Over the weekend, Barnaby Joyce made the astoundingly bizarre decision to publicly invite speculation on his partner Vikki Campion‘s sex life, after declaring in an interview that the baby might not even be his.
It was a new low for the former Deputy Prime Minister, who officially moved to the backbench on February 23 after what felt like one million years of scandals.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young called it a “pig act“, and female journalists have been imploring Campion’s mates to look after her, if her partner is being so utterly reckless with her emotional wellbeing.
Barnaby Joyce cares about no one but himself. After everything he has done to the women in his life, throwing his lover under the bus is a pig act
— 💚🌏 Sarah Hanson-Young (@sarahinthesen8) March 4, 2018
But it’s Joyce’s own colleagues who are delivering the harshest of blows. One Nationals MP told the Herald Sun that Joyce was “a first-class cunt”, which is about as Australian as you could get.
“I don’t want to kick him while he’s down,” the unnamed MP told the paper. “But this proves why he had to go – his judgement is appalling, bizarre and I think he has some real issues in his private life to sort out.”
Over the weekend, Joyce lambasted the media for not prying into his sex life and Campion’s ovulation cycle, putting two and two together, and figuring out that the baby couldn’t possibly be his. Of course, he’d also blown up at the media for not keeping his private life private, so it’s a big of a flip flop.
And not only that, but both Daily Telegraph political editor Sharri Markson and 7:30 Report host Leigh Sales have the receipts to prove that they did, in fact, ask him.
Markson tweeted out her proof, while Sales literally has the interview where she put it to him: “You have not commented yet on front page newspaper reports today that you are in a relationship with one of your former staffers, who is expecting your child. Is that correct?”
Here’s the email where, contrary to his quotes in Fairfax, I directly ask Barnaby Joyce, before publication, if the baby is his and ask him to confirm he had already told his wife and daughters. We published the story when we were satisfied he was treating the unborn as his own. pic.twitter.com/sKNBjCaqKP
— Sharri Markson (@SharriMarkson) March 3, 2018
Australia: an entirely normal country where politics doesn’t regularly careen from insanity to national embarrassment. Fun times.
