“After 30 years with the National Party, I am resigning from the party … I apologise for all the hurt that that will cause other people. I really do, but it’s not the most important thing,” Joyce said.
“What is really important is that we understand those dealing with the cost-of-living crisis that we go into battle them.”
On Thursday morning, two of Joyce’s political allies, speaking anonymously to this masthead, confirmed Joyce would make his announcement later in the day.
Nationals allies including Michael McCormack and Matt Canavan, a friend and former staffer for Joyce, were as late as Wednesday afternoon urging the former leader of the party to stay in the tent.
But Joyce’s Monday night steak dinner with Hanson was viewed as near-confirmation of his decision, prompting Canavan to flick the switch to campaigning against an old ally and boss who would become a political enemy and cannibalise the already-depressed Coalition vote.
Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson talk over a dinner of pasta, salad and steak in Hanson’s office on Monday night.
Former leadership rival McCormack spent an hour with Joyce in Parliament House’s Aussies cafe on Wednesday, making the case for Joyce to stay in the Nationals “for a number of reasons”.
“I think he owes it to himself, he owes it to his legacy, he owes it to those regional people who put him here, and he owes it to the party which gave him the great privilege of making him deputy prime minister, not once, but as he reminded me, three times,” McCormack said on Wednesday.
Littleproud, an enemy of Joyce who dumped the former leader from the shadow cabinet after the election, on Wednesday said Joyce wanted time and space and “we’ve given him that to work through where he wants to be”.
Hanson, who has made no secret of her hopes that Joyce would join her party and one day lead it, told Sky on Tuesday that she thought she “wooed him and dined him beautifully”.
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“Let’s keep our fingers crossed. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I hope the steak and the dinner and the mulberry pie did it. He’s a good mate. I love him,” she said.
Joyce was first elected to federal parliament as a Nationals senator for Queensland at the 2004 election, taking his seat in the upper house in July 2005. He moved to the House of Representatives in 2013, winning the seat of New England in northern NSW. He was briefly ruled ineligible to serve in parliament during the citizenship crisis in 2017, but regained the seat at a byelection later that year.
More to come
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