Barnaby Joyce’s obsession with the idea that Australia and the developed world generally is facing an economic Armageddon, caused by it drowning in mountains of debt is nonsensical, but Joyce is playing to an electorally powerful audience when he spins these alarmist lines.   They resonate with some hard-right voters, and particularly those who used to support Pauline Hanson and One Nation in Queensland.

This is the voter who thinks that free markets and liberalised trade are destroying Australia and that the financial system is collapsing around us.  Governments, on this view, need to reregulate financial institutions, and somehow make Australia self reliant.  If we do not, this argument warns, we will lose our sovereignty to international banks and multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

In 1998, One Nation’s federal election policy document warned that a “continuation of these globalist” policies will drive Australia to financial disaster and change us from a wealthy and self sufficient nation, to a “third world” nation, depending on the International Monetary Fund and loans to pay its debts, thereby losing its economic and political freedoms.”

And when she made her infamous maiden speech to Parliament in 1996 Hanson specifically referred to the fact that Australia was “$190 billion in debt with an interest bill that is strangling us”.

One Nation is not alone in proffering this extremist view of the world.  The Citizens Electoral Council, an extreme right organisation, which is strong in Queensland (the CEC has received more than $500,000 in recent years from one of its former candidates, Queensland farmer Ray Gillham) —  would not disagree with Senator Joyce’s dire warnings of chaos and collapse.

On December 29 last year the CEC’s national secretary Craig Isherwood issued a media release —  in which he warned that “we’re a nation drowning in debt” and that the “global financial crisis is in essence an unpayable debt crisis”,  which is  “a swelling volcano, and it is set to blow”.   It should be noted that it is not suggested that Joyce has any connection with the CEC.

In other words, there is nothing new in Joyce’s rhetoric and any idea that he is simply loose mouthed and doesn’t mean what he is saying, should be scotched immediately.  He knows exactly what he is about and it is this — cultivating the voters who turned on the Keating government with a vengeance in 1996 in places such as Queensland and who then flirted with One Nation and applauded John Howard’s dog-whistle politics.  These are voters who genuinely believe that the world has gone to pot and that it needs prophets such as Barnaby Joyce to tell us so.

I spoke to several of these types of voters a decade ago when I ran an industry group, the Australian Gold Council.  A handful of concerned citizens from the Gold Coast used to contact me regularly urging me to tell the public that the gold price was deliberately being kept low by bankers, governments and speculators. They used to sound just like Barnaby Joyce and I found out later at least a couple of them were active in One Nation.