Barnaby ‘free’ after joining ranks of coalition outcast
Fellow coalition pariah and good friend Jacinta Nampijinpa Price insists she will wait and see rather than accept the nonsense about Barnaby Joyce being about to partner Pauline Hanson.
The former party leader abruptly announced his departure from the National Party on Saturday, citing an irreparably broken relationship with the party leadership.
He says he will not contest the northern NSW seat of New England again at the next election.
“I am now free to consider all options for what to do next,” Mr. Joyce said in a statement distributed to branch members and then quickly leaked to media outlets.
Senator Price, who left his junior coalition partner to join the Liberals and was demoted from cabinet, declined to speculate when asked what Mr Joyce’s possible move would be.
“I’d rather wait and see,” he told Sky News.
“I’m a good friend of Barnaby’s but I’ll wait and see what’s real and what’s just another attempt to perpetuate this chatter and division about the coalition.”
News spread on Friday that Mr Joyce was in advanced talks with Senator Hanson about a possible move to the One Nation party.
Senator Hanson reportedly told the Sydney Morning Herald he would welcome the move if Mr Joyce was willing.
His statement on Saturday made no allusion to that possibility, merely stating that there was no point in continuing in his current role.
“The atmosphere in the party hall where I sit at the farthest corner of the coalition means that I have been seen and now I have struck a discordant note,” he said.
“This is not who I want to be.”
Mr Joyce was ousted from the party’s front bench by current leader David Littleproud in early 2025.
His departure was the latest indication of discontent within the ranks of the federal coalition after the worst election result in its 81-year history.
Frictions arose following the fall of Senator Price and the resignation of Andrew Hastie as a shadow minister over policy differences.
Like Mr Joyce, he was an outspoken critic of net-zero emissions reduction targets and repeatedly called on his colleagues to stop supporting them.
Finance Minister Jim Chalmers acknowledged on Saturday that he had heard voices about Mr Joyce and One Nation from afar.
“If even Barnaby Joyce doesn’t want to be part of this, you know the coalition is bad,” he told reporters in New York, where he has pitched Australia’s renewable energy potential to major companies.
“All this internal discord shows that the coalition has not changed at all, has learned nothing, and is more divisive and divided than ever.”
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