LNP Senator Matt Canavan stood down from his position as resources minister this evening while issues over his citizenship are resolved.

If he’s gone for good, he’ll be missed.

Canavan, a former Productivity Commission economist who bought Barnaby Joyce in from the fringes of the Nationals to the party leadership while on his staff, was one of the few ministers prepared to take the fight right up to his opponents.

He has been a ferocious advocate of the coal industry in the face of the bleatings from the “Let’s all freeze to death in the dark singing Kumbayah brigade” — and a ferocious advocate for jobs in the resources sector in his home state of Queensland.

Just last week he braved the Punch and Judy show that is the ABC’s Q&A, where in short succession he denounced the impact of the shutdown of Victoria’s Hazelwood power station on electricity prices, dealt with the whines of a professional protester and dispatched an Al Jazeera journalist who would presumably prefer we used Qatari oil where possible instead of Galilee basin coal.

But Canavan — more notably — has also been prepared to tackle the corporate social responsibility bedwetters crippling private enterprise and destroying shareholder value that have now leeched on to the top end of town.

He gave Westpac a good touching up when it got preciously namby-pamby over financing for the Adani project, saying it wouldn’t get involved.

In short, Canavan has been exactly the sort of figure conservative politics needs.

Here’s hoping he doesn’t join the Section 44 death toll.

Illustration: YouTube.

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