them on the science,” Barnaby explained.
You could wish that these were just off-hand comments from a younger, unwise Barnaby, but sadly not. In 2012, he was
reported saying the debate about whether humans were causing climate change was “an indulgent and irrelevant debate because, even if climate changes turns out to exist one day, we will have absolutely no impact on it whatsoever”.
Oh and when he was asked if he was concerned about being branded as a “climate change denier” he
said that he finds “the whole term repugnant. Climate change denier, like Holocaust denier…”.
4. He’s also not a fan of abortion
Time and time again, Barnaby has come out as anti-abortion. Believe what you want about it, but why does Barnaby have the right to tell women what to do with their bodies?
In 2004 Barnaby told
Mark Colvin of ABC PM that he’s “pro-life, unashamedly pro-life” and that his “personal philosophy is anti-abortion”.
Not content with simply having his own views, Barnaby
declared in 2005 his greatest achievement as a parliamentarian would be to “stop abortion”.
Barnaby
called abortion “the slavery debate of our time” and
said he is “philosophically opposed” to Medicare paying for abortions.
In 2005-6 when debate was swirling around legalising the abortion pill RU486, Barnaby even likened the drug to the act of murder:
“So if I shoot a woman in the abdomen and do not kill her but kill the baby, I have not actually committed a crime,” Barnaby argued before the Community Affairs Legislation committee.
Thankfully, Women’s Electoral Lobby ACT convenor Rosyln Dundas pointed out the absurdity of Barnaby’s argument and corrected him saying: “No, you actually have committed a crime by shooting a woman.”
One can but hope Barnaby’s oratory skills have improved in the decade since.
5. Gloated about rolling Turnbull
In yet another example of the first rule of being a politician, “never tweet”, Barnaby may have to face some awkward times in the Cabinet room. Why? Well this
tweet might be one reason…
Never tweet Barnable, never tweet.
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Ross Caldwell
