(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

The government must be chuffed that Barnaby Joyce seems set to continue making life miserable for his colleagues in opposition.

The former deputy prime minister, now demoted to opposition spokesman for veterans’ affairs, spent the last days of his leadership rejecting the fact that he is so toxic he helped inflict multiple losses on his Coalition partners. Along the way, he suggested the Coalition’s fig leaf 2050 emissions target could be dumped.

Now he’s undermined newly minted Opposition Leader Peter Dutton — who claims he’s all in favour of a wide-ranging federal ICAC — by opining at length about why a federal ICAC is an affront to democracy.

While Barnaby regressing to his “colour and movement” phase is always entertaining, he has both shone a light on the irredeemable nature of the Nationals and why there’s a need for more fundamental reform of government spending processes than the new Labor government is prepared to contemplate.

Joyce’s argument consists of a Labor MP who lost his seat a quarter of a century ago saying the Hawke government considered an ICAC and didn’t proceed (not that some members of that cabinet needed a federal ICAC), that there was no need for a federal ICAC because there was question time and Insiders, and that politicians should be free to spend money on whatever vision they want.

Yes, Joyce actually claimed that Insiders and a “forensic media gallery” prevent corruption. A vacuous program devoted to race-calling by News Corp columnists gets the job done, though presumably you’d need to redefine corruption as being unable to recall the Wage Price Index in order to see the press gallery as a check on abuse of office. As for the farce of question time being any sort of scrutiny, I reject the premise of your question and in fact, Mr Speaker, the real issue is the corruption of the opposition.

Joyce also runs a line that is common across political parties: that politicians should be free to spend as they see fit, unfettered by bureaucratic recommendations or “the purity of a business case”, that the elected should be “allowed to govern”. As Crikey explained when Scott Morrison peddled this nonsense, the argument is entirely inconsistent with how we’re governed right now — we already require experts to do much of the key policymaking in our polity, not politicians, because the latter can’t be trusted.

The Nationals, in particular, can’t be trusted, because unlike the Liberals, they don’t even pretend to adhere to the idea that taxpayer money belongs to taxpayers and not governments. For Nationals, the entire point of politics is to take money from taxpayers and use it to pork-barrel, rort and look after their mates.

For Joyce — who once boasted (perhaps perfectly seriously) that he used Productivity Commission reports as toilet paper — politicians need to be able to ignore officials and do whatever they like. The interest of taxpayers in seeing their hard-earned money spent wisely by governments is a distant second to what Joyce risibly calls “a vision for a greater Australia”.

As we know from the past nine years, “greater Australia” consists of car parks where there are no train stations, sports grants based on seat margins, a pointless rail line that will subsidise only wealthy coalminers, advertising contracts handed to mates, land sold for wildly inflated prices to donors, infrastructure projects that state governments don’t want… The list goes on and on, as does the cost.

A problem that Joyce doesn’t refer to is that if we can’t trust politicians and need them guarded ferociously, it’s no longer clear that we can trust the public service either.

Rather than Sir Humphrey-like wielders of secret power and rigid adherents of “the purity of the business case”, the APS under the Coalition was reduced to bungling servants — politicised, disempowered, bereft of talent, good only for muttering “I’ll take that on notice, senator” as yet another estimates hearing uncovered yet another scandal. In some case, such as the car park rorts, bureaucrats simply gave up trying to provide advice and simply did whatever their minister’s staffers told them.

Joyce presents false dichotomy between a rigorous APS and visionary politicians. Instead it’s a third-rate bureaucracy and the corrupt politicians who have neutered it.

That’s why a federal ICAC won’t be anywhere near enough — fixing the APS is needed, desperately.