Damn the wowsers: there’s no moral reason Joyce should leave parliament

Barnaby Joyce attends The National Rally Against Reckless Renewables at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Wowserism is back after the former deputy prime minister was filmed in a state of advanced refreshment while taking a stroll from the parliament to his digs in Braddon late last Friday evening.

Now he is being encouraged by his senior colleagues to take a period of personal leave to get his affairs in order. Naturally, the media leapt on the episode and, with lips smacking at the thought of all those clicks, posted the amusing footage of Joyce looking like an upturned snapping turtle barking expletives into his phone.

What other country could claim this as a political scandal? In Britain, personal misbehaviour ends with MPs being found with a quarter of an orange wedged in their mouths and a pair of pantihose over their heads. Barnaby Joyce merely fell down. He did get up eventually.

The parameters have now been set in the stages of alcohol consumption for public figures beginning with the light euphoria or a beer buzz to the next phase of intemp­erance, “Hold My Beer, Barnesy, I sing Khe Sanh better”.

Barnaby Joyce

Simply add more alcohol and we move to a state of muddled cognition, with the public figure shouting at passers-by, “Don’t you know who I am?” before ending finally in a state of tertiary inebriation now known as Totally Barnaby Joyced.

In years gone by this story would be of little moment but the Rechabites are thick on the ground now, tut-tutting abstemiously and furrowing their brows at occasional moments of excess. The question is not whether Joyce can do his job effectively but whether his drunken tumble may make them all look bad.

I sat in the public gallery of the parliament for the first time at the age of 12 with my parents, as guests of the former Collingwood mayor turned member for Batman, Horrie Garrick.

My memory of that day was a ragged debate on the Family Law Act that would ultimately offer no-fault divorce in Australia for the first time.

Jim Killen, a former minister for the navy in the Gorton government, who in the Whitlam years sat on the opposition frontbench, sought to move a procedural motion inferring that the debate in the previous evening was raucous and unparliamentary. His good friend Fred Daly, then leader of the house in the Whitlam government, interjected from the Treasury benches. “You couldn’t scratch yourself last night.” Killen replied, “That’s because I was drinking with you.”

It was something of an eye-opener for a precocious political watcher. It was a hint, too, that politicians managed to steer us through two world wars and a Great Depression while enjoying the odd tipple.

Gough Whitlam, Fred Daly and Jim Killen at lauch of Daly’s book, From Curtin To Kerr, in 1977.

Apropos of Daly, John Solomon “Sol” Rosevear, Speaker of the house during the Chifley government, ran an SP bookmaking operation out of his office. This side hustle was not seen as any great impediment to the performance of his parliamentary duties.

As a young parliamentarian and member for Curtin, Sir Paul Hasluck recalled seeing Rosevear loading crates of beer and bubbles into the boot of his car, leftover from an official function. The Speaker told the young backbencher he was simply making sure the grog got to the right people. Hasluck surmised accurately that Rosevear was the right people.

The Chifley government was defeated in 1949 and Rosevear resumed his duties as a backbencher. He died in office in 1953 after suffering a massive heart attack. At his funeral at All Souls Anglican Church at Leichhardt in Sydney the Labor faithful gathered to see him off.

As the reverend eulogised Rosevear, detailing the dreadful loss to the nation of a great Australian now gone, a man who rose above the internecine feuds of politics to place himself in service of the country’s most vulnerable, et cetera et cetera, Daly was heard to shout, “By God, we’re burying the wrong man.”

Joyce can be seen as continuing that tradition of thirsty Australian politicians, albeit a man with a face made more for colour television than black and white in what is a rare display of all of the colours on the visible light spectrum lying between his receding hairline and his jaw.

Almost a week after the fall, his so-called friends within the Nationals and more broadly in the Coalition have wrung their hands and shaken their heads in dismay. Perhaps, they murmured, Joyce should be shuffled off for the dreaded counselling with his role as opposition spokesman for veterans’ affairs snatched from him.

And here at last we get to the real story.Not one of a bloke who went for an ill-fated, chemically assisted late-night wander but as an opposition spokesman for veterans’ affairs, where Joyce has been active in keeping the government to account on what remains a weeping sore on public administration in this country.

There has been a Productivity Commission report and a Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. The timeline for the royal commission’s recommendation to simplify veteran compensation and rehabilitation assistance that requires a legislative response from government by December 2023 has come and gone with only one murmur – coming from Joyce, reminding the government and his opponent, Matt Keogh, of their obligations and commitments.

To be fair, Keogh and the government have invested public money and resources in resolving a backlog of veterans’ claims, which was at an unacceptable level of 44000 at the last federal election. The Morrison government cut $450m from the department’s budget over the forward estimates.

Nevertheless, veterans’ affairs was relegated to the outer ministry for the first time in years by the Albanese government in 2022.

Voters expect Joyce to stay in the parliament and continue his work. There is no moral reason why he should not do so.