Rita Panahi: Hysteria over Barnaby Joyce, Vikki Campion interview is out of line
FORMER deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce hasn’t covered himself in glory over his relationship with Vikki Campion — but let’s calm down, because the hate is out of hand, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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IT MAY have been another part of his anatomy that got him into trouble but Barnaby Joyce has an inimitable talent for putting his foot in it.
The former deputy prime minister was at it again today trying to dodge responsibility for accepting a fat cheque from Channel Seven by effectively blaming his new partner, Vikki Campion.
Joyce appears determined to aggravate one of the only woman in Australia who is not already mad at him.
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First he told the media that there was a biological “grey area” over the paternity of the child she was carrying, pointing out that they were geographically apart for much of the time during which conception could have occurred.
The question of whether it was really “Joyce’s bundle” was never raised by the media until the member for New England, bizarrely, put it on the agenda five weeks before Campion gave birth to Sebastian.
And now he has again thrown her under the bus by saying that he would never have taken Sunday Night’smoney if it were not for her.
“Remember there are other people in this interview, being Vikki and Seb, so if it was just an interview with me as a politician, sure, I am not going to charge for that,” Joyce told The Australian.
“But that is not what they wanted, they wanted an interview obviously to get Vikki’s side of the story and like most mothers she said, ‘Seeing as I am being screwed over and there are drones and everything over my house in the last fortnight, paparazzi waiting for me, if everybody else is making money then (I am) going to make money out of it’.”
The only reason paparazzi or the public are interested in Campion is her relationship with Joyce, so it’s a little rich for him to blame her for the paid interview.
And, why shouldn’t Campion ensure that her son has a tidy nest egg? Nothing focuses the mind like having a child.
Campion may have heard the line from tycoon, politician and for a period Imran Khan’s father-in-law, Sir James Goldsmith, who said: “When you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy.”
The $150,000 fee is said to be going into a trust fund for Sebastian and provides the new mother and her son some level of financial security.
Why couldn’t Joyce take responsibility and defend the decision instead of assigning the justification to his “baby mama”?
There is no law against accepting payment for an interview, even if you are a serving politician, and given the intrusion into their private life, Joyce could argue he was well within his rights to seek compensation from a media outlet that was going to profit from his story.
Also, as an older father with significant financial commitments, he would want to provide a sum for his newborn should he not be around when the child comes of age.
It is not the political machinations that the masses are interested in but the details of his relationship with Campion and their new life together with baby Seb. Of course there are also potential political implications if Joyce and Campion spill the beans on who knew what when and what part they played in Campion moving from Joyce’s office to coalition colleagues Matt Canavan and Damien Drum.
There is plenty of bad blood between Joyce and Malcolm Turnbull, particularly since the prime minister admonished his then deputy for his “shocking error of judgment” that had “set off a world of woe”.
Given the reaction to the Sunday Night interview this week, there’ll be plenty more acrimony between Joyce and his coalition colleagues.
Veterans’ Affairs Minister Darren Chester, who has some history with his former leader, said he supported a ban on serving politicians receiving payment for interviews.
“This is unprecedented in my time in parliament and I’m open to the conversation banning MPs from benefiting personally from selling stories to the media,” he said.
Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer said that “most Australians are pretty disgusted” by Joyce’s decision to accept payment.
BARNABY WON’T BE ABLE TO TOUCH TV MONEY
JOYCE INTERVIEW TO AIR ON SUNDAY
Let’s just calm down with the bans and hyperbole. I would have thought knifing a first-term prime minister and breaking election promises are far more “disgusting” than participating in a paid interview.
It’s not like Joyce is a criminal profiting from his crimes; he made a mistake millions of men make daily without costing them their jobs.
The reality is Joyce is facing a costly divorce and has two families to support while his salary has more than halved from the $400,000-plus he was receiving before he quit the Nationals leadership and ministry.
Why shouldn’t he and Campion, and their son’s trust fund, share the spoils when their story delivers Channel Seven healthy ratings and advertising dollars?
Sunday Night also needs a win this week after last week’s Jacqui Lambie exclusive failed to win over viewers. The program had only 444,000 viewers (five-city metro) tuning in to hear Lambie’s dating woes. Joyce’s romance should do significantly better and could help rebuild not only his but Campion’s damaged image.
But once you accept money for an interview then you are beholden to the interviewer and Joyce and Campion should expect some hard questions about matters they’d rather keep private.
One thing Joyce must do is to withdraw the Press Council complaint against the Daily Telegraph for breaching his privacy.
When you take part in paid tell-all exclusives you lose the privilege of complaining about intrusion of privacy.
— Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist.
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