Barking Barnaby gets excitable
When it comes to yapping loudly and lifting a leg to mark out your territory, Johnny Depp’s two wee dogs have nothing on Australia’s border watchdog, Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce.
Depp, in Australia to film his latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, flew his Yorkshire terriers Pistol and Boo with him in his private jet without declaring them to Customs.
Can’t have that. However, while the actor must be faulted for being less than scrupulous, the same can surely be said for the Customs procedure through which he clearly wafted at the time.
Clearly the whole link between pirates and smuggling hadn’t prompted Customs officers to deviate from the approach that Joyce insists they do take, which is to ‘‘rely on people being honest’’.
Many’s the traveller who might react with surprise to this explanation of how the honesty system works, given their own unhappy experiences with Customs officers doubting their declarations and diligently probing their possessions, not to mention their bodily nooks and crannies on occasion (though we grant you this is seldom in pursuit of small dogs). Joyce has a legitimate case that border security is important, but in his zeal to demonstrate that nobody is above the rules he has been showing more canines than the circumstances warrant.
If Depp didn’t arrange for them to ‘‘bugger off back to the United States’’ they would be put down, he warned.
The prospect of that being necessary is pretty much zero.
It’s the minister’s excitability, rather than his diligence, that has attracted attention.
There’s a difference between being politely implacable and being a bit of a dick about it.
It smacks more of ministerial ego than Aussie egalitarianism.
Joyce also raised the possibility of the dogs being rendered stateless without permits to return to the US, a situation akin to the true story behind the Tom Hanks movie The Terminal.
The whole ‘‘war against terriers’’ story emerges chiefly as a trigger for comparisons that tend not to be to Australia’s advantage: perhaps the most telling of them the tweet: ‘‘Tough on boat people, tight on foreign aid, deadly on private jet-flying dogs . . . Australia’s big balls, small heart stand.’’