'they Will Sell Your Mother Into White Slavery With A Smile On Their Face To Become A Minister. They'll Do A Deal.'

CANBERRA — With One Nation is riding high in national opinion polls, de facto deputy leader Barnaby Joyce joined Amanda Copp in POLITICO's office for the Canberra Playbook podcast.

The wide-ranging interview was notable for Joyce's confidence that his new party is the one setting the terms of conservative politics in Australia. He’s certain the Liberals can’t win — anything — without One Nation support.

The interview was temporarily interrupted midway, when Joyce had to rush out to vote on one of his own amendments to a bill on illicit tobacco.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Late Tuesday you spoke at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Business Summit. You don't get a lot more mainstream than ACCI: Does your appearance there, along with Senator Pauline Hanson, mean One Nation has gone mainstream? 

We don't want to be characterized as some sort of you know crazy fringe group, and we're not.

We've got much more business experience than any other party in the building. Pauline, of course, being a small business person, as a single mother running her own fish and chip shop. Myself, still running a business now, a family business, and also having worked for many businesses as an accountant — and running my own accountancy business. David Farley as the CEO of a range of large companies. Even Tyron Whitten running a construction company with about 1,100 employees and a $200 million a year turnover. That’s not bad when you've only got six in the parliament.

We're quite at ease with the business community. I suppose that is reflected in the approach we have. We've got a pretty dry, sort of straight down the line approach to things. We’re up against the sort of fanciful, beautiful ideas but bad outcomes — such things as climate policy, which is just garbage. Never changes the climate, just makes you poor.

One of the main pushes from ACCI was around productivity, getting that moving again. Productivity seems to be the bane of every government for the last 20 years. How does One Nation plan to solve that productivity crisis? 

Well, first of all, you do it by exercising small business. You don't start divinely believing that you, from Canberra, have a cure for this.

So what you do is say: ‘What are the policies that inspire small business to make the investments?’ From small business it then permeates through to all forms of business. But with such a large part of the economy, if you’ve got 3 million small business people employing about 5 million people, it's incredibly important that you concentrate on that section.

Big business, especially multinationals, can draw from experience overseas, and they probably don't need as much pastoral care as small business. To get productivity, you have to reduce costs for the same outputs — what productivity is all about.

One of the big areas you're going to need a productivity increase in is government, and the way you're going to do that is utilization of such things as AI, so that when people retire — not sacking them — when they retire, you to the very best of your ability try to fill in a lot of those jobs with something that that is cheaper and works 24/7. If we don't do that — we're just a trillion dollars in debt, there’s no secret to this — You're going to go broke. All that matters is not whether, it's when.

How could anything else happen if your trajectory of debt keeps going through the roof and you keep borrowing to pay your interest bill? Where else are you possibly off to? So there you go, there's some ideas on productivity and to increase that productivity at a small business level.

People take risks at small business levels. I'm in small business, and if you take a risk, you might do your shirt, you might go broke. But if you win, if you win. That's good. You don't want the treasurer to take 47% of your winnings. So you've got to have a tax arrangement that says if you take the risks, build your business, increase your productivity, and win, you win. You keep it.

One of the interesting things that Pauline Hanson said to ACCI was that too many people are going to university. Do you think that's the case? 

Yes, definitely.

Why is that?

Well, even in my role as an accountant, I learned to be an accountant in an accountancy practice. I didn't learn to be an accountant at university. The vast majority of things that are happening at university, you really don't learn it. It's just a ticket to say you have an inclination and a desire to go in a certain direction. You learn most of it on the job. When my father went to university as a vet — he’s passed away now. — only 5% of people went to university. I think now it's like 45 or 50%. That doesn't mean that you need new universities, that means that universities have decided that they need students, and have devised courses which you'd have to ask: what is the efficacy of them for our nation. Do they make our nation richer, better? You've also got to look at the circumstances we're in. You're over a trillion dollars in debt. Stop spending money you don't have, and that's a really hard thing that mummy and daddy tells you to do. If you spend money you don't have, you go broke.

Migration is a massive part of productivity and economic growth. There's a lot of predictions that One Nation's migration policy is going to push us into a recession. Do you think that it's worth it to get migration under control?

I don't agree with that. What we have at the moment is, per capita, Australians getting poorer. If you don't believe that, go buy some groceries and see how much you get for 100 bucks. So let's not let's not pretend that we're heading in the right direction. We're not. People can't afford a house, people can't get near a house.

If we want to have Australians have babies — and it's as raw as that, that's what you want, actually — you can't have them living with mummy and daddy. Getting married and living with mummy and daddy and having a baby just doesn't quite work. So you've got to allow people the opportunity to get a house, to have their own dignity, to have their own agency, and you’ve got a vastly better chance of them wanting to have it than a family. That’s goal number one.

We have close to 3 million people on temporary visas. This is untenable. You can't have more than half the population of Sydney wandering around as temporary visa holders. That is crazy. Where you see them is when you're trying to get into the emergency care at the hospital, when you're trying to drive your car on the road, when you're trying to buy a house. This is this is not the way it's supposed to work.

Do you think it is a problem that the Australian economy relies so heavily on migration?

See, what they do is they throw up things which are the smaller factor of the bigger picture. With One Nation's policy, we are still demand driven. For working holiday visas, we're still having them. For people who want to be picking fruit or working as boilermakers and turners or those jobs — they're demand driven, we support them.

We don't support people bringing out their family members. Speaking to people in the Philippine community, they say: ‘Barnaby, the reason people come out as temporary visa holders is the money?’ They don't need to bring their families. They come out for the money and they send the money back, and the money's worth a lot more where they came from than when they're here. That’s how it was supposed to work, and we’ve just got to bring it back to sanity.

The Australian people have also made their intentions incredibly clear on this issue. And in politics, the first person you've got to listen to is the Australian people. Now, I don't think for one second we're going to have a recession because of the change in the immigration policy. People are utilizing that, but you say to them: ‘So should we just throw the gates open and let everybody in? Free for all. Here you come, Bangladesh arrive in Australia — and bring India and Nigeria and Lebanon. Come here!’

People will come to increase their opportunities in life, so they're not going to be rolling in here from Sweden. Sweden's quite nice. You're going to just get a whole influx of people trying to increase their position in life, as I would do. It's just that it's untenable. It does not work because we just don't have the capacity to absorb it.

One of the big pieces of legislation coming through Parliament this week is the Digital Duty of Care? 

Well, that could rule you out. You could have a very short career in this job.

It looks like Communications Minister Anika Wells is quite happy to negotiate on that particular policy. Will you be negotiating? 

Well, it's just crazy. I mean, this is just censorship. The minister has the capacity to decide whether something is offensive and whether it can be heard. Really, that is: wow. That's new, isn't it? And it's also dangerous. It's just dangerous. I know where they go.

They've already said the reason they lost Secret Harbour to One Nation in Western Australia [in a September by-election] is because of misinformation and disinformation, which means that if they want to have the authority to rule you out over misinformation and disinformation, they could basically rule out our capacity to get a message out. Now, if you take that to the next step, the source that goes well with the goose goes well with the gander. I mean, we'll get in there and say: ‘Okay, well now we'll start doing the same thing. We'll say any of your messages are illegal.’

One of the things that came up this week was the live streaming of that execution in the U.S.

Which I don’t support at all.  

The government is looking at that, though, as potentially one of the reasons to introduce a Digital Duty of Care.

But this is something you can be really specific in ruling out. They always use the minutiae of virtue for the expansive of attaining a goal. Now, if you had a bill that says there will be no live streaming of executions, I don't think anyone in the parliament wouldn't vote for it. It would scream through. But they haven't given that, have they? They've given this sort of broad range — could be this, could be that — and they've just said: ‘Just understand, we've got your best interests at heart when we say that we’re going to rule out naughty things.’ And then they'll give you a list of virtuous things, but they don't tell you that they've actually got the power to do vastly, vastly more than that, and that's where the danger lies.

This week we're also seeing Resources Minister Madeleine King introducing the gas reservation policy as well. Do you think that is going to bring down energy prices enough? 

The only thing that's going to bring down energy prices substantially is to get out of both net zero and the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement is being used more and more now to tie Australia to this economic boulder around its feet as it goes for a swim in the ocean. What we have done into the energy sector in this nation with both this mad idea of moving to intermittent power — it's not renewable. It's intermittent power. It's intermittent solar and intermittent wind. I don't mind hydro. You got that down in Tasmania. Hydro, I suppose, is more genuinely renewable. But you've moved away from what actually worked.

You used to have coal-fired power. We had coal-fired power, had all these evil things like a glass industry, a urea industry, a plastics industry. You didn't have record insolvencies in small business. You had a very vibrant aluminum industry. The steel industry wasn't on its knees. You had all these wonderful things when you had coal-fired power, which you don't have now.

Now, on the other side of the energy, you've got the safeguard mechanism. Are we going to make everybody safe? Well, the safeguard mechanism was instrumental in closing down coal mines, and also instrumental in making refineries unviable. You've done it to yourself because this mad idea, mad idea, that Australia can change the clouds, that Australia will bring back glaciers and make the frost return and stop the cyclones and reduce the bushfires by policy in a green room in Canberra in a white building on top of a hill. That's how he’ll do it.

It's about collective action, though, isn't it? 

But you haven't got it, have you? I mean, for real. Did you have a look at what's happening in Fiji [for the pre-COP summit]? It was Roly Poly. Who was there? Us, Timor-Leste. Where was Xi Jinping? He wasn't there. How about Narendra Modi? He wasn't there. How about Trump? He wasn't there. How about even the Prime Minister of England there on the left, he wasn’t there. How about the Chancellor of Germany? You're playing a game with yourself. We have this belief that we're vastly more important in this game than we are, but we are belting ourselves over our head with a stick that we picked up ourselves.

Do you think that the Liberals can win the Victorian state election without One Nation? 

No.

Why not?

Because politics change. In the past they talked about the broad church. Well, the broad church has no parishioners. The broad church is a different scenario, and what we have now is socialism and conservatism — that's where the votes are. If there wasn't One Nation, Australia would invent One Nation. There is no prospect of a Liberal Party government on current polling winning without people who have the capacity to get blue collar votes and other regional votes, and that's One Nation. The Tories can't get the votes in blue collar areas.

Would you do a deal with the Coalition to form government in Victoria? 

With confidence and supply. We don't want to be in coalition with the Coalition, but we want to assist [them] in removing socialism.

We're happy to make sure that we get rid of the socialists. We do that by saying: ‘You need a letter to the governor that says you have the numbers to win. We will give you that letter for confidence and supply on the premise that you agree to these policy outcomes. If you agree to these policy outcomes, and we see that legislation drafted and tabled in the first three months, we got it.’ You can't rip us off because if you don't do it, we'll just remove the letter, and the government will fall over.

What about when it comes to the federal election? 

Same deal.

You think that you can carry that momentum? 

If the Coalition believes that they can somehow do something miraculous and arrive there without working with One Nation, then they're having themselves on, and they'll be in that position forever.

Now I know how politicians work — do not stand between a politician and the blue carpet, which is a ministerial wing, okay? They will run you over. They will sell your mother into white slavery with a smile on their face to become a minister. So you can bet your bottom dollar that, no matter what they say, they'll do a deal.

There are rumors that Pauline Hanson may try for a lower house seat. What's the leadership plan? Who would actually become leader if she doesn't get into the House? 

Pauline Hanson's the boss, okay? Pauline Hanson's the boss, and that's all we have to worry about. I don't get carried away with the hubristic visions about what might be the case. Pauline's the boss, and even the polls are indicators. They're not votes. I love votes. Indicators are interesting. But I really don't like getting ahead because you start having a discussion about how many fairies dance on the head of a pin — don’t worry about that. Just do your job for now.

From the outside looking in, it often looks like people in your party say things, and then you're the guy who comes in and cleans up — clarify things when it comes to migration, apologizing to Andrew Hastie. Do you see yourself as almost the clean up guy?

No. Pauline is straight down the barrel. People love that. She is the person who was a single mother from the western suburbs of Brisbane, Ipswich, who had to run her own business to pay for a family. So she just doesn't trifle with you. That’s why she's auntie Pauline, and people know that it comes from a good place. It's like your auntie — she'll tell you tough things, but it's not to hurt you, it’s basically [to say]: ‘This is the way the world works.’

Now, I'm a bit more nuanced. That's just in my nature. I don't know — blame Catholic guilt for it. I don't know what you do, but that's probably where it comes from. But between the two of us, we're great mates, we get along well, and we get through things. It's going well, but I never get ahead of myself — it's going well at the moment, and we want it to continue going well.

You work pretty closely with her at the moment. What's something that people don't understand about her, or don't see when not behind the scenes?

She's auntie Pauline. A lot of politicians are a little bit absorbed in their self-importance, and that's fair enough. But when you walk into her office, she goes: ‘Gee whiz, do you want a cup of tea?’ And you think, ‘Oh no, no.’ You're sorry. She goes: ‘No, no, I'll make it.’ And then she'll look and go: ‘Have you had lunch?’ And then she'll make a sandwich or something for you. It's a remarkable thing.

Another thing is, despite what people may think in our meetings, advisers, which never get heard in other parties, do get heard. They're actually at the table, and it's a very, very robust conversation. If they think you're on the wrong direction, they'll let you know. So it's not just a small group of politicians sort of reinforcing their own egos. It's a dynamic group of people around a table who really look into things and say: ‘These are the risks. These are the opportunities that reside here. These are the people we've spoken to.’

When you just have a room of politicians, everybody's sort of jockeying for positions and saying the right things to curry favor and cuddle up to the person who can give them a promotion. It's a bit, well, it's a little bit pretend, isn't it? That's why sometimes you get bad decisions.  

What about James Ashby? He's often seen as the brains behind a lot of the One Nation operations. What's your relationship like with him? 

Oh, very good. James is a smart guy, and he has added heaps to what's happened with One Nation. I get along very well with him. I've known James for years — James is capable, and that's why you get along with him, because he knows how to get around the paddock.

Do you ever miss the Nats?  [National Party]

Yeah, of course. There are absolutely things in the Nats I love. I love the members. Leaving a political party is like leaving a marriage. It's traumatic, and to say otherwise would be lying. But that relationship had come to an end. It was becoming demeaning for me and, by my own actions, I was being less than a perfect person. It was made quite abundantly clear to me that my time with the Nats was over, and they wanted me out of the building.

Now, I made the choice that I had more to give, and I went to One Nation. I had a long, long considered discussion with One Nation about it. But I have to say, right now, it's been a very, very decent thing to do, and it was the correct decision, 100% the correct decision. Why? Because now I have greater effect. You only have one life, and I'm having a lot more effect with it, being able to make a lot more changes with it, and I do it on behalf of the Australian people.

If One Nation disappears, you're going to go back to this stultifying duopoly of banal, tepid dish water. It would be really sad for Australia, because all of a sudden things become predictable, boring, and bad.

Vikki Campion, your wife, has taken up a job with One Nation. 

That’s correct.

That’s not a conflict of interest in your mind?

No, it's not. You show me how many people in the Labor Party have wives that work? I can go around and find you so many people who have wives, or are in relationships, with people who are in the media. We're human beings. Vicky has an incredibly good political analysis. She's in media.

So what is her role?

Her role is to say: ‘Well, what do you want to say? I'm going to tell you how you can say it to get that message out. If you say: ‘I want to say I want bacon for breakfast,’ she won't care. A media person says: ‘Okay, that's a message. Kind of weird, but this is how we'll do it.’ It's what media people do, and she works also for the Daily Telegraph. But she's married to me — I don't think anybody's highly surprised about which way she'll politically lean.