Barnaby Joyce’s courting of publicity negates his calls for privacy

Walking the line between politics and privacy: Vikki Campion, Barnaby Joyce and baby. Picture: Dimex

Barnaby Joyce has become a national joke that Australians are paying for in all sorts of ways. His affair with his staff member was so poorly handled that we ended up with a bonking ban in federal parliament. Taking payment for an interview to be screened tomor­row on the Seven Network’s Sunday Night is so devoid of decency that it has been suggested we may need a law to stop that kind of behaviour, too. Now he has taken extended leave from his job as MP to recover from the mess. Notice the lowest common denominator?

Everything awful about this saga has happened because of Barnaby. Instead of another rule to catch his latest bad behaviour, can we just ban Barnaby? Or at least give him the ballot-box boot when the chance comes around.

Given that can’t be soon enough, what are we to do in the meantime? Going by the reactions of some of our politicians, we may end up with a whole new bureaucracy to implement Barnaby’s laws.

The bonking ban was stupid enough. Plenty of people date, have relationships and even meet their lifelong partners in the workplace without the mess Bar­n­aby brought to his relationship with Vikki Campion. But Malcolm Turnbull succumbed to that old political drug of wanting to “do something” regardless of how dopey it is. The rush to regulate has become such an addiction that it now kicks in at the whiff of the most trivial crisis. Barnaby has ­affair with staff member, ergo we need a bonking ban.

After news broke this week of Barnaby’s $150,000 deal to sit down with Seven, the first interview with Campion and their six-week-old baby, some politicians started muttering again. Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack said that while he cautioned against a push to change existing rules, given that lots of politicians write books to make money on the side, he also said that paid TV ­interviews might be different.

“A television interview where you are sitting there facing the cameras for half an hour or an hour, that could be construed as being different,” McCormack said. “There should be changes for cash for comment? Well, maybe that’s something that needs to be considered.”

Let’s hope Canberra doesn’t try to “do something” here, too. Sometimes the best thing a politician can do is nothing. The problem with regulating to stop stupidity is that the laws end up catching ­entirely proper behaviour. The bonking ban is a prime example of using the law as a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Barnaby has developed his own addictive rush to regulate, just not when it comes to politicians being paid for TV interviews. Having pocketed $150,000 for the Sunday Night interview, he said he was keen to discuss a new tort of invasion of privacy with the Prime Minister. This is beyond parody.

When news broke this year about Barnaby’s marriage break­up and his new relationship, the newly elected member for New England could have been part of a sensible debate about where to draw the line between politics and privacy. After all, politicians have a right to privacy. But Barnaby’s own behaviour derailed that discussion: each time he pleaded for privacy and simultaneously talked about his private life in public.

There was that dreadful interview on ABC’s 7.30 program where he mentioned privacy more than 30 times while sharing with Leigh Sales intimate details of his messy personal life. When he took time off to escape the media glare, Barnaby chose to speak to Fairfax Media, once again, about his private life. When he resigned as deputy prime minister and Nationals leader in late February, surely hoping for the media caravan to move on, Bar­n­aby again spoke about his private life to the media, this time mentioning a “grey area” over the paternity of Campion’s unborn baby.

The recent adventures of Barnaby are infused not just with a yuck factor but a hypocrisy quotient that is excruciating even by Canberra standards. This week he said our legal system, and the lack of a tort of privacy, made him talk about his private life on prime-time TV. Then he claimed Campion wanted the money. Everyone is to blame for this mess bar Barnaby. Barnaby’s “please pay the baby” ploy is another example of him treating voters like mugs. So if I write a column about my kids and ask this newspaper to pay my kids rather than me, that’s OK? No, it’s not OK. Putting the $150,000 payment in a trust for the baby doesn’t get Barnaby off the hook for his poor judgment. If this is a neat way to cut a tax bill, it stinks even more.

The Barnaby saga, and his failure to take responsibility for this series of unfortunate events, is hardly a deserving case to kick off a debate about a tort of privacy. But if we must consider new privacy laws for this country, then first shine some light of the main players — the lawyers, the politicians and the media.

Start with members of the legal profession. They will point to a 2001 decision of the High Court that left open the possibility for a tort of privacy. They also will pull out a 2014 ­report by the Australian Law ­Reform Commission suggesting that we need a new tort to protect privacy. It’s not easy locating a lawyer who doesn’t want more regulation. A new law is not just a lawyer’s picnic, it’s a lawyer’s new car, a lap pool, a small renovation, maybe an overseas holiday.

When politicians start warming to a tort of privacy, remember this: most of them have a cosy and symbiotic relationship with the media, each needing the other in equal proportions. There are two golden rules. First, when that relationship sours, one or both sides will scream foul play until they settle back into the same ­arrange­ment, so cosy they hope we don’t notice. The second and related rule of thumb is that the politicians who are the most shameless users of the media often end up complaining the most about the media, exposing their chutzpah, rather than a deserving claim to privacy.

Two weeks before he left office, former British prime minister Tony Blair complained the “vast aspect of our jobs today, as big as anything else, is coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity. If you don’t have a proper press operation, it’s like asking a batsman to face bodyline bowling without pads or head gear.”

It was a bit rich from the master of spin who exploited the media more than most. And Barnaby has the same credibility problem when he complains about the media.

It’s true that other countries offer some kind of legal protection, under differing claims, for the private lives of public figures. In 2005 Catherine Zeta-Jones and Mich­ael Douglas successfully sued Hello! magazine in Britain for breach of confidence when six photos of their lavish wedding were leaked to the press, even though they had cut a deal with a rival magazine to sell photos. In a reminder that all laws lead to silly claims, Zeta-Jones was offended by an unflattering photo of her eating a piece of wedding cake. And she won on that ground, too.

More deserving, the Duchess of Cambridge won damages last year for invasion of privacy in a French court. Paparazzi shots were taken with a very long lens of a topless Catherine lying in the sun on a private patio during a holiday in the south of France.

Politicians should take note that setting the record straight may justify a breach of privacy.

Several years ago, Naomi Campbell won a privacy action against Mirror Group Newspapers when the court found that even a supermodel is entitled to privacy about the location of her Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Given that Campbell had denied a drug problem, the Mirror was not stopped from reporting she was in treatment for drug addiction.

The Australian media should also be careful here. Those in the media who rightly fear that a tort of privacy will infringe freedom of expression may be doing the most, by pursuing Barnaby and his new family, to encourage these new laws. That said, let’s not ­imagine a new tort of privacy would have saved Barnaby from himself. Not if his past conduct is anything to go by. In countries that have invasion-of-privacy laws, judges tend to ask this pertinent question: When someone courts the media, what level of protection from the media do they deserve? As a new senator, Barnaby succumbed early on to a seductive drip of grandstanding that neither he nor the media could resist. As former treasurer Peter Costello ­remarked in his memoirs, Barnaby as a senator played the numbers to full effect. “Since the government had a majority of one in the Senate, Joyce was able to grandstand on practically every issue,” Costello wrote.

It is passing strange that a man in a relationship with his former media adviser has made such a spectacular series of missteps in the media. None of them are lineball decisions. The best media ­advice, and legal advice, for Barn­aby is this: put a sock in it. If Barn­aby stops talking about Barnaby, the press will lose interest in Barnaby. If he keeps feeding the media monster, it will devour him, and his family, who are innocent in this ghastly story.