Barnaby Joyce’s hysterical response to the Prime Minister’s move to tighten up the ministerial code of conduct is nothing more than a cynical ploy to retain his job.
That Joyce could call a media conference and admonish the PM for the hurt he has caused to his family is surely the best example ever of jumping the shark. The Nationals have long been searching for an issue they can fight on to show that they are prepared to stand up to their senior Coalition partner. Who ever would have thought it would manifest as the right to sleep with your staff free of Liberal Party interference.
The Deputy PM hopes to distract from his own poor conduct and use the PM’s intervention to stir up parochial Nationals sentiments.
But the ploy should fail — it is Joyce not Malcolm Turnbull who has killed stone dead the government’s momentum this year. It is Joyce not Turnbull who has done the wrong thing, in multiple respects. The Deputy PM should have the decency to go quietly.
Nationals who continue to spruik the retail political skills of Joyce are living in the past. Yes until recently he was Australia’s best retail politician, as Tony Abbott once described him. Especially in the conservative heartland of the regions.
That ended when he got his mistress pregnant and left his wife and mother of their four children. And the earthy demeanour of Joyce also took critical blows when he accepted free accommodation from a party donor and flagrantly used his power to insert his mistress into plumb jobs in colleagues offices — jobs that didn’t exist before her arrival and didn’t exist after she left.
The whole sordid tale is a poor reflection on Joyce, nobody else. Yet he went on the attack today and further exacerbated the damage caused to the government. He is now trying to damage the Prime Minister directly in a bid to save his own skin.
Nationals who continue to back him are not only having the wool pulled over their collective eyes by Joyce (who seeks to make this an issue of Nationals independence within the Coalition), they are also degenerating their own brand as members of a party with conservative roots and traditions.
Nationals MPs and Senators need to wake up to the fact Joyce is playing a game of divide and conquer — hoping to drive a wedge between Turnbull and the Nationals, to save himself, and be damned what the consequences may be when doing so.
It is another selfish act by a one-time asset to the Nationals and the Coalition who has become a dead weight. Joyce is now the ultimate liability, and rather than walking into the yonder with his tail between his legs he’s fighting to save his job.
It’s the ultimate act of entitlement by a politician who once upon a time came across as the antithesis of such a man.
Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics at the University of Western Australia
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