Neophyte Senator Barnaby Joyce is hogging the limelight this morning on a false premise. While the Howard Government theoretically takes control of the Senate today, it is not because of Joyce’s election, but that of Russell Trood, the third elected Liberal Senator from Queensland.
So I thought it was worth drawing a bit of attention to Russell. He’s a mild-mannered Associate Professor from Griffith University’s Department of International Business and Asian Studies. You can see his staff profile here. He has a law degree from Sydney Uni (one of our sponsors) and an economics degree from the University of Wales.
I suspect, from once having spent a couple of hours in conversation with him on an airline flight, that the Economics Department at the University of Wales is not given to what is generally termed “neo-liberal” economics. Trood’s economic view of the world is not mainstream “Howardism”.
His PhD is from Dalhouse University, which is in Nova Scotia in Canada, so he gets around! If you want to know more about what he thinks, you could check out his publications here (pdf 78kb) or an article that we published here
It might be worth studying the backgrounds of all the other Coalition Senators too. Barnaby Joyce is not the only one with clout – they all have it. If Labor is smart it will be trying to work out where the fault lines are and start pushing issues where other “balance of power” senators may want to line up with them and against Barnaby Joyce.
Which means that John Howard will have to pull Joyce into line pretty soon, or “control” of the Senate will bring more problems than lack of control did.