It’s Barnaby unplugged as his family tells it like it really is

Barnaby Joyce, with help from wife Natalie, gives a candid insight into behind-closed-doors life as a politician.

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, with his wife, Natalie, and their four daughters. Picture: Kym Smith

Blues with cabinet colleagues, ­battles with strangers in rest­aurants, a climate change barney with his daughter’s science ­teacher, the lost years of an absentee dad, love, hate, faith, lovemaking, oath-taking and a secret pact to pack it all in.

In The Weekend Australian Magazine today, Barnaby Joyce, with help from his wife, Natalie, and their four beloved daughters, gives a candid insight into behind-closed-doors life as a federal politician. “Nothing worse than a politician crying into his beer,” the Deputy Prime Minister said with a laugh. And there’s nothing more ­refreshing than a political ­family honest enough to tell it like it really is.

“It’s a horrible life and I don’t wish it upon anyone,” summarised Joyce’s eldest daughter, Bridgette, 20. “Probably the worst thing is that we haven’t spent time ­together as a family since he got elected in 2004.”

There was a time when Joyce’s youngest daughter, Odette, was so uncomfortable with her father’s rare presence in the family home that she would ask her mother when he was going to leave. “Odette’s never known anything but politics,” Natalie Joyce said. “Every time he’d come home, she actually wouldn’t go near him ­because, like, he hasn’t been home.

“It’s taken a long time to get that father-daughter rapport. She’s stand-offish because he wasn’t home. That’s really hard.

“She’s like, ‘Why is he home and how long is he going to be home for?’ ”

Joyce described his longing for the purple days, the days he ­colours in purple in his diary to ­indicate a night he will sleep in the family home.

Early last month, he had pencilled in precisely two purple diary days for the 59 days of last month and this month and his press secretary, Jake Smith, yesterday cast his mind back over the Deputy Prime Minister’s ever-changing calendar of commitments crisscrossing the nation in recent weeks and wondered where those purple days had got to. “More often than not those purple days are cancelled,” he said.

Joyce said the most regular thought that enters his mind when he places his head on a motel ­pillow in some interstate town a thousand kilometres from his Tamworth home is: “When will I get on that big bird that gets me out of here?”

He left it unclear whether that big bird was just taking him out of town or out of politics altogether.

“There are times in any career when you’re ready to tip,” he said.

“You can’t let people know that — you’ve just got to keep it to yourself.

“I always say to Nat, ‘The ­moment you don’t want me in there, you say bail and I’ll be out that night’.”

“The thing is, yes, I probably will when the time is right,” ­Natalie Joyce said.

“And I’ll know. I’ll know when he’s ready.

“He’s not ready.”

She laughed hard in that ­moment.

“I might be ready,” she said. “But he’s not ready.”