I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Caroline Overington at The Australian has reported Natalie Joyce has spoken:

I am deeply saddened by the news that my husband has been having an affair and is now having a child with a former staff member. I understand that this affair has been going on for many months and started when she was a paid employe.

This situation is devastating on many fronts. For my girls who are affected by the family breakdown and for me as a wife of 24 years, who placed my own career on hold to support Barnaby through his political life.

Our family life has had to be shared during Barnaby’s political career and it was with trust that we let campaign and office staff into our homes and into our lives. Naturally we also feel deceived and hurt by the actions of Barnaby and the staff member involved.

The situation for myself and the girls will be made worse by the fact that this will all be played out in public so at this time, I would ask that the girls and I are given some privacy and time to come to terms with the consequences and take steps to plan our future.”

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

Well it put me off my breakfast so....


He nutted inside her

The Guardian posted:

The New Daily can reveal that on May 4, 2017, the former Australian Defence Force general’s Twitter account retweeted a post that said: “Exam. I was asked to name two things commonly found in cells. Apparently ‘young Muslims’ and ‘Somalians’ were not the correct answers.”

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

He nutted inside her

bandaid.friend posted:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-07/mps-defend-joyces-right-to-privacy-after-partner-on-front-page/9403988

hmm

Fairfax posted:

When news broke of The Daily Telegraph’s front page this morning, which carried an exclusive story picturing the woman pregnant with the “love child” of Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, literally no one in the media was surprised.

Since last year, stories about Joyce’s private life have been the subject of constant gossip. It was said he had left his wife for a former staffer, and the former staffer was pregnant. Her name was well-known, as was the fact she was a former News Corp journalist.

Last year Joyce confirmed he had separated from his wife, and was living with his sister. It was said his four daughters were furious with him, and the entire family was greatly distressed by the situation.

Why didn’t Fairfax Media publish the story? Why would we protect Barnaby Joyce?

The reasons were less conspiratorial than they were journalistic: we couldn’t stand it up.

The rumours were so widely circulated it seemed clear there was some truth to them. But until now, no one, within the press gallery or outside it, could firm them up to a publishable standard.

Within our newsroom, there was debate over what resources, if any, should be devoted to confirm the rumours.

In a newsroom that is hollowed-out by cost-cutting, every reporter who is assigned to cover a love child expose, is a reporter who cannot write about national energy policy (which affects far more of our readers), or about the latest factional dispute in the Labor Party, or about the citizenship crisis.

At the same time, we knew it would probably be broken, sooner or later, by the News Corp tabloids.

The Daily Telegraph had a bite at it in October when it published a front-page story with the headline, “Barnaby Joyce battles vicious innuendo as Coalition fears citizenship woe”. The story was written using a circular logic that it was reporting rumours that were reported to be impacting Joyce’s chances at his (then-probable) upcoming by-election.

“Embattled Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is in the grip of a deeply personal crisis that has now spilled into his public life at the very time he is fighting to save his political career,” read the first paragraph.

If it had been published in full, could the story have changed the crucial by-election result in New England?

During the campaign it was reported the Deputy Prime Minister had broken up with his wife and was living with his sister. Rumours about an extra-marital affair and a pregnant “mistress” (terrible word!) were widely known throughout the electorate. His long-time nemesis, former New England MP Tony Windsor, frequently tweeted about it. At one point Joyce was hounded by a man who harangued him about his family situation in a pub.

None of it affected his popularity. Joyce won the by-election with a huge swing to him of 7.21 per cent.

More broadly, would the story have served the public interest? It was undoubtedly newsworthy.

Joyce, a Jesuit-educated Catholic, has long proclaimed the sanctity of traditional marriage. He has often spoken of his conservative “family” values.

During the debate on same-sex marriage Joyce advocated against it, saying he believed marriage was a heterosexual institution that had “stood the test of time” and was “a special relationship between a man and a woman, predominantly for the purpose of bringing children into the world”. He then abstained from the same-sex marriage vote, perhaps because he realised how untenable and hypocritical his position was.

Joyce is a leader, not just a regular MP, so his character is part of his political brand. Voters are now free to judge him on it.

Then there is the human factor of the story. Who can look at the photo of Vikki Campion, surprised by a paparazzi outside her Canberra home, heavily pregnant and wearing gym gear, and not feel a little icky about it?

It is such a huge invasion of her privacy, not to mention the privacy of the unborn child, at a time when a woman is at her most vulnerable (and prone to emotional distress).

It’s easy to imagine a circle of male editors sitting around in news conference crowing that, finally, their photographers had gotten the “money” shot of the pregnant woman, the scarlet woman - even though, if anyone has committed an act of betrayal, it is Joyce.

Some readers will remember the huge scrutiny and nasty sexual innuendo Julia Gillard copped over her personal life and suspect a double standard is at play. The scandal is unlikely to be a career-ender for Joyce. But if a female politician fell pregnant to a staffer while married to someone else, you can bet it would be.

Finally, there are Joyce’s four daughters and wife to consider.

The families of politicians are generally considered off-limits for good reason: they didn’t sign up for public scrutiny, and they shouldn’t have to suffer for the sins of the father, so to speak.

But in this case, the same courtesy was not extended to the soon-to-be mother.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Jacqueline Maley on why Fairfax handled the story the way they did.

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Jacqueline Maley on why Fairfax handled the story the way they did.

JBP posted:

The Guardian has decent reporting and if you click opinion/comment on any print media you're a dickhead and deserve everything you get.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

The Guardian is the home of hilarious Australian Political Cartoon "First Dog on the Moon"

BBJoey posted:

it took less than one week for the press to publish every single detail of the life of duncan storrar, who had the temerity to ask a question on q&a

thatbastardken posted:

anyone heard anything about Noel Pearson running for parliament?

BBJoey posted:

i think it’s fair to write about the idiotic internal civil war the alp is constantly fighting, but if you read her stories about turnbull particularly towards the end of last year it’s obvious she is blindly devoted to him as a leader. basically every word of her articles is about how if only the dang conservatives would get out of the way, malcolm with his genius intellect would lead australia into a golden age.

quote:

The contemporary media cycle rewards politicians who emote (thinking in the current period really is strictly optional, how else do you explain Donald Trump?), disrupt (the contemporary currency of everything) and go negative – or even better – go full ad hominem (because it works more often than it should).

Voters say they are repelled by negativity, and I think some people genuinely are, but it cuts through. While I was sitting in Canberra about whether the Labor senator Sam Dastyari was a double agent, wincing about a serious issue being reduced to a potboiler, Labor MPs were telling me they were being approached in their electorates about Dastyari being some new cold war operative.

Clearly it gripped. So if an issue grips in an environment when others struggle to gain traction, a rhetorical arms race develops, where the language becomes more and more shrill and reckless – never mind the long-term implications.

quote:

If there’s no obvious penalty for bad behaviour (apart from a few political commentators rolling their eyes and firing off a scarifying hot take – which will be replaced in five minutes by a puff piece from someone else), then people will go on doing it.

quote:

There is a measure of the current relationship between politics, government and everyday life, and that is the rich varieties of contempt one now feels for our elected representatives. We’ve gone well beyond the stage of blanket “hate” for pollies we happen to dislike or disagree with. Virtually the entire crop of leading mainstream party politicians — after the cresting of John Howard and the demise of the Beazley-Crean Laurel and Hardy act — arouse in us rich and complex blends of pity, loathing, and disgust; each as distinct as the different notes and flavours in a variety of single malts.

Of our leaders of the last 15 years, only Julia Gillard escapes such judgement, due to her basic competence, rationality and having some consistent beliefs; ironic, in that she had to suffer the worst barrage of simple hatred while in office. What a goddamn golden age.

Now look at those who came before and after. Kevin Rudd floats across the political landscape like an escaped hot-air balloon with a face painted on. The practice of government that once tethered him to the ground awhile; now, bereft of that, the fantasy side of his nature has taken over, reconstructing the memory and account of his inspiring but shambolic time in office. The cocktail? A degree of remnant regard, contempt, a dash of pity, a garnish of schadenfreude.

Joe Hockey? Good old Wobbles, whatever job he’s employed in, he’s not up to it. If he ran a Mr Muffler in West Ryde, he’d do it badly. The mix? Vast amusement, exasperation at his time-wasting, contempt for his lack of self-awareness, his inability, offered great things, to rise to them. Mark Latham? Sheer catharsis. Pity and terror, at the place that any human can get to if they never find the strength to know and accept their own limitations. He failed, then he failed at failing. He’s a rubbish skip fire, but in Aleppo, Syria. We just look away.

Then there was Abbott. We thought he marked the end of this cycle — which I suspect had something to do with the early 2000s collapse of a politics/public/media relationship, which had been stable for many decades; there was simply now no external controls on the excess narcissism that many politicians carry with them. The boy wonder, feted to be either pope or prime minister, the right-wing rugger bugger, turned Santamaria student politics falangist, journalist, would-be priest, thinker, the leading conservative of his generation — and he turned out to be the most ridiculous figure of them all. Ridiculousness is it exact.

Abbott is contemptible, yes, in his hypocrisy as regards to politics — whining about left-wing bullying, while running thuggish media campaigns, playing the teary victim when he gets a drunken headbutt — and he generates that distinct embarrassment you feel when watching others flounder, but above all he is absurd. What looked, for a time, like gravitas, was simply the weight of expectations, weighing down a man who lacked the constitution to support them. He sounded like the last conservative, and he turned out to be nothing much more than one of those medieval re-enactment guys, who drink cider from their own pewter tankard at the office picnic.

But for all that, Mr Tony, well he believes in something beyond him, and he strives to serve it. There is a sense that the man has content, even if that content is the DVD extras of a season of Game of Thrones. Maybe it’s the nostalgia effect, but Mr Tony is absolutely thrown into relief by the abysmal horror that is Malcolm Turnbull. Sartre spoke of the nausea, the actual physical sickness one feels at the contingency of things, how everything could just as well be otherwise. Turnbull goes one better; he channels a sort of existential dry retching, a product of the vast disappointment with the politician, combined with a rich contempt for the man he has decided to be, or always was.

The latest trigger for that has been his pathetic handling of the Jim Molan mini-scandal, the new senator posting anti-Muslim dreck from a British far-right/neo-Nazi website. This ill-judged act is evidence of the further decomposition of the Australian right, in a Trumpian fashion, a series of obsessive preoccupations serving as a substitute for a political philosophy. The creep towards actual neo-Nazism, or the tolerance of such, is moral and political poison for any centre-right force that wants a long-term future. There’s no real upside in pandering to it, unless you believe News Corp’s fantasy of a vast Anglo silent majority out there, angry enough about 18C to make governments fall. The failure to find any judicious words to draw a line between that and his politics is failure afresh.

But it’s all like that isn’t it, with Turnbull? Everything he does now produces the sort of contempt one feels for someone living out an imaginary life on our time. Even his anodyne interview on last Sunday’s Insiders had that quality. What was it about his defensive, irritated short-tempered performance — his basic imputation that Barrie Cassidy was being impertinent for asking any questions at all — that seemed far, far worse than your usual grouchy interview? Ah yes, it was the open-necked white shirt! The collars sitting slightly too high above the jacket rim, consciously styled. “I’m relaxing at home,” it seemed to say. “I’m one of you too” — as if aliens were trying to infiltrate themselves among the humans by a careful study of our habits.

It was there in the despatch box speech after the same-sex marriage postal survey, the pretence that he had been the leader of a movement, rather than having been pushed forward by the press of the crowd. It’s the $4 billion boondoggle for the death industry, when we could spend it on the life industries of renewables. It’s not congratulating Sydney ICAN for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, whatever he thinks of their politics. The hits just keep on coming.

It is all awful to watch. The sheer horror of Malcolm Turnbull, of what he turned out to be, is that one might compare him to the boss in The Office — but not David Brent, from the UK version, a clumsy, excruciating man, but with some capacity for real feeling and need, beneath the bluster. Turnbull is Steve Carell’s Michael Scott from the US version: the smirking, giggling, twitching cartoon figure, who never misses a chance to advance his own interests, usually blunderingly, a man whose presence lingers, when he is gone, by the sour taste in one’s mouth.

Turnbull cannot shift the Coalition out of the 47/48-53/52 two-party-preferred zone, I suspect, because disgust is immovable, and disgust is what he provokes in a number of people. Cowardice, poor judgement, delusion, petty ambitions: Malcolm Turnbull manages to discredit not merely the life of politics, but human striving in general. Even at the end of this bum cycle of Australian politics, that is quite an anti-achievement.

Kafka Syrup posted:

Given his recent, very public split with the Liberals in the Monthly, any real likelihood of getting elected has evaporated.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2017/december/1512046800/noel-pearson/betrayal

BBJoey posted:

it took less than one week for the press to publish every single detail of the life of duncan storrar, who had the temerity to ask a question on q&a

wonder how long they knew about barnaby before they published

god bless the australian media

Doctor Spaceman posted:

https://twitter.com/emilykwatkins/status/961070558321426432

Wouldn't mind seeing the whole thing, if anybody has a Crikey sub.

quote:

This morning The Daily Telegraph splashed with a story that’s been political gossip for months: Barnaby Joyce’s ex-staffer and now-girlfriend is pregnant with his fifth child. This comes months after another story, which also ran on the front page, about the unspecified “personal crisis” that was spilling into the Deputy Prime Minister’s public life in the lead-up to the New England byelection.

The story has brought to the fore the age-old debate for political journalism: when is a politician’s personal life in the public interest? So we did a whip around of some interested observers on the ethics of publishing this story.

Chris Dore, editor, Daily Telegraph

How is it not in the public interest? Would it be in the public interest if we were talking about the prime minister or the opposition leader? He’s the Deputy Prime Minister. Of course it’s public interest. We ran it the very first day we were 100% sure of the facts. Until yesterday we could not categorically write the story.

Lots of journalists are suggesting everyone knew. Well did they? How? And are they really suggesting the leader of a major party and deputy prime minister living with a former adviser and expecting a child is not a story? What would they have done when he started pushing a pram around Lake Burley Griffin or Parliament House. Its an absurd argument.

Truth is it was merely a rumour until we confirmed it and had enough information to publish.

Bernard Keane, political editor, Crikey

I’m Barnaby Joyce’s harshest critic in the press gallery. But this story about him is shameful non-journalism and debases public life. There is zero public interest in Joyce’s personal life, despite the efforts of News Corp columnists like Caroline Overington, and left-wingers on social media, to confect one.

Because a politician has mentioned their family at some point in their career — which they all do — does not magically create a “family values hypocrite” justification for revealing their personal lives. Because some other public figure on your preferred side of politics has suffered the same fate does not justify it happening to a figure you dislike. Joyce has not used taxpayer resources inappropriately; he has not behaved in a way that opened him to the risk of security breaches, there is no allegation of misconduct.

What he does personally with a consenting adult is no concern of ours, let alone a matter for our judgement. Who among us has behaved perfectly in our personal lives? There certainly aren’t many journalists — a profession notoriously antithetical to domestic bliss — who are in a position to pass judgement about anyone, but this is what such a story amounts to.

Margaret Simons, associate journalism professor, Monash University

The test here is whether Barnaby Joyce’s personal life was relevant to his public responsibilities. That is, does his personal conduct expose him as a hypocrite, involve some compromise of public responsibilities, or suggest he is unfit for his post and so on.

It seems to me the only things that might bring this into the sphere of legitimate public interest are:

1. The suggestion that due to his Catholicism he has in some way been a hypocrite

2. The fact that the woman apparently bearing his child was a former staff member.

However, on 1, I would have thought the case was weak, and on 2, so far as I am aware there is no suggestion of harassment or coercion or improper favouritism or improper expenditure of public funds. (if any of this did emerge, then that would make the fact of the relationship of legitimate public interest).

On balance, and without knowing all the circumstances, I would have thought the relationship was nobody’s business but that of the people involved. I can see that there may be an argument on the other side, though. It’s a marginal case.

Mark Day, former media columnist, The Australian

Of course the media is entitled to report on Barnaby’s baby and the circumstances surrounding it.

The Canberra Press Gallery has a rule that declares the private life of politicians is off-limits, unless it becomes a matter of public interest. In my view there’s a lot of humbug and hypocrisy surrounding this rule, but even if we ignore that, the Barnaby Joyce case clearly is in the public interest.

He has been the subject of rumour and scuttlebutt before, during and after his citizenship by-election (including one of his family denouncing him by loud-hailer in the main street of Tamworth); he has confessed to a marriage breakdown in the parliament and he advocates strong family values as a politician, including opposing same-sex marriage. He is also Deputy Prime Minister and as such, what he does sends signals, wanted or not, to the electorate.

The media has a duty to tell it like it is. Barnaby could have avoided this by not taking the course he has. He has no option other than to let the cards fall where they may.

Julia Baird, journalist and presenter, The Drum

For my PhD on the history of female politicians and the Australian media, I tracked how the convention regarding not reporting on the personal lives of politicians was most spectacularly broken for women, from Margaret Guilfoyle to Cheryl Kernot.

If Joyce were female, and having an affair — let alone carrying the child of a staffer, it would have been huge news, justified on the grounds that it would have impacted her work, and also her capacity to work, as it was for Kernot. This is very rarely argued of male politicians who have frequently had public, well-known affairs that have gone without reporting.

Barnaby Joyce was taking a big risk with some of his rationale for SSM being based on healthy heterosexual marriages while he was breaking his own vows, so it is strange it did not become a bigger story.

Rob Stott, managing editor, Junkee

A politician’s private life should remain private until their public words don’t live up to their private actions. Given Joyce’s very vocal opposition to marriage equality and defence of the sanctity of marriage, I’d say his affair with a staffer fits that bill.

I’m generally not a fan of the media acting as gatekeepers and deciding when an “open secret” is ready to be made fully public. As news spreads more and more on social media, the time has long passed since the press gallery was able to hold back information that was being widely circulated in the community.

My only question is why now? If the story is newsworthy now, surely it was newsworthy months ago when the entire Canberra Press Gallery knew about it.

Blamestorm posted:

quote:

Joyce has not used taxpayer resources inappropriately

BBJoey posted:

pm just confirmed in question time that it’s ok to be racist if you were in the army killing muslims, which is an interesting position to take but i respect his decision

ewe2 posted:

That's a loving astounding take from Keane. Glad I didn't resub to get the benefit of that piece of poo poo non-journalism.

Blamestorm posted:

quote:

My only question is why now? If the story is newsworthy now, surely it was newsworthy months ago when the entire Canberra Press Gallery knew about it.

Blamestorm posted:

When Barnaby made his dumbass traditional marriage comments that should have been criticized on the basis of them being stupid, illogical, non representative and discriminatory, rather than worrying about hypocrisy.

Gorilla Salad posted:

For the longest time, the Goons in Platoons subforum apparently had a policy of allowing racism.

Are troops

Blamestorm posted:

Here’s what Murphy should be writing on Turnbull - Rundle in today’s Crikey: