Barnaby Joyce blames campaign ‘pressure’ after One Nation Farrer candidate contradicts party on immigration | Farrer byelection 2026
Barnaby Joyce blamed “campaign pressure” for One Nation’s Farrer candidate contradicting the party’s immigration policy and appearing to endorse Labour’s current intake.
The One Nation MP also claimed voters won’t be worried about Gina Rinehart’s million-dollar private plane donation to Pauline Hanson’s party, claiming journalists were more interested in the lucrative gift from Rinehart’s company than ordinary people.
Speaking to Sky News on Sunday, Joyce said he expected his party’s candidate David Farley to prevail in next Saturday’s by-election, despite this week’s stumble when the prospective MP said Australia’s 306,000 net overseas migration last year was “probably not that much”.
One Nation’s stated party policy is a limit of 130,000 immigrants per year.
Appearing at the candidate forum hosted by former Insiders presenter and Guardian podcast host Barrie Cassidy, Farley said One Nation wanted to “pair immigration with a housing policy, a health policy and an education policy”, highlighting the demand for skilled immigrants.
Cassidy asked: “306,000?” [net overseas migration] Is it too much?
Farley responded: “No, probably not.”
“If we are successful with One Nation’s water policies, we will need more labor, and we will need more labor, skilled labor, more quickly,” he said.
“So for anyone to say ‘what is the number today’ it has to be addressed in terms of what are we doing on productivity and what are we doing on capacity building then you’ll get a real number that is needed for Australia.”
When asked about Farley’s comments, Joyce downplayed the mistake.
“When you’re a candidate and you’re in the race. Obviously politics is 130,000, as we’ve said before and he agrees when we talk about it. It’s just the pressure of a campaign,” he told Sky.
“You’ve got to do a stocktake. You’ve got to see what an area can absorb. Even in Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane, if you’re bringing in 400,000 people a year because we’re bringing in the population of Canberra, and you don’t have homes, you don’t have schools and you don’t have hospitals… we can’t have that.”
“If there is the capacity to absorb them and there is a need, then of course that is a completely different discussion.”
Farrer is expected to be a tight end countdown between Farley and independent candidate Michelle Milthorpe. The seat on the NSW-Victoria border had been held exclusively by Liberal and National members since its formation, but National Party leader Matt Canavan downplayed the political impact of the Coalition losing the seat.
“These things don’t concern me,” Canavan told ABC’s Insiders programme.
“I believe we can make things better if the National Party is elected under Farrer. But I understand why people are disappointed with us.”
He said he “fought pretty hard” in the national campaign but did not raise expectations for a strong performance. Canavan also strongly criticized Milthorpe and Farley, accusing them both of running “dishonest” campaigns.
Canavan criticized Milthorpe’s policies on fossil fuels, calling him an “orange”, a label the candidate rejected, and also criticized Farley’s comments on immigration.
“[Farley] he said the other day that he was happy with Albo’s immigration policy settings. “Although they say on their own party’s website that they want them to be cut off altogether,” he said.
“We don’t need any more than we have right now. We need much, much less.”
On Sky, Joyce also downplayed Rinehart’s million-dollar private plane donation to One Nation, claiming it “won’t really worry” voters.
“I think it worries people in the fourth grade more than people on the field,” Joyce told Sky News.
As reported this week, one of Rinehart’s companies gifted Hanson a new private plane worth more than $1.5 million to be used ahead of the next federal election, while a group of close associates donated another $2 million to One Nation.
Joyce ruled out the possibility that the expensive donation could hurt One Nation’s electoral chances.
“If you’re not so inspirational that you can’t get big donors, that says a lot about the political philosophy you stand behind, which is kind of a meaningless beige soup rather than something actually worth believing in,” he told Sky.
Joyce noted that the Labor government and the Greens have “huge supporters”, including the union movement and leading business leaders.
“I don’t believe in what they believe, but obviously they have a philosophy that has support. We now have support from people on the conservative side of politics and successful businessmen on the conservative side of politics because they believe they can clearly define our conservative values. They may not agree with all of them, but they agree with enough.”
