Maverick no more? Barnaby aims for the House

James Riley
Monday, 07 December 2009 16:06

Opinion and Analysis

The first time I met Barnaby Joyce – at a pub near Old Parliament House in early 2005 – he was in Canberra preparing to take up the Queensland Senate seat he secured at the 2004 election.

Specifically, he was in town to attend the Senate's boot camp orientation program, learning the procedural ropes. Despite his strong showing at Federal election, Barnaby remained a somewhat unknown quantity, even though the media had already permanently attached the descriptor "Queensland maverick" to his name.

He was already talking loud about telecommunications services in the bush, however, and in a year when the Telstra T3 sale was a big agenda item for the Howard Government, that was enough for me to be assigned to "go an have a beer with him" in my previous role as a technology reporter on The Australian.

During the months prior to the new Senate forming on July 1 2005, Barnaby and NSW Nationals Senator Fiona Nash were busy developing a long term telecommunications policy platform for the Party.

At a time when then Finance Minister Nick Minchin was doing the planning to sell Government's holding in Telstra below 50 per cent for the first time, Barnaby and Senator Nash were doing to ground work to establish points of leverage with which to extract the best deal possible for the bush as the price of the Nationals support for the T3 program.

They didn't do too bad, with the creation of a $2 billion Communications Fund, a series of committees looking at regional telecoms that ultimately led to the now defunct $1 billion Opel consortiums broadband contract for the bush.

But the heart of the Nationals research – performed by the party's Page Research Centre – put forward a variety of options for future proofing the bush. Top of the wish-list was a government funded fibre roll out.

This alone made the Nationals attitude to Rudd Labor's National Broadband Network all the weirder.

Which brings us to Tony Abbott and Barnaby's plans to move to the Coalition front bench.

As the freshly minted opposition leader, Abbott has already made vague references to shutting the NBN project down if the Coalition wins Government. The ICT industry – and regional Australia – can only hope the current government gets as much fibre deployed as possible and as many homes and business as possible connected before the next election.

I wouldn't rate Tony Abbott’s chances. But elections are fraught – just ask Jeff Kennett and Alan Carpenter.

Barnaby has had an incredible year. Spearheading the Nationals ETS "a tax on everything" campaign, he can reasonably claim a big chunk of credit both for unseating Malcolm Turnbull as opposition leader, and the coalition’s rejection of the Government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme bill.

And with Tony Abbott at the helm, he's heading for shadow cabinet – most likely (according to The Australian's Sam Maiden) in the Finance portfolio, vacated today by Helen Coonan, who will move to the back bench.

There's a great shame in Barnaby's move into the more disciplined cabinet arena. It takes a lot of the fun out of the game. (This is the bloke who, on a point of order, complained to the Senate President that Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's microphone was turned off and he that couldn’t hear – and then asked if the President could keep it that way.)

He is unlikely to lose the maverick tag anytime soon. He has a way of doing things. But the shame of it is that on telecommunications a loud and public advocacy voice is lost. We can only hope Barnaby is able to use that voice inside the shadow cabinet to develop a more NBN friendly coalition policy than the one advocated by Abbott/Minchin.

The Nationals were prepared to sacrifice public support of the NBN and the telecommunications reform bill at the altar of rejecting the ETS. As it happens, the Senate ran out of time before the telecommunications bill was voted on, so it's an almost moot point.

But when the Senate returns at the beginning of February, the Nationals support the passage of the telecommunications bill.

Clearly the ETS has been the main game. But the NBN and telco reforms are not small beer. And the industry should be hoping Barnaby takes the Nationals "glass Snowy" plan developed by Page Research into the Shadow cabinet and presses for Abbott and Minchin to start getting serious about the tech sector and the digital economy.

The Finance portfolio is a great place from which to argue the merits of an NBN investment. But, assuming he’s able to maintain the discipline, we might not know how the fight’s going.

The industry should play careful attention later this week when Tony Abbott names his front bench. It will be interesting to see whether shadow communications spokesman Nick Minchin retains the portfolio.

It is hard to imagine Mr Abbott moving him, but Senator Minchin has certainly earned the right through his role in the leadership change to request a change if that's what he wants.

To be fair, Senator Minchin has been consumed with leadership issues and with the ETS. But he’s not a natural for the comm’s portfolio. And his vociferous and regular press releases carry an uncommon venom.

And there is no calibration of the venom. Attacks are made with equal viciousness, regardless of the issue. It has become counterproductive – Senator Minchin has made some legitimate complaints and requests about the NBN and the Telstra negotiations, but they have become lost in the noise of constant nay-saying.

And he has said little or nothing about the Digital Economy end of the portfolio, a shame, because the industry development decisions that need to be made are at least as important as the actual NBN roll-out.

Finally, congratulations to Paul Fletcher on his by-election win in Bradfield on Sydney’s leafy upper North Shore. Fletcher, the former Optus executive, has been touted as a potential replacement for Senator Minchin as opposition communications spokesman.

It won't happen. As a newly elected MP, Fletcher needs to comms portfolio like he needs a hole in the head.

Quite apart from being a long way off being ready for the front bench, its hard to believe that as a freshly-minted MP Fletcher would have any desire to argue a Coalition policy that sought to kill the NBN, and reject reform legislation.

That kind of Chutzpah requires a level of cynicism that takes years of Parliamentary head-butting to achieve.