Barnaby Joyce: Messy private lives of MPs not always a turn-off for voters

Barnaby Joyce ‘giving as good as he gets’ at the dispatch box in parliament this week. Picture: Getty Images .

They say you can’t keep a good man down. In recent years Barnaby Joyce has basked up hill and down dale and he has caused himself considerable harm as well.

Joyce apparently has a protective shield around him that enables him to deflect all criticism. Nobody has been criticised as much as he and nobody has deserved as much criticism either. Yet, as I sit here watching question time, there he stands at the dispatch box giving as good as he gets.

Despite what his enemies may have hoped for, his rather messy private life has never done him a scrap of electoral damage. He represents a very conservative area yet voters there seem to forgive him his peccadillos. Not all politicians generate such loyalty.

Al Grassby swept all before him to win the NSW seat of Riverina. Both sides of politics were stunned by his victory. He could not consolidate his win because his char­acter was not up to the standards demanded by his contemporaries.

The unsolved murder of Donald Mackay, an anti-drugs campaigner and a Liberal Party member, hung like a pall over the area and over Grassby’s head. Crime writer Bob Bottom kept the story in the news. He was like a dog with a bone. He made us all aware of who Grassby liked to hang around with, including notorious bad guy Robert Trimbole. Being a brilliant orator wasn’t enough to save Grassby from public reaction to his friendship with criminals.

Lin Gordon won a state seat in the region but, since he quit, Labor has lost all representation in an area that has reverted to type.

Labor once held a swag of seats in the NSW parliament but over the years gradually lost them all. The strong ties with the union movement never helped in the bush nor did an impression of urban focus. Now if the bush won’t vote Labor it has the opportunity to vote for the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers if voting Nationals really turns stomachs.

One contributing factor to Labor’s demise in the bush was the decline of the railways as a main form of transport. Big railway towns usually provided a solid Labor vote to counteract the bush vote around them.

As a young party organiser I was constantly forming and reforming country branches. I would always visit the local schools and post offices because among teachers and postal workers you could always find Labor voters. Under party rules 15 members were required to start a branch, but if you could find 10 in a country town you ignored the rules. The side benefit was those small branches sending right-wing delegates to the electoral councils, which in turn voted for delegates to state conferences.

NSW conferences of the party are big, bold and beautiful, with a thousand delegates on the floor and a similar number of the faithful in the galleries, cheering on their heroes and booing their opponents. You know you are someone when delegates all troop in from the pub or the pie stall when you approach the microphone. It has an atmosphere like no other forum I have experienced.

The real bitterness that was a hallmark of the conferences of old has gone. The rivalry between the Right and the Left has been substantially civilised. When I was a leading figure in the party the fight was more about ideology because the Left was led by people who held secret Communist Party membership. No one is that stupid today. There is little left to fight about today other than how many refugees should be allowed in each year and whether arriving by boat on our northern or western shores should be tolerated.

Richard Marles managed the shadow immigration and border protection portfolio brilliantly and marked himself down as one to watch. Marles’s speech on this issue at the federal conference was superb, particularly since he was speaking at a forum at which he did not have the numbers.

At some point the Left will unite on a big issue and pass a conference resolution that Australians won’t cop. This is as certain as it is to be feared. A centrist Labor Party will always be in the contest. The trick for Labor is to represent mild, gradual change without ever frightening the horses.