Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is expecting a child with a former staffer. Credit:AAP "We know that the best protection for those girls is that they get themselves into a secure relationship with a loving husband," he said, "and I want that to happen for them. I don't want any legislator to take that right away from me." All these years later, I'm still perplexed as to why Joyce thinks marriage equality would have denied his daughters the right to marry men. But as Jennifer Wilson wrote back in October 2017 (incidentally, the only journalist willing to explore what was then and still is a matter of public interest), "Joyce used his four daughters' inalienable right to heterosexual marriage as an argument against marriage equality". This in itself makes no sense, but it does demonstrate his hypocrisy in advocating a "secure relationship with a loving husband" as a woman's ultimate "protection". I doubt his wife or his daughters feel particularly protected by the man who has brought such unwelcome attention to their lives through his own alleged infidelity. With the reality of a baby on the way, Natalie Joyce has released a statement saying she and her four daughters are "hurt and deceived" by the Deputy Prime Minister's bog standard behaviour. Joyce has previously spoken about his "guilt" over being an absent father to his four daughters, none of whom are likely to respond well to the fact he's joined the Old Father With A New Family do-over club.

This is where the cliche comes in. Because really, a 50-year-old man leaving his wife to start again with a 33-year-old isn't a love story. It's a midlife crisis. But we are also entitled to be concerned about the ease with which one of our supposed leaders takes advantage of women for his own benefit. In her statement, Ms Joyce locates part of her devastation in the fact she placed her own career on hold to support Joyce as he established his political one. Having wives and children enormously benefits men's careers, particularly when they operate in the political sphere. I'm not suggesting people stay in relationships that are no longer producing happiness or fulfilment. But when someone has sacrificed so much for you, have the moral integrity to separate from them with dignity. It speaks volumes about the Deputy Prime Minister's character that he has treated his wife as little more than a long term employee, useful so long as she served a purpose but easily replaced when a better applicant came along. If you want to talk about the protection women deserve in marriage, this is it: it's the protection from "traditional" protocol that encourages women to sacrifice their own ambitions to support those of their husbands. This is part of the double standard that affects women, both inside politics and out. If this were a 50-year-old woman - hell, if it were a 40-year-old woman - whose sexual relationship with a much younger subordinate male employee were exposed, she would be crucified by the press and the public. If she were a 40-year-old woman who had become pregnant as a result of that affair, she would be destroyed. There would be no calls to respect her privacy. Her qualifications as a mother would be repeatedly torn apart and it would be considered an indisputable fact that she'd foregone her right to continue representing her electorate let alone occupying the role of Deputy PM.

Loading Think of how Jacinda Ardern has been treated since announcing her pregnancy! Accused of deceiving the public, of irresponsibly vying for the leadership of New Zealand when she knew she was going to require "time off", of emasculating her partner by forcing him to stay home and do "her" job. Barnaby Joyce is a hypocrite who considers himself above scrutiny, and he's a cliche who conforms to the blandest of middle-aged male stereotypes. If this is the best deputy leader the country has to offer, no wonder we're such a garbage heap.