BEN HARVEY: Barnaby Joyce might be the economic voice of reason Australia needs

Economics can be bewildering. The dismal science is so riddled with obscure concepts and abstract theories it’s little wonder the kids in Ferris Bueller’s class were bored.

Keynesian orthodoxy, opportunity cost, reversion to mean, prospect theory, moral hazards — academics have created dozens of concepts in a bid to make sense of why people, businesses and governments act the way they do with money.

Boil it down, though, and all that matters is supply and demand. This immutable law, which holds that prices are dictated by the relative supremacy of one or the other force, is the most fundamental of all economic pressures.

Successive Australian treasurers have fooled themselves into believing they are immune to this law. That they can tinker with the equation without affecting prices.

It’s poppycock and Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock called it out as such this week, telling a parliamentary committee that runaway government spending would “put a bit of upward pressure on the neutral rate”.

Australia has been living outside its means ever since the global financial crisis. COVID took the problem to a whole new level. “Stimulus” is now applied monotonously, and it has lost its zing.

Businesses and consumers are like hardened addicts, requiring ever bigger hits of a drug to get a high.

The economy has become so dependent on these regular fiscal shots in the arm, and voters so conditioned to government handouts at the slightest hint of privation, that outsized public spending is now baked into the national business case.

The $1 trillion in debt Australia amassed in this 15-year spendathon was going to affect prices eventually. It took a while, but the fiscal chickens have come home to roost.

Is there a politician brave enough to make the economy go cold turkey?

Labor has proved it won’t. Anthony Albanese hasn’t walked past a budget line item he didn’t like the look of.

The Liberals are making the right noises about cutting spending but the concurrent pledge to slash taxes means the party is perilously close to preaching voodoo economics.

Don’t for a second believe that Sussan Ley will doing anything other than spend just as hard and fast as Anthony Albanese should she ever get the keys to The Lodge, for any majority will be wafer thin and reliant on incessant pork-barrelling.

The Nationals are addicted to subsidies and the Greens want to make everything free, so David Littleproud and Larissa Waters won’t stand up and do the right thing.

So, who?

Here’s a sentence that you’ve probably never read before: Barnaby Joyce might be Australia’s economic salvation.

Now that he is a free agent, the Member for New England is able to tell some home truths.

He did it on Sunrise this week when he discussed the merits of the energy transition.

“We should be building the coal fired power stations, I can say that now,” he said matter-of-factly, before delivering the following, slightly tortuous, analogy.

“What’s happening, in a technical term, is they’ve got a car that worked perfectly well, which is the energy car, and they randomly opened up the bonnet and started taking out parts and putting new parts in, thinking it was going to go and guess what, it doesn’t,” was how he summed up the nation’s predicament.

It was a bit mangled, but Joyce sounded like he believed in what he was saying. That’s refreshing in a debate where so many others are obviously parroting audience-tested talking points.

If the man Tony Abbot once lauded as the best retail politician of his generation can bring the same straight talk to the debate on the economy, he might emerge as the voice of reason (which is another sentence you’ve likely not read).

If, as expected, Joyce supplants Pauline Hanson, he has the opportunity to shame the major parties into action on the Budget.

As leader of One Nation he would be a potent force because, unlike the incumbent, he has frontbench experience. And a brain.

He’s already a shoo-in to suck in every Katter and Palmer voter out there, plus a lot of other borderline deplorables.

If Joyce started talking sense about the economy, he might also snaffle the rump of financially conservative Australians who are uncomfortable with the blasé attitude to debt and deficit.

Don’t underestimate what an oft-derided fringe player can achieve in politics. Nigel Farage is now odds-on to become British prime minister. And remember who is in the West Wing.

To have a crack at the top job Joyce has to jettison a lot of historical baggage.

The one-time Senator, one-time Deputy Prime Minister has thumbed his nose at political convention ever since he was elected back in 2004.

He drove John Howard nuts with his ill-discipline and penchant for crossing the floor and was infamous for funnelling Federal money into his own electorate.

But he survived.

The respectability that came with being Tony Abbot’s deputy in 2016 was fleeting because he had to quit as an MP. It turned out there was something even more damaging in politics than being a pork-barrelling floor-crosser: Barnaby was a New Zealander.

Like other victims of the dual-citizenship scandal, Joyce had to be re-elected to retain his seat.

Again, he survived.

Then things went really pear-shaped.

Touching up the help is a time-honoured pursuit in Parliament House and Barnaby probably had no idea his fling with staffer Vicki Campion would turn into a public soap opera.

His ex-wife’s revenge body and Malcolm Turnbull’s infamous bonk ban — a directive that was counter-productive because it made the forbidden pleasure of an office knee trembler that much more alluring — put the tawdry icing on a garish cake.

Still, he survived.

By the time Joyce was found drunk on that footpath in Canberra, he had so many scandals under his belt he was immune to public censure.

His curriculum vitae suggests he’s an unlikely voice of reason, economic or otherwise. For the sake of the nation, here’s hoping he defies his history and becomes one.