Wives left behind have every reason to be venting their anger

BUT what about the wives? Why can’t we say that what Barnaby Joyce did to his wife was immoral? Boy, have commentators shied off such judgments.

But not so the married women ringing me on talkback, hot with anger.

Natalie Joyce also has no trouble saying what most journalists have decided they must not: that her husband broke a most fundamental deal. She issued a statement going to the heart of her betrayal by the man she helped to become Deputy Prime Minister, only to have him leave her and her four daughters for a beautiful young staffer, now pregnant.

“This situation is devastating on many fronts,” Natalie Joyce said.

“For my girls, who are affected by the family breakdown, and for me as a wife of 24 years, who placed my own career on hold to support Barnaby through his political life. “Naturally we also feel deceived and hurt.” Of course. And how many wives have sacrificed their own careers to stay at home and raise the children so their husband can soar? They do the school functions and help the kids with their homework, freeing their husbands for those massive hours at work. They perform those trivial tasks — from the washing and cooking to paying bills — that keep their family life ticking smoothly, but which will never make them famous and never feature on any CV. Natalie Joyce did all of that. A year ago her husband told of his “guilt” at being home for just two days in two months. No other partnership in life is so big. It’s much more solemn a deal than, say, a contract to build a new airport or an NBN.

This is a deal where one person pledges their life to help the other, on the implicit understanding that this is to build a joint future. The rewards of success will be shared.

But Natalie Joyce is not the first wife to find that by helping to make their husbands successful, they have made him a shiny prize for some other woman.

After years of sacrifice for their husband’s career, they find he’ll now share the success with a woman who did nothing to create it.

Bang. Husband gone, wealth divided, and the wife who once shared her powerful husband’s life is now reduced to a kind of social death.

She’s now the single mum, discarded and humiliated — not wanted any more at the high table of power where their husband and new partner still sit.

Do professional women understand how vulnerable the sisters back at home truly feel?

I hear many — particularly journalists and politicians — instead tut- tut along with the famous Ita Buttrose, that Joyce leaving his wife for his staffer is “none of our business”.

Cassandra Thorburn, too, clashed with their type after TV star Karl Stefanovic left her for a glamorous shoe designer. In her first public response, Thorburn made the same point made by Natalie Joyce — that she’d helped to create her husband’s career.

She’d given up working as a journalist to care for their three children, and she listed some of the other things she’d done to help Stefanovic’s career: “The suggestions, the story ideas, the constant counselling. This took a huge toll on my family and I.”

But professional women — the kind who write in magazines and newspapers — once more swooped and said it was distasteful for her to speak. Thorburn hit back: “It’s such a shame that the biggest critics of women seem to be other women. The media showed no interest in this stay- at- home mum for 11 years, so kicking me now when I’m going through one of the hardest times of mine and my children’s lives seems very cruel indeed.”

To shut up Thorburn, Natalie Joyce, and the “moralisers” may suit the high- flyers, but out in millions of homes — where children are raised — many women want very much to speak. For those stay- at- home women, the Joyce scandal is not just the issue that journalists such as me have focused on — the use of taxpayers’ money to give Joyce’s lover two high- paying jobs.

It’s actually about what most journalists won’t discuss. It’s the moral issue.

For these women, it is very much their business to defend the marriage institution and morals meant to keep them safe from such a profound betrayal,