Barnaby Joyce offered $1 billion in another bizarre interview
FORMER deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce capped off a day of bizarre interviews last night promoting his tell-all memoir by being presented with a cheque for $1 billion as payment by comedian Charlie Pickering on ABC’s irreverent The Weekly.
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FORMER deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce capped off a day of bizarre interviews last night promoting his tell-all memoir by being presented with a cheque for $1 billion by comedian Charlie Pickering on ABC’s irreverent The Weekly.
Mr Joyce suffered another awkward interview after a day on the publicity trail spruiking his book, Weatherboard and Iron: Politics, The Bush and Me.
Even when Pickering produced a “cheque” for $1 billion as payment for the interview — a direct reference to Mr Joyce and partner Vikki Campion’s paid “tell-all” with Channel 7’s Sunday Night — he soldiered on, maintaining the line the book is “not about me”.
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Pickering then posed the question the public’s been asking about the book since the scandal which saw him leave his wife, get his mistress pregnant, and lose the deputy prime ministership erupted: “This was all dying down, why start talking about it again?”
Mr Joyce said the book wasn’t a memoir about him, “it’s a memoir about trying to look after people who in regional areas are doing it tough”, which he’d been working on it for about five years, long before Barnabygate.
Not deflected, Pickering pointed to the dedication of the book to Mr Joyce’s beloved daughters.
“Are your daughters embarrassed by you?” he asked.
Mr Joyce opted for a political answer: “Charlie, I love my daughters dearly. And I love my son. And I think that what we’ve got to do is make sure we have a nation where there are opportunities if they live in a regional town, a small town, as good as your opportunities where you are”.
Earlier in the day Mr Joyce rewrote history to claim that voters in his regional NSW seat of New England knew his marriage was over before they headed to the polls last year.
In an interview on 2GB, the disgraced former deputy prime minister lied when he said he had revealed in Parliament that he had left wife Natalie before the by-election on December 2 last year.
In fact, he stood up in Parliament on December 7 after he was re-elected to make the statement.
When asked if he should have come clean before the by-election that was caused because he was a New Zealand citizen, Mr Joyce said he had.
“I said it in the chamber. I actually went into the chamber and noted that my marriage was over,” he said.
When asked specifically if that was before the by-election, Mr Joyce said “yes”.
Mr Joyce has since corrected his comments and said he “didn’t quite remember the date”.
Mr Joyce and Kyle Sandilands earlier in the day buried the hatchet after a very public spat three years ago, with Mr Joyce appearing on KIIS FM yesterday morning to talk up his new book.
Sandilands ripped into Mr Joyce on air in 2015, calling him a “wanker” and “just a gerbil of a thing” when the politician demanded Johnny Depp’s dogs, Pistol and Boo, “bugger off back to the United States” after it was revealed the pair of Yorkshire terriers had dodged Australian quarantine on his private jet.
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But yesterday’s interview struck a more conciliatory tone, with Sandilands declaring they had much in common, including both having younger girlfriends. Sandilands is 47, his partner Imogen Anthony is 27. Mr Joyce is 51 and his partner Vikki Campion 33.
Co-host Jackie O Henderson asked what Mr Joyce would have done if he had ran into Sandilands in the months after the infamous 2015 interview.
“I was a bouncer for two years,” Joyce said.
Sandilands spoke of his surprise after Mr Joyce was later chosen as deputy prime minister after Nationals Party leader Warren Truss announced his retirement in February, 2016.
“A shiver went through my body, I thought, I’m finished,” Sandilands said.
“Was there any part of you that was going to seek revenge behind the scenes — even a thought of it?”
Mr Joyce replied: “I thought I’ll bump into this bugger somewhere and I’ll say G’day.”
He also recalled the media attention after news broke of his affair with Ms Campion claiming “it just does your head in.”
“At one stage people were pushing chops and potatoes through a fence so we could get food into the house so we could eat. That’s how mad it got. We had people full-time positioned outside our house and at that time I thought, ‘I’ve got no mates’, and of all the weirdest things, of all the head changing issues, I’ve got Kyle backing me — obviously, I’m in the wrong,” he said.
Mr Joyce told the radio hosts his relationship with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull changed following the fallout.
“You go from friendly to professional, it’s not friends,” he said.
“It took a turn for the worse when he did the doorstop, but you’ve got to work, you’ve got to do the right thing, so it’s professional.”
“You live on the extremities of the bell curve, you’re really happy then at times down in the dumps.
“It creeps up on you, towards the end it was really prominent. I didn’t see it, people around me saw it.”
Mr Joyce was asked about the ways to deal with mental health problems when Sandilands confronted Mr Joyce on whether he had ever tried marijuana.
“Yeah of course, when I was at bloody university,” Mr Joyce replied.
Henderson pressed further, asking Mr Joyce if he had tried “anything else”.
“I’ve come on this show and spoken to you guys,” Mr Joyce said, to which Sandilands replied “that’s like smoking crack.”
In his new book, Mr Joyce opens up about his battle with depression and admits he pursued women for years in Canberra before having a baby boy with his media adviser and now partner Ms Campion.
Mr Joyce was seen leaving the radio station’s Macquarie Park studios just after 7am — an hour before the interview went to air.
Mr Joyce also spoke over the phone to 2GB’s Alan Jones just before 8am, saying he now felt like an outsider in a “boarding school”.
“How far on the outside are you now?” Jones asked, to which Mr Joyce replied “pretty much on the outside”.
“You’ve got to remember, if you become part of that boarding school, then you will just try and make that your life and you’ll try to get ahead in that boarding school called Parliament House,” Mr Joyce continued.
“Big white building on the top of a hill,” he went on.
“It’s a boarding school because you all travel down there, they ring the bells you go here, they ring the bells you go there, you all eat your dinner together … it’s a boarding school environment.”
Mr Joyce writes in the book how he wanted to die after the affair ruined his marriage and career.
“When you stop thinking about how sad it will be when you have gone, to thinking, I have hurt so many that I want to go without anybody knowing,” he writes in the book, excerpts of which were published in Fairfax Media earlier this week.
“Winston Churchill had his black dog. Mine was a half-crazed cattle dog, biting everything that came near the yard.”
For 24/7 crisis or suicide prevention support, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit www.lifeline.org.au/gethelp.