Politics

Barnaby Joyce Took A Pic Of A Blocked Urinal To Make A Point About Economics. It Didn’t Go Well

The ex-Deputy Prime Minister shared a photo of a broken, wee-filled urinal, for reasons that can best be described as "confused".

Barnaby Joyce urinals photo

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Barnaby Joyce has always had a, well, let’s call it unconventional way of getting his point across.

Sometimes, when the one-time Deputy Prime Minister of Australia wants to mount an argument, he bellows it across the floor of parliament with all the sheer force of a maths teacher trying to contain a rowdy class of year sevens. Who can forget, after all, the time he stood up in front of the assembled cameras and his colleagues, and shouted very loudly about carp — yes carp, the fish — for a very long time?

But other times, Joyce is more elliptical. And nowhere is that clearer than on his Twitter page, which includes strange, coded insults on journalists, screenshots of his weather app used to make a point about global warming, and admissions that he doesn’t understand what’s going on.

However, yesterday Joyce broke new grounds in incomprehensibility, taking a photograph of a blocked urinal at the Sydney Airport bathroom to make a point about, uh, the free market, I guess?

“At Sydney Airport a monopoly owns the terminals, charges for the retail space and landing fees but is responsible for the bathrooms,” he wrote. “Excessive market power is never healthy.”

And then, there was the picture: two broken urinals and one filled with ruddy brown piss.

So, uh, yeah. Rough.

Anyway, predictably, within minutes, hundreds of Twitter users were piling on Joyce.

Best of all, before long, Twitter users were pointing out that it was Joyce’s beloved PM John Howard who privatised the airport, creating exactly the problem that troubled Barnaby enough to get his camera out.

Chalk this one up as a self-own, then.