Barnaby Joyce Nationals Michael McCormack
(Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

Barnaby Joyce is consistently lauded as a “retail politician”, and one thing the last week has shown us is that he is certainly all about making transactions.

After re-ascending to the top Nationals job, he moved quickly to punish his foes and reward his friends. Barnaby 2.0 also swiftly made it clear that he would be pushing for deals to favour coal, and carve out agriculture from climate change action. He is nothing if not industrious when it comes to selling out the rest of the nation in favour of his voting base.

And he and other Nats saved some of their most blustery bullshit for a shambolic stunt over the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

For more than a decade, as the plan was formulated and its compromises negotiated, Nationals (and some Liberals) would sneer to me and others that South Australia was never going to get the 450 gigalitres (GL) of water it needs to keep the Murray healthy.

Meanwhile, scientists say even the 2750GL at the base of the plan is not enough to save the system — with many telling a South Australia royal commission that it wasn’t based on the science. One whistleblower even said that it was understood the figure had to have a “two” at the start of it — with that number being linked to Barnaby Joyce’s postcode.

When those ill-fated but clearly targeted amendments were moved in the Senate last week, the Nationals’ talking points were widely circulated.

There was fearmongering about job losses, even though the Murray-Darling Basin Authority has found that “drought, population decline and on-farm technology are the major factors leading to job losses”.

They say that science “no longer supports SA needing fresh water”. Which is, in fact, the opposite of what the science says. The science says without water flows down to SA and the Murray Mouth, salinity will build up. That salt is deadly to plants, fish, and farmers’ crops.

The whole river system would be affected — by the salt, by algae outbreaks, by the deaths of plants and animals.

Saying SA doesn’t need fresh water — as though down here we’re eager for upstream irrigators to go to the wall so we have nice clean water for our coal-powered barista machines — is bunkum. As is the claim that “rising sea levels will mean the SA Lower Lakes will not need environmental water”.

What effrontery from the climate change laggards in the Nationals, to suggest that climate change could in fact be the cure for the Lakes. It’s rot, of course, possibly based on debunked theories that the lakes were once saline.

Underlying all of this is the cynical binary perpetuated by the Nationals — and the Coalition more broadly — that Australians are either latte-sippers or salt-of-the-Earth farmer types. Spoiled inner-city whingers or authentic country folk.

Joyce said regional jobs were “just as important” as jobs in Adelaide, as though that’s the trade-off. It’s not.

Millions of people rely on having a healthy Murray-Darling system. Farmers, of course. More than 40 Aboriginal nations. Not to mention dozens of native fish, hundreds of other plant and animal species, the internationally protected wetlands in the Coorong, and the ecosystem more broadly.

All those and more are done a deep disservice by the bullshit divisiveness and bodgy science being bandied about. And by the relegation of the water portfolio — along with its minister, Keith Pitt — to the outer ministry.

Joyce says Keith Pitt will “remain over this portfolio like a bad suit”.

That sounds like Joyce wants to send out a charlatan salesman in ill-fitting polyester to make dirty deals — done dirt cheap.

What do you think? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au and don’t forget to include your full name if you’d like to be considered for publication.