opinion

An important message for Barnaby Joyce: You're not on Married at First Sight.

Barnaby Joyce is very confused – and we think we know why.

You see, over the weekend, the former Deputy Prime Minister decided it was a good idea to tell Fairfax he wasn’t entirely sure he was the father of his former media advisor, Vikki Campion’s unborn baby – describing the child’s paternity as a “grey area”.

It would be raised as his, 50-year-old Joyce very nobly stated, but really it could be just about anyone’s baby.

The biological question of which there most certainly is one, Joyce said, made no difference to him – that’s why he made a point of broadcasting it to the nation, and shining a glaring spotlight on the details of 33-year-old Campion’s clearly very busy sex life.

The same man who repeated the mantra “private matters remain private” so many times on 7:30 that we found ourselves violently banging our televisions thinking we were encountering some strange glitch, has now shared, just so we’re all across it, that he put his penis into Campion’s vagina on a “sporadic basis” and they were not officially partners.

The Mamamia Out Loud team deep dive on Australia’s new Deputy PM Michael McCormack. Post continues below. 

Joyce says he was physically away from Campion when the baby would have been conceived, and perhaps if Campion could just provide us with a diary of a) who she had sex with and when b) whether she used protection and c) a precise breakdown of her cycle/when she ovulated, then all this mess would be cleared up.

It would be easy to criticise Joyce for slut-shaming and managing to humiliate yet another woman in his life – but we’re sure that’s not at all what’s happened.

Oh, no.

Poor Barnaby Joyce thinks he’s on an episode of Married at First Sight and why has no one told him he most definitely is not?

He thinks he is sitting on the couch at a Commitment Ceremony, where couples are required to discuss the ins and outs of their sex life to a panel of, er, ‘experts’, and also the entire nation, but he is not at all sitting on that couch. And Campion never signed a contract that said she was comfortable having her relationship, let alone the alleged details of her sex life, on display for an entire nation.

Barnaby. That is not where you belong.

And we think we know where exactly the mix up took place.

In early February, The Daily Telegraph reported that Joyce was in a relationship with Campion, who was also pregnant with his child.

ADVERTISEMENT

As the story unfolded, we learned the Nationals' leader had engaged in an extramarital affair with Campion, which led to his separation from his wife of 24 years, Natalie Joyce.

Goodness.

In an interview with Leigh Sales on 7:30, a visibly shaken Joyce repeated the aforementioned sentence over and over again: "What I want to do," he insisted, "is make sure that private matters remain private."

That is all he wanted and why wouldn't the godforsaken media just let him leave his wife for a former staffer who he impregnated while simultaneously harping on about the sanctity of marriage, in private. 

Well.

This is where Joyce got a little bit confused, and understandably.

7:30 wasn't the only show broadcast that Monday night. There was another program, attracting outrageous ratings, which also explored intimate details of relationships as a matter of public interest.

That show was Married at First Sight.

Married at First Sight or the Barnaby Joyce saga? We can't tell the difference. Post continues below. 


And just as the storylines on Australia's finest television program have become increasingly out of hand, so too has the tale of Barnaby Joyce.

It's like he is competing, and NO. You were never MEANT to be on this show. You are NOT on the couch, and John Aiken is NOT here to offer you advice.

There is no need to tell us about the inner workings of your relationship. We do not want to know about how many times you had intercourse with Campion. You have four children and one on the way, and since when did politics just become a really intense episode of Married at First Sight. 

So, to Barnaby Joyce, we have just one message.

You never go full Married at First Sight. Which, this weekend, he most certainly did.