Barnaby Joyce is the deputy prime minister. Take it up one peg and imagine prime minister Malcolm Turnbull having an affair with a staff member and he and his wife Lucy splitting up. And imagine if the now former staffer was pregnant with Turnbull’s baby.
Would a single journalist in the Canberra press gallery argue that this was a private issue not worth reporting? Would Turnbull get away with saying, as Joyce did on the ABC’s 7.30 on Wednesday night, that “private matters remain private”?
It would be absurd. And it is similarly absurd to suggest that it’s a bit icky to report on Joyce’s affair, marriage breakdown, pending fatherhood (for the fifth time) on the grounds that the private lives of politicians are off limits.
I have always been conservative on this and I’ve been reluctant even in this case. I don’t want journalists to peer into the bedroom windows of our politicians. The British media’s prurience debases politics and journalism. I’m not much interested in politicians’ sex lives, and a messy personal life doesn’t mean they don’t have much to offer the country.
I have respect for the long-standing Australian principles – murky principles, but still there – that unless an affair impacts on how the politician conducts his or her work, or unless it indicates gross political hypocrisy – it’s not to be reported. That’s not a uniform view among journalists; it’s argued about all the time.
But let’s not pretend that those principles don’t serve journalists, whose personal lives are as messy as anyone else’s. If it’s open slather on politicians, then why not on well-known media personalities, or business and sports leaders? The principles have been convenient for all.
And they have never been definitive. Channel Seven’s decision in 2010 to run footage of married NSW Cabinet minister David Campbell emerging from a gay sauna was base journalism, the network’s excuse that somehow his “double life” had impacted his work unconvincing and self-serving.
But when the Republican congressman Tim Murphy, a pro-lifer who fought to ban abortions, encouraged his lover to terminate her pregnancy, his hypocrisy was so blatant there was a duty to report it.
But most cases aren’t simple and it’s all changing fast. With social media and cameras on every phone, the idea of privacy can seem quaint. Indie websites publish rumours all the time – which mainstream media generally do not – and they don’t play by the gentlemen’s agreement between journalists and politicians that affairs are off limits.
The Joyce case exposes the murkiness and why sometimes the conventions don’t serve the public. First, Joyce’s seniority. As Daily Telegraph editor Chris Dore pointed out in Crikey, what would journalists have done “when he started pushing a pram around Lake Burley Griffin or Parliament House”. Ignore it? When Turnbull is away, Joyce is the acting prime minister. If his new partner, former journalist Vikki Campion, turns up with him to a social event, does nobody notice it?
A backbencher leaving their spouse isn’t the same. A political leader or aspiring leader in most cases – not all – uses their personal story, including their family, to shape their public persona. The media goes along with that, indeed encourages it, because readers and viewers want to get to know their leaders’ character as well as their politics. It doesn’t mean that anything goes, but political leaders are going to attract personal attention and once they do, they can’t always control it.
The Canberra press gallery has acknowledged that Joyce’s affair was an open secret, and it’s wrong to say that no journalist pursued it. But you can’t just publish gossip – although some small websites did – and Dore says the Telegraph published only when it was sure of the facts. When the paper established that the new partner was pregnant and was living with Joyce, it published. Whether it should have published a front-page photograph of a heavily pregnant Campion is another matter – she’s not the story, Joyce is.
Journalists had submitted FOI requests seeking information about Campion’s expenses and travel with Joyce. And journalists, including those at the Guardian, did ask Joyce about the rumours, but he refused to discuss them, although he acknowledged last year that he had separated from his wife of 24 years, Natalie.
Yet we journalists do have some questions to answer. The suggestion by Jacqueline Maley in the Sydney Morning Herald that it was all a matter of resources in hollowed-out newsrooms and that it was preferable to pursue more serious stories is disingenuous.
Newsrooms always seem to have the resources to cover the latest happenings on My Kitchen Rules or I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. It’s closer to the truth that the “quality” media sometimes leave the dirty work to the tabloids and then write hand-wringing think pieces like this one.
The other question arises from the fact that in the middle of last year, Joyce was found to be a dual New Zealand citizen and faced a crucial byelection in his NSW seat of New England. This byelection threatened the government’s survival. There were tiny hints of the turmoil in his private life at the time, but little reporting of what was going on, which did spill into the campaign.
As Caroline Overington reported in the Australian this week, the government wanted the story to be about a ruddy-faced, knockabout conservative Joyce, and sought to bury the mess that his life was in.
During the campaign, “a man accused him of adultery in the pub. Joyce stood up and knocked the man’s hat off,” wrote Overington. Surely the voters of New England deserved some reporting of all this, or at least some digging. That’s easier said than done, but the government must have been happy that its efforts to keep it quiet were so successful.
At the time, I was in the camp that found it all distasteful, questioning whether Joyce’s private life was the public’s business. I was wrong, and there remain questions that should be pursued. Joyce has refused to say whether the affair began when Campion worked in his office or later. But why and how was she moved from Joyce’s office last April to resources minister Matt Canavan’s office and under what conditions? Why was she moved again to another National MP’s office and what job did she hold?
Human beings are imperfect. Affairs happen and marriages break down. The agony of Joyce’s wife Natalie is raw. In her short statement, she said that “this situation is devastating on many fronts” for her, and for the couple’s four children.
That agony can be respected. Nobody has a right to know all the details. People are entitled to a private life. But the deputy prime minister can’t just say that none of this should be reported, that it has no political relevance. And journalists can’t say that we know, but we’ll keep it from you.