Editorial
Beet-red selfishness

Barnaby Joyce was on a street in New York when he realised his trousers had split, an experience he described as “a new fresh breezy free feeling”. He was on a street in Canberra when he lay on his back like a recently poisoned cockroach and rambled drunkenly into his phone.

In New York, the hole in his pants was so large he couldn’t conceal it even with his satchel. It was obvious to onlookers that he was “wearing red grundies”. His wife, on whom he hadn’t yet cheated, making his press secretary pregnant, then casting doubt on the child’s paternity, calling it “a grey area”, helped fasten the tear with a safety pin.

Joyce says it looked and felt as if he was wearing a nappy. He has always had the nature of a child, not the innocence but the neediness. He is always crying out for love and attention.

“If there is a parable that comes from this experience,” he says, “it would be the realisation that our perception of ourselves is rarely the perception of others.”

The joke about Barnaby is that he’s better in the morning. Even that is too generous. He is a caricature of beet-red selfishness. He is a private schoolboy who never did the homework. He represents one of the country’s most drought-prone regions and doesn’t believe in climate action.

Joyce’s private member’s bill is about distraction. He’s a man who films himself yelling at clouds. His most detailed thoughts in recent weeks have been on whether it is right to liken him to a bull or a steer. The difference is testicles.

Joyce calls net zero a “lunatic crusade”, presumably to make it sound like an area of his expertise. He calls it “treacherous” for the same reason. His call to abandon the country’s emissions target is based on three lies and one vanity. It sounds like a parlour game because it is. This is politics at its most hollow and opportunistic.

Renewable energy has not increased power prices, as Joyce claims. The world is not abandoning the Paris Agreement, as he claims. Not all farmers resent wind turbines and wires.

Beneath Joyce’s bill – and for a man so shallow, there is always something beneath – is a desire to destabilise both Sussan Ley and David Littleproud. In this he is joined by Michael McCormack, his old enemy, a man who looks perpetually as if he is about to eat a lamington.

These twin buffoons are holding up action on climate change. There is no way their bill will succeed, but it is because of bad-faith bills such as this that we do not have the more ambitious action on climate change that is necessary.

Joyce is right that our perception of ourselves is rarely the perception shared by others, unless he thinks of himself as an angry polyp on the mucous membrane of democracy, pedunculated by years of public indulgence, an outgrowth of a once effective party, living now only to irritate the other organs, an adenoma in a split suit, busying himself with a safety pin while the rest of the world moves on. If he sees himself like that, he is more honest than his politics.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 2, 2025 as "Beet-red selfishness".

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