What next?

Barnaby Joyce was recorded lying on his back on the footpath in Lonsdale Street, in the suburb of Braddon, Canberra, late on Wednesday night (7^th February). He was heard mumbling into his phone “dead f***ing c**t”, while supposedly talking to his wife, Vikki Campion¹. Campion, and her father, a member of One Notion, are now trying to put the blame onto onlookers for not trying to help Joyce, even suggesting that he was in a “very bad place” and that “who’s to say he didn’t have a stroke”¹. The onlookers said that Joyce was quite ‘happy’ while talking on the phone, but was “clearly wasted” (i.e. drunk), “unable to walk” and “slurring his words”².

Joyce has been a laughing stock and the object of disgust around the country for many years. It beggars belief that people actually vote for him.

This disgust is for his reflexive lying, whether it be about deaths from Covid-19³, the availability of Rapid Antigen Tests⁴, or his opinion of Morrison⁵; and for his trivialisation of Covid-19, in which he stated that snakebite was more a concern than Covid-19, seemingly ignoring warnings from the World Health Organisation, which proved to be largely correct⁶; 

his idiotic climate change denial, in which he blamed it on his god, or the magnetic field of the sun, and demonstrated he is incapable of understanding anything about science^{7, 8}. It is also for his hypocrisy over harassment of women by the religious, in which he was quite happy to have women harassed outside abortion clinics by religious nutters, but aggressively confronted a photographer taking pictures of him, from the other side of the street, as he came out of a church⁹; his hypocrisy over same sex marriage, in which he railed against this saying that Asia would see us as decadent if we passed same-sex marriage, while destroying his own marriage at the same time^{10, 11}; his feeling of entitlement, pleading for privacy regarding his little horizontal peccadillo with Campion, but being paid $150,000 for an interview, and spending 50 days with Campion (with travelling allowance) in Canberra when parliament was not sitting¹².

The disgust is also engendered by his corruption, over such things as the water rights in which Joyce approved a dodgy $80 million water buyback from a property owned by a Cayman Island based company of which Energy Minister Angus Taylor used to be a Director and which his Oxford University mate now runs¹³; and the south arm pipeline scandal, in which he used a water infrastructure fund to grant $5 million to build a 6.8km pipeline under Hobart’s Derwent River to water a newly planned, privately (Liberal) owned golf course¹³; and the Costa Group scandal, in which his government awarded $630,000 in funding for the installation of fibre-to-the-premises NBN to a single business in Joyce’s electorate (Joyce’s now wife owned shares in Costa Group)¹³; and the Urannah and Hells Gates dam scandal for which Joyce, dissolved the national advisory body established less than two years ago by his predecessor, Michael McCormack, to scrutinise major water projects. The advisory body was not consulted before the announcements of $5.9 billion in funding to build the dams in north Queensland¹⁴.

The disgust is also because of his organising jobs for his now (second) wife after he was caught with his trousers down^{15, 16}; his pork barrelling in which he moved the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) to his electorate¹⁷, which was predicted would be disastrous for the organisation and proved to be so¹⁸. It was also for his fraud in which he was given over $600k as the ‘drought envoy’, but provided nothing in return¹⁹. Coupled with this is his bizarre attitude to Gardasil-9, the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine, a virus which causes cervical cancer. He suggested that ‘some people’ would say: ‘Don’t you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a licence to be promiscuous’²⁰, seemingly agreeing with Tony Abbott who said he would not get his daughters vaccinated against HPV, while he was Health Minister²¹.

Part of the reason that people do vote for him is epitomised by the attitude to Barnaby’s footpath event shown on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Insiders show, where both discussions were about how Barnaby ‘needs help’ and ‘we don’t know the circumstances’ to Albanese’s ‘double standards’ when compared to Lidia Thorpe’s rant outside a strip club. Funny how this didn’t seem to be a concern when all sorts of conspiracy theories popped up when then Victorian premier Dan Andrews fell and cracked his spine on a couple of steps at his holiday home. There was very little ‘get well soon’^{22, 23}. The Murdoch media even went and ‘interviewed’ the stairs (with photos!), as if to epitomise the lack of journalism integrity in the Murdoch media²⁴.

Perhaps worst of all is that Barnaby Joyce is owned by Gina Rinehart, just as she owns much of the rest of the National Party. In Joyce’s case this became clear when Rinehart tried to give him a prize cheque for $40,000 at an ‘agricultural event’ put on by Rinehart’s company, Hancock Prospecting. The cheque was supposedly the National Agricultural and Related Industries prize, for him as a “champion of farming”. Joyce was forced to hand back the ‘prize’ after an outcry over such a blatant bribe²⁵. However, that embarrassment did not stop him doing what Rinehart tells him to²⁶. His latest effort in this regard is the ‘reckless renewables’ rally held outside parliament house in Canberra on Tuesday. This clearly demonstrates that Rinehart is still calling the tune, as the complaints about renewables are the same bullshit spread by climate science deniers, especially those in the coal industry, and they have not progressed. They include the ridiculous claim that offshore wind farms kill whales (they don’t); that renewables are unreliable because they only work when the sun shines and the wind blows (that is why they are in numerous connected sites around the nation); that wind turbines end up as landfill (85-94% of the mass of a wind turbine is recyclable); transmission line costs are 60% of power bills costs and will increase power bills substantially (transmission forms only 8% of power bills, 35% is distribution to buildings); that renewables will cost ‘the economy’ $121 billion (simply a lie, it is $121 billion in economic activity); that solar and wind are more expensive than just sticking with coal (this is a lie too; even when the costs of integrating renewables into the grid, they remain the cheapest form of electricity); that renewables will take 33% of ‘prime agricultural land’ (this is another Rinehart lie; 0.1% is more accurate)²⁷.

The fact that people could even consider voting for a drunk, corrupt, ignorant, Rinehart-owned idiot like Joyce only makes one wonder at the inability of a substantial number of the voters in his electorate to spot a venal spiv like Joyce when they see one. He is one of those people who are only ever out for themselves either electorally or financially. The wellbeing of the nation is of no concern to people like him, and the nine years that people like Joyce were in government was a time when corruption, pork-barrelling, money laundering, and lying expanded to a degree more than I have ever seen in decades of watching politics.

Sources

1. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13068091/Barnaby-Joyce-video-Vikki-Campions-dad-Peter-offers-strong-clue-husband-appeared-distressed-state-infamous-street-video.html
2. https://chaser.com.au/national/former-deputy-pm-barnaby-joyce-denies-being-too-drunk-while-lying-on-a-braddon-sidewalk-that-is-the-most-sober-i-have-ever-been-while-in-canberra/
3. https://blotreport.com/2022/01/24/barnabys-reflexive-lie/
4. https://blotreport.com/2022/01/15/rats-lies-from-joyce-ruston-morrison/
5. https://blotreport.com/2022/02/06/another-lie-from-joyce-and-morrison/
6. https://blotreport.com/2020/03/09/barnaby-loses-yet-another-marble/
7. https://blotreport.com/2019/11/16/barnabys-lost-marbles/
8. https://blotreport.com/2019/07/14/the-criminal-behaviour-of-barnaby-joyce/
9. https://blotreport.com/2018/06/11/the-hypocrisy-of-barnaby-joyce/
10. https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6064687/asia-would-see-us-as-decadent-if-we-embraced-gay-marriage-barnaby-joyce/
11. https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/barnaby-joyce-does-not-understand-marriage-20180207-h0v87i.html
12. https://blotreport.com/2018/05/30/the-entitlement-of-barnaby-joyce/
13. https://blotreport.com/2020/03/08/corruption-galore/
14. https://blotreport.com/2022/04/05/corruption-galore-11/
15. https://blotreport.com/2018/03/05/the-joyce-syndrome/
16. https://blotreport.com/2020/03/08/corruption-galore/
17. https://blotreport.com/2017/05/15/pork-barrel-joyce/
18. https://blotreport.com/2018/07/03/apvma-move-a-fiasco-as-expected/
19. https://blotreport.com/2019/12/28/do-barnabys-drought-reports-exist/
20. https://blotreport.com/2018/10/03/promiscuous-anti-vaxxer-joyce/
21. https://blotreport.com/2021/11/09/papillomavirus-going-going/
22. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/11/daniel-andrews-injury-inside-the-conspiracy-theory-around-the-premiers-fall
23. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/liberals-take-the-low-road-over-premier-s-fall-20210609-p57zir.html
24. https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/people/tone-on-tuesday-151-the-fall-and-rise-of-daniel
25. https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-11-22/gina-rinehart-awards-barnaby-joyce-40-thousand-dollars/9178612
26. https://blotreport.com/2020/07/11/paedophiles-coal-and-jesus-2/
27. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/08/parliament-house-protest-renewable-energy-plan-barnaby-joyce-pauline-hanson-matt-canavan-craig-kelly