The Sketch: Barnaby Joyce goes the biff

Attack being the best form of defence, the Deputy PM gives as good as he gets during question time in Canberra yesterday after crashing through a psychological barrier. Picture: AAP

Given the juggernaut of revelations about Barnaby Joyce’s “private” life and his new partner’s employment, pretty much any sentence felt like a booby trap in yesterday’s question time. Exhibit A, this early effort from Malcolm Turnbull: “Sixty per cent of the new jobs created last year were taken up by women and that’s why we’ve got a record level of female participation.”

But when it came to that one specific female participant, a certain reticence descended, with the Prime Minister and Treasurer Scott Morrison handballing responsibility for Vikki Campion’s employment to their partners in arranged political marriage, the Nationals. (Just how the Nats handle the matter is a little opaque. When David Speers of Sky News later asked Nigel Scullion who approved staff transfers in his party, the minister, whose interest is evidently yet to be sufficiently piqued, replied with a briskness bordering on the disarming: “No idea.”)

ScoMo tried to get things back on happier ground with this thought: “The Labor Party is about as useful to the economic debate in these times as a pig-shearing competition — lots of squealing but no wool.” It’s an expression Vladimir Putin is fond of, and it gave things a momentary zing.

Yet despite this flash of Putinist rhetoric, something was missing. Christopher Pyne uncharacteristically fluffed a cheeky point against Labor and got firmly sat down by Speaker Tony Smith for his troubles. Even Peter Dutton seemed subdued, neglecting to set about the opposition with his metaphorical bit of four-by-two.

But the worst was when Joyce spoke, which was often. The man who once managed to single-handedly energise the government benches with a thunderous and semi-metaphorical tirade about weaponising herpes against mud-sucking carp now had the benches behind him looking like a wake. Not one of those bittersweet ones celebrating a long life well lived, but more for an existence suddenly and shockingly cut short.

Having touched on the personal stuff, Labor began circling, slowly but surely moving around the map and hitting the Deputy PM with infrastructure questions from MPs across the country.

Not surprisingly, Joyce — who is in the midst of what the Chinese might term interesting times — faltered in his replies. Labor rediscovered its appetite for heckling him, which seemed to help Joyce rediscover his for firing back.

When Anthony Albanese got up, Joyce merrily bellowed about “the new leader of the opposition”. Which, given the sudden, urgent talk about his own party’s leadership, was courageous.

But if language was booby-trapped it didn’t matter any more. Joyce had crashed through some sort of psychological barrier and the momentum was his. “I think this is a great opportunity for the member for Grayndler to show his wares,” he roared, alchemising an unrelated question into a mischief-making endorsement of Albo’s leadership prospects. “To show his wares to the Australian people and to show his wares to the Leader of the Opposition.”

It sounded vaguely risque, but not as much as the very Joycean magnum opus: “We’re in there rooting for the member for Grayndler.”

Game, set, match.