Barnaby Joyce Admits Climate Change ‘Might’ Be Happening In An Amazing Interview With The SMH
He's starting to wonder "whether climate change might really be happening."
The lengthy, up-close profile of Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce in the Sydney Morning Herald‘s latest Good Weekend ends with him looking at the drought-stricken dirt of his family farm and saying, “When I look at this, I start to wonder whether climate change might really be happening.” Might be happening, Barnaby? Really?!
It’s one of several eye-opening parts of a feature that gets more personal than you might think with the “sweaty, big-gutted man” as Johnny Depp called him.
Writer Frank Robson travelled with Joyce, and his media adviser of course, through the politician’s childhood home of northern New South Wales. He even visited the property where Barnaby Thomas Gerard Joyce grew up and met his unusual parents, who have basically the exact opposite politics to their son and haven’t been interviewed since 2009.
The full interview is pretty amazing and well worth a read, but in the meantime here are some highlights:
He’s pretty chuffed that someone called him a cunt
“Somebody sent this letter to my office today,” he guffaws. “It ran like this: ‘I don’t know who’s a bigger c…, you or Trump. But I think you win.’ And that was it!”
His landlady keeps track of when he’s been out drinking with the lads like a character in an English comedy of manners
In Canberra, he has lodged for years in the home of a retired Latin teacher, Mrs Primrose, who leaves a light burning which he’s supposed to turn off, and so always knows when he’s late home. “Some of the boys might say [after work], ‘Let’s go out for a beer!’ ” he says. “Then we go, ‘Aww, shit. Mrs Primrose …’ ”
He didn’t have much luck with the ladies as a young bloke
“No, I was very, very unlucky. I was awkward, I guess, and I just didn’t have the lines.”
His love of Joh-Bjelke Petersen encompasses the belief that turning Brisbane into a police state was “theatre”
“That was nothing to us,” says Joyce. “It was irrelevant to us. It wasn’t our life. Our life was: can you get us a hospital, a dam, a sealed road?” Everything else, he insists, was just a show for the TV cameras. “They were all having fun: university students tearing around and wreaking havoc! And the cops on their gee-gees chasing them! It was all a bit of theatre, really.”
His distaste of the Left goes back to when he worked as a bouncer and had to deal with students
Later, when he worked as a bouncer at the Wicklow Hotel in Armidale to defray his uni costs, Joyce got his first real exposure to the “cookie-cutter crowd” (as he calls the despised trendy Left), which has mocked him ever since over his idiosyncrasies and conservatism. “They were usually around the pool tables,” he recalls grimly. “They were all dressed in black, and they all got so psyched by uni politics … you’d know without them speaking their views on any subject.”
His mum basically thinks he’s a Hobbit
Marie tells how her “fanciful, imaginative” son read Lord of the Rings at the age of 12. “I was eight, not 12,” he interrupts, glowering at the floor.
Marie beams at him. “And over across the creek he had his own little Hobbit hole,” she continues, drawing a groan from Joyce. “I read things in the papers about him throwing people out of hotels and so on. But he wasn’t like that then. I always found Barnaby a very cheerful, warm, affectionate little boy.”
Finally, beautifully, his lefty parents are staunch Republicans
Marie and Jim laugh over how they want Australia to become a republic while their son remains a staunch monarchist. “So you want Big Ears [Charles] to be our boss!” taunts Jim, before beginning a long story about why he doesn’t really like Poms.
Read the full piece here.