Joyce’s choices
DÉCLASSÉ, demeaning and distasteful. Inexplicable, inexcusable and, quite simply, incredible.
There is only one story this week that could possible warrant a double dose of the rule of three (with alliteration thrown in to boot!) — Barnaby Joyce.
Barnaby is in danger of becoming the standard text for political students when the topic is ‘What’s wrong with Australian politicians and politics?’
From the start, this whole saga has been wrong from almost any aspect you choose to view it.
It is a classic example of how remote our politicians have become and the disdain with which they treat the very people who elected them, you and me.
Joyce, let us not forget, was one of the politicians who didn’t know whether or not they were entitled to sit in Parliament because of a potential conflict over dual nationality.
He was judged to have contravened the citizenship requirements, duly stood down and successfully was re-elected in his New England electorate.
Whether or not that would have been the case if the story of his affair — and of leaving his wife and four children — had been known at the time is a moot point.
This is a devout Catholic and, yes, we all make mistakes. But in Barnaby’s case he compounded mistake after mistake with illjudged and faintly ridiculous denials and disingenuousness. The sheer hypocrisy is breathtaking.
As the Leader of the National Party and Deputy Prime Minister Joyce he espoused, first and foremost, family values.
He steadfastly opposed nontraditional marriage formation. He opposed sex before marriage.
He invited moral panic around cervical cancer vaccines with bon mots like “There might be an overwhelming backlash from people saying, ‘Don’t you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a licence to be promiscuous’.”
He campaigned against equal marriage. He voted for drug testing welfare recipients. He told the unemployed to “get off their backside and do your very best to find a job” as if they were all workshy bludgers.
So we have what has become the classically self-interested politician who is only too happy to provide a sound bite on anything and everything when it suits him. We have an ultra-right Catholic and ultra-right National Party member. Of course, however, things change when he himself crosses moral boundaries, similar trespasses by others he would readily condemn on the steps of Parliament with news cameras at the ready. When his affair with Vikki Campion was first revealed, he ducked and weaved before admitting it. He then of course told the media that he wanted privacy and that his private life should be off limits. Sorry, Barnaby, not when it goes against all your public utterances on the sanctity of the family unit. We also have to question when the affair started as it seems likely it started when Vikki was employed in Barnaby’s office. This raises the now mandatory questions of imbalance of power and appropriateness of office affairs.
We then have to question Vikki’s placement in another highly paid job in another minister’s department. Or do we simply accept it as a huge coincidence? I think not. I wonder how Vikki felt when Joyce made statements to the media, soon after it became known that Vikki was pregnant.
He said that he was never asked if he was the father of his former staffer’s unborn child and that the issue of paternity was not certain, adding at the time that the baby boy he and Ms Campion welcomed in April would be raised as “mine” but conceded the identity of the biological father was “a grey area”.
Of course, he has now conceded that the child is his and admitted it was a mistake to raise the paternity issue when he already knew the answer.
This week we hear the pair has sold an interview to a TV station for what is believed to be around the $150,000 mark.
Barnaby has said that it wasn’t his decision but was made by his former staffer and now partner Vikki and that he wouldn’t get any money as it was going into a trust for his son.
Are we really expected to accept this claptrap on top of all the other claptrap he’s uttered? Barnaby wants a toughening of privacy laws. I want a toughening-up on politicians’ behaviour, unfettered hypocrisy and downright unacceptable disdain for voters.