Renegade New England MP Barnaby Joyce is set to meet with Pauline Hanson in Canberra next week, as the One Nation leader ramps up efforts to poach him for her party.
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"I intend to cook him dinner and have a good chat with him," Senator Hanson told ABC radio on Tuesday.
"I'm going to have a good talk with him about whether his prospects will be better with One Nation ... Of course, I want him on board."
Mr Joyce, who was relegated to the backbench by Opposition Leader Sussan Ley after being confined to his electorate during this year's federal election campaign, has not yet decided if he will rejoin the Nationals party room when Parliament sits next week.
It is understood that Mr Joyce is weighing a potential defection to One Nation to target a NSW Senate seat at the next election, after announcing he will not recontest New England.
Mr Joyce told this masthead he was mulling over the Coalition's new climate and energy policy, which retains a commitment to the Paris Agreement but not Australia's net zero by 2050 emissions reduction target - and that questions remained to be answered.
"What is going to be asked of me in town halls is, 'have you stopped these transmission lines?'" Mr Joyce said, referring to renewable energy projects.
"Now, I'm working out what is the answer to that question ... The next thing is, are we going to be able to provide base load power, as we have in the past in an unambiguous way, which is coal-fired power?"
He claimed it was "ridiculous to say intermittent power's cheapest and then go ahead and subsidise," dismissing the CSIRO's GenCost report - which found that wind and solar are the most cost-effective new sources of electricity - as based on a "fallacy".
"People quote the CSIRO. Well, I'm going to quote another place. Tomago," Mr Joyce said, referring to the Hunter region's struggling aluminium smelter facing potential closure, pending federal government intervention, because of rising power costs.
"Do you think [owner] Rio Tinto doesn't have an incredibly stringent oversight of where our power prices are?" he said, also pointing to the company's decision announced on Tuesday that it will slash alumina production at its refinery in Gladstone, Queensland.
"They've had a very, very good look at it and made a multibillion-dollar decision to get the hell out of here."
Senator Hanson, whose far-right populist party has enjoyed a boost in popularity since the election as voters turn off the major parties and is about to launch a Canberra branch, said she wanted to recruit "people with the vested interests of this country at heart, like Barnaby has."
One Nation attracted just 6.4 per cent of the primary vote nationally at the May election, but polling by the Resolve Political Monitor in September suggested its support had hit a record high of 12 per cent.
When asked about the Coalition's climate policy shift, Senator Hanson said: "They haven't gone far enough. They should be getting out of the Paris Agreement, because you can't have one without the other."
Her message to Mr Joyce was that "we can forge ahead, because we're on the same page on net zero, and working together, we can do a lot for the country."
The New England MP, who has long been friends with Senator Hanson, has not yet set a time for the pair's Canberra catch up, but it won't be the first time the One Nation leader has cooked him dinner inside her Parliament House office.
"She is very much the no-fuss mum in the kitchen, talking to you in the next room whilst standing over the cooking," he told this masthead.
As for what's likely to be on the menu, he said, her signature dishes included steak and vegetables, and steak and salad.











