Malcolm Turnbull has told the House of Representatives he has confidence in the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce. Very often, in politics, this is the immortal line uttered just before somebody packs their bag, and the end of lease cleaners arrive.



But playing along for now, and taking the prime minister at his word, the observance of form was about the only comfort Joyce could have derived from question time on Monday.

Labor asked a series of questions about who signed off on the decisions moving Vikki Campion, partner of Barnaby Joyce (or not, apparently, on the technicalities – but we’ll return to vexing definitional questions later), from office to office after she left the staff of the deputy prime minister last year.

PM's office says Campion's jobs didn't break rules because she wasn't Joyce's 'partner' Read more

Both Turnbull and the treasurer, Scott Morrison, who fielded some of the questions as he represents the special minister of state in the lower house, made it clear the Nationals were responsible for those decisions.

While the prime minister had been polite enough to generalise, Morrison thought he’d get specific. That responsibility, said the treasurer, sat with “the leader of the National party”.

It was Joyce, in other words. Don’t look at us, chaps.

Play Video 0:59 Barnaby Joyce apologises to family, partner and voters – video

Morrison may as well have turned in Joyce’s direction and said “why don’t you ask that bozo?”, or nailed a flashing red arrow over the deputy prime minister’s head – but Labor, already tiptoeing around the glass house – declined to take the hint.

In case it wasn’t already obvious, Monday demonstrated the Liberals have little appetite to go to the wall for Joyce.

As question time unfolded, it was hard to recall the triumphant scenes only a few months back, when Joyce was sworn in at Government House with almost unseemly haste and carried back into parliament on a litter after he held the seat of New England with a positive swing – oh marvel of marvels, Barnaby, the bush poet, is back among us, sparing us the embarrassment of being unable to control the lower house.

Obviously Joyce’s personal travails, and the very public consequences of them, is mess that Turnbull and the Liberals really don’t want to be saddled with at the opening of the new political year.

But, as well as all the general unpleasantness, there is also the highly specific inconvenience of the ministerial code of conduct, which explicitly forbids ministers employing their partners, and also forbids the partners of ministers being employed in other offices without “the prime minister’s express approval”.

This is where we get to partners, and definitions.

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Asked the obvious questions triggered by stipulations of the code – how can Campion have been continued to be employed in government roles when she was involved in an intimate relationship with Joyce, which was the reason she had departed his office in the first place – the answer from the prime minister’s office was twofold.

The first explanation was the prime minister didn’t know about the relationship.

The second was she wasn’t the deputy prime minister’s partner. Joyce already had a partner, his wife Natalie, who was claiming spousal entitlements, and was continuing to be seen in public with him until about August last year.

Everyone gets the technicality. Fundamentally it’s a question of whether a relationship is a fling or a partnership.

But I suspect the technicality won’t wash.

Because the facts, hard to pin down for months, are now very clear. Joyce has been involved in a long-term intimate relationship with a woman – not his former wife – who is about to have the deputy prime minister’s fifth child.

Out in the real world, that looks an awful lot like a partnership.

