The miracle of an inbred tomato

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Via Domainfax:

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has publicly apologised to his estranged wife Natalie and their four daughters for the pain caused by his affair with a staffer, but has denied the relationship breached any ministerial rules.

Mr Joyce has also hit back at fresh allegations of misbehaviour at a 2011 awards night, hinting at potential legal action. He said the alleged incident “did not happen” and had been pedalled by his political enemies for years.

Former Liberal Leader John Robert Hewson says Barnaby Joyce’s future has been under question for quite some time, and this could be an opportunity to rein him in.

“It’s just in the past I don’t believe it dignified a response. But today it’s in the paper and as such I reserve all my legal rights as to what action I should pursue,” he said in a brief statement to reporters at Parliament House.

He said he was “deeply sorry” for the hurt his affair with former media adviser Vikki Campion had caused his family.

To me, the only eyebrow raising thing about this is that there are actually two shielas in this world that want to copulate with an inbred tomato.

Aside from that, I’m old school on this stuff. It’s private and should stay that way.

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If Joyce gets the chop it should be because he’s useless, via The Sloan Delusion:

Let me run through some of the appalling policy positions he has pushed, to the detriment of the national interest and ordinary Australians:

• He supported re-regulation of the sugar industry in Queensland even though several hundreds of millions of dollars of public money was used to compensate farmers for the deregulation of the industry;

• He endorsed the building of the dubious, vastly expensive inland railway even though there has been insufficient scrutiny and cost-benefit analysis of the project;

• He equivocated about the building of a mine in his electorate while professing support for the resources industry more generally;

• He insisted the pesticides/agricultural chemicals regulatory agency be shifted from Canberra to his electorate even though the case was not established — an instance of pure pork-barrelling;

• The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is on the point of collapse but Joyce has been missing in action;

• He has been silent about alleged theft of irrigated water in the northern parts of the basin; and

• He takes credit for rising agricultural prices when answering questions in parliament, which is both witless and bizarre.

There are any number of other things wrong with the policy positions of the inbred tomato so let him go on those. Obsessing over pollies’ personal lives is just the flip-side of the void of real policy discussion.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.