The Audacity of Barnaby Joyce

There’s a particular kind of political figure who seems to exist outside the normal rules of consequence. Not untouchable exactly, more like teflon-coated by a combination of low expectations and regional loyalty. Barnaby Joyce is that figure.

This week he’s been on the telly again, making noises about abortion. Specifically, that women should not have easy access to it. That it represents a moral failure. That the nation needs to have a serious conversation about life and commitment and responsibility.

I’ll let that sit for a moment.

This is the same man who, while publicly campaigning on family values and voting against marriage equality, was quietly starting a second family with a former staffer. Who was photographed face-down on a Canberra footpath. Who later explained that the affair happened partly because parliamentary rules prevented him from employing his wife. He actually said that. Out loud. To journalists.

The brass on it is genuinely something to behold.

The thing that gets me isn’t really Barnaby himself. He’s a known quantity at this point. What gets me is the structural failure that keeps returning him to relevance. New England keeps voting him in, and the usual explanation involves pork-barrelling, regional grievance, and a cultural preference for someone who “tells it like it is.” Which is a generous way of describing a man who appears to tell it like it isn’t, consistently, about his own life.

Someone in the comments I was reading put it well: Tony Windsor got turfed from the same region after negotiating fibre broadband for the area during a hung parliament. Actually delivered something. Gone. Barnaby, meanwhile, endures.

There’s a media ecology problem here too. Regional outlets are thin on the ground and often owned by interests that aren’t especially curious about scrutiny. So the story that lands is the one Barnaby wants to tell about himself: the straight-talking, Akubra-wearing, salt-of-the-earth bloke who fights for the bush. The other story, the one with the footpath and the staffer and the lectures about commitment, requires a bit more effort to hold together.

Now he’s cosying up to One Nation, which is a whole other thing. One Nation’s vision for Australia is roughly what you’d get if you took the worst aspects of American culture war politics and removed the parts that occasionally work. The health system. The gun laws. The general idea that government can sometimes do useful things. They’d sand all of that back in the name of freedom, which in practice means freedom for people who already have options.

I find it hard to argue with the view that a man who has demonstrated a consistent inability to honour his own commitments has no standing to lecture anyone about theirs. Particularly women. Particularly about pregnancy. The hypocrisy isn’t incidental here, it’s load-bearing. The whole edifice of his political brand depends on people not looking too closely at the gap between what he preaches and what he does.

I don’t know if he’ll face any meaningful consequences. Australian politics has a long tradition of forgiving a certain type of man for a certain type of behaviour, provided he’s useful enough to the right people. He might yet land somewhere comfortable.

But I do think the patience for it is fraying. Slowly, unevenly, with significant regional variation. That’s not nothing.