Barnaby Joyce and his former media advisor Vikki Campion, mother of his new baby boy, Sebastian.
Photo: Fairfax Media“I failed. I failed. I failed. I failed. I failed,” says Barnaby Joyce on the trailer for the television interview he has been paid to take part in by the Seven Network.
And it is true: he has failed – but probably not in the way he is talking about.
We cannot know yet what point he is making with this confession because the full interview is yet to be broadcast but Mr Joyce has confessed to failure in the past often enough to give the rest of us some idea what he is driving at.
We already know he regrets what happened to his first marriage. Quite possibly he fell short of being an ideal husband to his first wife but, if so, he is far from alone and no outside judgment in a private matter is appropriate or necessary. We make none.
The same applies to his relationship with Vikki Campion, the mother of his new baby. None of these relationships or failures is relevant to his performance as the federal member for New England or as a minister.
Encouraging a prurient interest in the private lives of public figures does nothing for our political culture, as overseas examples show. But where Mr Joyce is responsible is for what he has done since – and there, we believe, his record has been failure after failure after failure – until the present utter debacle.
As most of his colleagues recognise, Mr Joyce has made a huge mistake by accepting payment for an interview. The practice is always objectionable – and the results always suspect – but for a politician paid from the public purse to serve the public interest it is more than objectionable. It is outrageous. It is too late now for him to pull out, because the film is in the can.
Mr Joyce’s judgment where money is concerned has long been suspect. His decision to accept a $40,000 prize as a champion of agriculture from the mining magnate Gina Rinehart is a case in point. His enthusiastic acceptance (“Hooley dooley. Rightio!”) was reversed only when it was pointed out to him that taking large sums from interested supporters looked thoroughly suspect.
His behaviour during the storm of publicity over his affair shows equally questionable judgment. Finding the situation difficult to deal with, he questioned aloud whether Ms Campion’s baby was really his. In an interview with the Herald he asked for his privacy to be respected.
Now we learn the couple has sold that privacy for a tidy sum. And when that decision has – entirely justifiably – come in for serious questioning, Mr Joyce has once again sought to blame his new partner. Nothing apparently is ever Barnaby Joyce’s fault. Others make the bad decisions; he – unaccountably – just keeps getting caught up in them.
But this blame shifting shows not that Barnaby Joyce is always unjustly accused but that he never learns from mistakes. Mr Joyce has gone from Deputy Prime Minister to an embarrassment – to his party, to the Coalition, to the Parliament, and to the country.
Enough is enough now. Mr Joyce is taking a leave of absence, which we support for his own wellbeing and that of his family. But while doing so, he should acknowledge the genuine failures for which he is responsible. He should then consider whether resigning from the public office for which he has shown such scant respect is a logical next step.
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