Barnaby Joyce Went Out Of His Way To Share An Anti-Abortion Statement In Parliament Today
Labor MPs started bellowing "sit down!" as soon as Joyce's time expired.
Barnaby Joyce loves controversy, it seems. This afternoon in Parliament, he decided to share a 90-second statement arguing that abortion should not be decriminalised in NSW, despite literally no one asking for his opinion on the topic.
Joyce rushed to make the statement just one minute before Question Time, and it started as a cute story about the child he just had with his former staffer Vikki Campion. Things quickly escalated to address an upcoming attempt to decriminalise abortion in NSW, even though the federal Parliament has nothing to do with that.
“On the first of June, Vikki’s and my son Tom took his first breath. This was not the start of his life — the reality is he was part of this world for some time, and was merely passing from one room to another.”
“We had, and have, an absolute responsibility to Tom, but we never owned him,” Joyce continued. “He was more than merely a property right. He was a person.”
He went on to share a bunch of the anti-abortion schtick we’ve heard from him before, saying that his child had rights as a foetus, committed no crime, and so forth.
Weirdly, though, Joyce kept coming back to this strange rhetoric about property and classifying people as “subhuman”, which seems to draw a comparison between abortion and things like slavery.
“To say he didn’t have the rights of other human life is to say he must be subhuman,” he said. “Historically that concept is not unusual — people were informed by the social mores of the time — but I don’t believe that any person, any doctor, any Parliament, has the power today to declassify another person as less than human, and by so doing removing their most fundamental right to be alive.”
Anyway, the very minute Joyce’s time expired, Labor MPs began heckling and calling for him to sit down. Good advice, especially given that just last night Joyce was busy complaining that it’s “vastly more difficult” for him to keep advocating for Newstart to be raised now that he’s been widely mocked for describing the “struggle” of living on a $211,000 salary.
Perhaps if he put a little more effort into supporting his constituents rather than making everything about him, he wouldn’t find things quite so hard. You can watch his odd little statement on abortion below (or skip to the end if you’d prefer to hear some soothing heckling).
Here's Labor booing Barnaby Joyce after his cooked little statement on abortion rights #qt pic.twitter.com/f5H1zdBN0U
— sam langford (@_slangers) August 1, 2019