James Campbell: Bonk ban is Barnaby Joyce’s legacy

AFTER more than two weeks of headlines, it’s time to say sayonara to Barnaby Joyce, our first Cabinet minister to lose his job in a sex scandal, writes James Campbell.

AFTER more than two weeks of headlines, it’s time to say sayonara to Barnaby Joyce, our first Cabinet minister to lose his job in a sex scandal.

Will his demise turn out to be a one-off caused by the difficult-to-ignore arrival of a baby? Or have the rules about the private lives of politicians changed forever?

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By international standards, it is astonishing that he lasted this long.

If he and his pregnant girlfriend, a former member of his staff, had been splashed all over the British tabloid newspapers, he would have been toast a fortnight ago.

But as late as Wednesday, it was looking as though he might just pull through. Even after Malcolm Turnbull’s extraordinary intervention on the Thursday before last and Joyce’s equally extraordinary press conference the next day, which kept the story going just as it was running out of petrol.

In the end, two things seem to have finally persuaded his colleagues he had to go.

Barnaby Joyce after his resignation at a press conference at Drummond Apex Lookout in Armidale. Picture: Hollie Adams

The first was his incredibly ill-advised decision to give an interview to Fairfax from his rent-free “bachelor pad” in Armidale when he was meant to be keeping his head down on leave.

This convinced them that despite Joyce’s protestations that it wasn’t all about him, it really was all about him.

The second was the sexual harassment complaint, about which not much is known.

By Thursday night, Joyce had apparently accepted the numbers would not be there in Canberra next week. Now, following his exit, will things return to normal?

My bet is that if it weren’t for Turnbull’s ban on bonking between ministers and their staff, we would probably see a return to the what-happens-in-Canberra-stays-in-Canberra rules that press gallery and politicians have, with a few exceptions, happily operated under for decades.

But unfortunately for the politicians, that new rule is going to make this sort of stuff much harder for journalists to drive past, which is why it will come to be seen as deeply ill-considered.

That problem is for down the track, however. Turnbull’s immediate difficulty is going to be managing the arrival of a second National Party “maverick” to sit on the backbench alongside George Christensen.

Joyce was making the appropriate noises yesterday about not causing trouble, just as Tony Abbott did when the Liberals took the keys away from him back in 2015. That’s really worked well.

If I were Turnbull, I would be worried that Joyce and his mates are convinced the PM’s office was briefing against him. Turnbull has his work cut out repairing relationships.

The PM’s curt press release accepting Joyce’s resignation was a bad way to start.

It’s not like they haven’t had a fortnight to think of something nice to say about him.

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