DROWNING IN GUTTER POLITICS

DEAR God, how depraved is our politics now? We’ve got our former deputy prime minister publicly suggesting he’s been left holding a baby that isn’t his. Barnaby Joyce was last week shamed into resigning after he gave his lover, Vikki Campion, now pregnant, two taxpayer-funded jobs before leaving his wife for her.

But having publicly humiliated his wife, he’s now humiliating his new partner.

Incredibly, he’s now volunteered it’s a “bit of a grey area” whether he’s actually the father of the boy they’re expecting in early April.

The dates didn’t quite match, he mused. He was away on a trip with his wife for 10 days in the critical period. And then he was busy acting as prime minister.

Has Joyce no dignity? No sense of having to shield Campion and her soon-to-be-born son from shaming?

And why are political journalists now sniffing the sheets of our politicians, pretending to be horrified by the stains they eagerly hunt for?

It was the oh-so-moral Fairfax press which last week tut-tutted that some low-life MPs were peddling smut: “Liberals spread rumours that Joyce was not the father of the baby he is expecting with his new partner, Vikki Campion.” The real story there is just how sordid the Liberals are under Malcolm Turnbull’s so-called leadership.

But it’s not just a matter of Joyce and the Liberals spreading rumours about his child. That’s the crying shame of it all.

Just last week, we had Jobs Minister Michaelia Cash threaten to “name every young woman in Mr Shorten’s office about which rumours in this place abound” — an unsubstantiated smear suggesting these women were sleeping with the boss.

You’d think Cash would be forced to apologise for slinging such mud at innocent women, especially when her Prime Minister, Mr Turnbull, had just a couple of weeks earlier announced a bonking ban for ministers, preaching “there is a need to have more respectful workplaces”.

So what about “respectful workplaces” for the women on Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s staff, Prime Minister?

No, Turnbull refused to condemn Cash for trashing them, and even claimed she’d been “bullied” into her foul comments. At this rate, what self-respecting woman would dare risk working for a federal MP? And still they weren’t finished. Next came Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, himself on a second marriage, jeering: “There’s a history of problems in Bill Shorten’s personal life, (Labor frontbencher) Tony Burke’s personal life”.

Unbelievably, Campion was with Joyce during some of an interview he gave about his son’s paternity, during which he complained the media had “never even asked if it was Joyce’s bundle” — an appallingly demeaning way of referring to his son.

True, Joyce — in a pale imitation of gallantry — did add that he wouldn’t arrange a paternity test: “It’s mine, on the record, there it is … Even if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t care, I’d still go through this, I’d still love him.”

But what will his son later think, knowing his own father may not be his father? Knowing, too, that millions of others now know it, too, after his father told the world?

What sticks in the craw, apart from the cruelty, is Joyce’s hypocrisy.

Joyce is the man who two weeks ago told the media to stop writing about his new family for the sake of his expected son.

“I don’t want our child to grow up as some sort of public display,” said the man who has now just made his son a public display.

He didn’t want his son to seem “somehow less worthy than other children”, said the man who has now referred to him as a “bundle”, father uncertain.

I used to have some respect for Joyce. Not now.

As far as I am concerned, his political career is now over. For good.

For a start, Joyce will need all the time in the world to make it up to his new partner and his son, and if I see him once again rattling around the country as a federal minister, I’ll know he’s not at home to fix what he’s broken.

But it’s not just Joyce. That’s what’s so shocking about the vileness of this past month.

I don’t know how our government ended up down in the gutter.

Maybe it’s just following the voters, who are glued to dignitytrashing shows like Married at First Sight and Real Housewives.

Meet I’m a Politician ... Get Me Out of Here!, where MPs in a swamp eat buckets of s--- for our horrified amusement.

But however they got into this gutter, do our politicians even know how to climb out?