JENI O’DOWD: If Barnaby Joyce moves to One Nation he will bring Pauline Hanson’s passion project legit clout

There is one political story I cannot get enough of right now, and that’s the slow-motion, high-stakes, almost operatic speculation about the possibility Barnaby Joyce will march himself straight into One Nation.

Every few days, the whispers flare up again, and every time I think: surely he won’t.

But then I remember who we’re talking about. If any figure in Australian politics is capable of detonating the national landscape on his way through, it’s Barnaby.

If he does jump, it won’t be some quiet, polite entry through the side door. Barnaby Joyce does not do subtle.

He’d turn up boots-first, booming voice, bigger personality and all the political muscle memory of a former deputy prime minister.

Which is why the real question isn’t whether he would join One Nation. The real question is: if he ever did, how long would it take him to try to run the place?

Barnaby has form. He has never been content as a backbencher of anything. He has the instincts of a challenger. He has already led the Nationals. Twice. Leadership contests are practically his natural habitat.

Put a man like that into a party currently defined almost entirely by one very polarising and controversial figure and one figure alone, and you don’t get harmony. You get a countdown.

And Pauline Hanson knows this. She’s been around long enough to recognise when someone with real political heft looms near the throne.

She built One Nation in her own image. But Barnaby Joyce brings something she has never quite had: genuine establishment clout.

He has spent years inside the machine she has railed against. He knows how the levers work. He has negotiated budgets, fronted departments, survived scandals that would have incinerated anyone else and still walked back into Parliament with his seat safe.

Barnaby is a straight shooter. And he is adored in his seat of New England.

The man could fall into a puddle of controversy on Tuesday and still stride into the Tamworth Country Music Festival on Saturday to applause.

That level of loyalty is rare in modern politics. It’s the sort of following that can shift the balance of power inside a smaller party overnight.

The Nightly reported last week that the 58-year-old politician, the father of six children from two separate marriages, denies he has financial motivations for leaving the National Party backbench to eventually become One Nation leader.

“That’s completely wrong. Look, my family is also in business. We’re cattle producers. Take it from me. It’s not the money,” Mr Joyce said before heading to the airport to fly out of Canberra well before Parliament rose for the year.

But he didn’t deny he wanted to be the leader - only that he would not make such a move for the money.

It’s hard to ignore the subtext. This is a man who has never quite forgiven the Nationals for shunting him aside, and the chance to claw back relevance by leading a rival party would offer a level of satisfaction money can’t buy.

The Coalition is definitely not the force it once was in regional Australia. The Nationals are in a defensive crouch, fighting off independents, Greens, climate concerns and an electorate that increasingly realises the world has changed faster than their representatives have.

But One Nation? They’ve been quietly picking up the disillusioned. The COVID years accelerated that shift. The anti-Canberra mood hardened. Pauline’s brand of grievance politics found real traction again, particularly in the bush.

In areas in regional Queensland and NSW, the party is no longer a fringe sideshow.

So imagine Barnaby Joyce throwing himself into that mix. Imagine the base he’d bring. Imagine the media attention. Imagine the legitimacy, because whether people like him or not, he has it. It will be a political earthquake.

And if he did take that step, would he be content sitting quietly behind Hanson?

Barnaby Joyce is many things, but a loyal junior partner is not one of them. If he moved, it would be because he could see a pathway to the top.

And if he reached the top, One Nation would change shape overnight. It would become bigger, noisier, more strategically aggressive, and, frankly, more electable, at least in the regions.

So, could One Nation, under a figure like Barnaby, overtake the Nationals and effectively replace them as the Coalition’s regional partner?

It sounds dramatic. It also sounded dramatic when the Liberal Party wiped out the UAP in the 1940s. It sounded dramatic when the Greens pushed Labor into permanent preference negotiations. Australian politics has a habit of reinventing itself while everyone insists it can’t possibly happen.

Right now, both major parties are drifting. Voters no longer feel the old loyalties. They don’t care about the traditional left-right divide.

They care about housing, energy bills, crime, migration, their kids’ prospects and, most importantly, whether anyone is actually listening.

If Barnaby joins One Nation, it will feel less like a fringe party and more like the beginning of genuine political change.

Not today. Maybe not next term. But eventually? It doesn’t feel impossible.

Politics is full of big moves no one saw coming. But this move is staring us in the face, and that’s why I can’t get enough of it.