The nosebleed seats: Barnaby Joyce’s return to centre stage was always going to be unpredictable

It started with a sniff. And a sneeze. In a post-pandemic world, public sniffles are difficult at the best of times.

But in a case of both bad timing and bad luck, Barnaby Joyce suffered a nosebleed on national television.

Perhaps it was a portent. Peter Costello got stuck in a lift in 2007 before the Coalition lost government to Kevin Rudd.

There is a weird parallel. The nosebleed seats are far from centre stage. In this election, the deputy prime minister has stayed far from the main election media circus.

At one level, this is entirely expected, because the seats that concern the National party leader are far from metropolitan areas. His circuit includes the swag of seats in central Queensland as well as Labor’s seat of Hunter in NSW and Lingiari in the Northern Territory.

The Victorian seat of Nicholls has also seen Joyce a few times, but less so than the northern seats, where his Big Hat persona plays better. The Nationals currently have 16 lower house seats and Joyce wants to pick up Hunter and Lingiari to both win government and ward off any unexpected leadership tension.

The other reason he keeps his head low is that the teal independents, and some of the rural ones too, are using his name in campaigning. “A vote for the [insert Coalition MP] is a vote for Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce” is regularly trotted out. So Joyce’s visage is not welcome in every electorate.

Indeed, the big change in this election is that some rural electorates may not be buying the bloke Tony Abbott once dubbed the “best retail politician”.

So when he burst back on to centre stage to address the National Press Club, it was always going to be unpredictable. It was an easy audience, given the room was stacked with National party supporters, old and new campaign directors, various lobby groups, grifters, spinmeisters and a few innocent bystanders.

There were also working journalists who were trying to discern some meaning from his speech.

The speech veered from infrastructure largely above the Barnaby Line, to threats from independents, then to threats from China and a vague promise to review tax arrangements for Australian shipping out of consideration for a sovereign merchant capacity – the lack of detail suggesting it was a policy designed to neutralise the Labor idea for a “strategic fleet” announced earlier in the campaign.

Joyce railed against independent candidates who failed the transparency test by declining to nominate who they would support in a hung parliament. But he refused to countenance showing journalists or his own constituency what the Nationals negotiate under the Coalition agreement.

“I don’t want to have to ventilate every iteration, every nuance day by day,” he said.

Climate change remains a tricky dance for Joyce, as he tried to describe how his government’s own so-called safeguard mechanism would, in Labor hands, be a carbon tax. (The safeguard mechanism requires polluting companies to buy carbon credits or reduce their emissions).

Regional areas, he said, “read transition as unemployment”.

“We have a safeguard mechanism,” he said. “It’s like the ceiling on this. It’s out of the way but it stops you going through the roof. They [Labor] are going to bring the ceiling down to about head level for tall people. And about 215 [companies] are going to start belting their heads on the fans and the lights and being fatally attacked based on that.”

Infrastructure, which took up a large part, included mentions of the $5.4bn Hell’s Gates dam, announced in March without a business case or environmental approvals. A week later Joyce abolished the water advisory body set up by his predecessor Michael McCormack to scrutinise such projects.

We did discover business cases are so last century. Referring to the Alice Springs to Darwin rail line, Joyce said “there’s a clear example of how infrastructure grows into its business case”.

Then there was China, where his own rhetoric has been at high volume for some time.

“It is quite obvious through their desire to have military bases that they are starting a process of encircling Australia and that there is a wish, at the very least, to intimidate, or worse, to supplicate Australia,” Joyce said.

But in the end, the case for remaining in government came down to changing the curtains.

“This election is a case of whether voters wish to change the curtains or keep them to avoid the cost,” he said, “as the current curtains work well and no one has proven to us whether the replacements will keep the sun out of our eyes, the carpet from fading and stop other countries from peeking through your window to see what you’re up to.”

It may have been about daylight saving; but to be honest, no one was sure.