Culture

Hark Ye, For Barnaby Joyce Has Written A Weird Prophecy About Australian Politics In 2019

"If you want their nirvana then find yourself an excellent accountant. You will need one."

by Sam Langford  3 January 2019
Barnaby Joyce appears to be trying to win the Nationals leadership back.

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Imagine that you’ve just entered the new year of 2019 after screwing up 2018 in every conceivable way. How do you move forward and make a fresh start, perhaps even a comeback? If you’re Barnaby Joyce, the answer is a career change: the disgraced politician appears to be starting anew as a modern prophet specialising in #auspol, and if you have not yet received the word I beckon ye, come and be enlightened.

2018, of course, was truly bad for Joyce — national media discovered he’d had an affair (and a child) with his former staffer, he subsequently lost his extremely powerful and high-paying job, and he blew every possible chance at redemption by taking holidays, blaming others, and accepting big bucks for an interview instead of facing up to his mistakes.

It appears, however, that this brush with the darkness (and/or the sleep deprivation occasioned by caring for an eight month old baby at the age of 51) has given Joyce a unique insight into the darkness that is to come. In an op-ed for The Australian, Joyce predicts that an era of doom will settle over 2019, and warns that we will all need an accountant to face what is to come.

“The new year is going to change our nation,” Joyce warns. “This may be a trite, repetitious warning, but this time it is going to happen. We have arrived at the space where indoctrination has beaten logic.”

Nowhere is this truer than his own writing, where logic is remarkably absent. “Don’t dare say the words ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ — they are now to be neuter people,” he proclaims. “I live in a rented house but you don’t. No brother, you are going to pay because when they get their money out of your house by taking away your buyers because of the loss of negative gearing, it will be your problem and nobody else’s.”

These are not even the most mysterious passages. If you are able to translate the sentence “the Greens-Labor-independent alliance has its philosophical totem which it enforces by guilt to place more caveats over your assets and more impositions over your income streams”, please get in touch.

Some predictions are clearer. Traffic, according to Barnaby, will get worse in 2019, while international travel will become much easier. “If you believe Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are congested — well, suck it up, because more people from God knows what country are on their way. They will come because they want to and under the circumstances they choose,” he writes.

The 2019 federal election, meanwhile, will apparently be played out via Fortnite. “The Labor Party will play the quiet game,” says Barnaby. “It is too cunning to be led to a hostile battlefield when it can shoot us in a clear field from its own forest.” This actually not a bad Fortnite strategy.

There are many more predictions in the original text, but they are better read together, in context — who knows what meaning we may disturb by fragmenting a work of genius in this way. We can’t say it’s a pleasant read, but we urge you to view it anyway (if you can — the original text is behind a paywall).

Still, these visionary words are crucial. As Barnaby himself put it, “this may be a bitter dirge but it is one that is going to be sung to you in six months”. We can only hope they will not be sung to us by the man himself.