Voters in Joyce’s electorate are standing by their plain-speaking man despite his ‘mess-up’

Armidale, midday Wednesday: a 40-something man wearing canary yellow board shorts, thongs and Von Zipper sunglasses walks down the main street carrying a slab of Victoria Bitter on his shoulder.



“No time, mate,” is his friendly reply when the Guardian tries to ask his opinion on the scandal engulfing the town’s MP – the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce. He taps the case of throw-downs by way of explanation and keeps walking.

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People have all sorts of different priorities. As the Coalition in Canberra continued to work itself into a lather over Joyce’s future, his local constituents were more droll than disappointed at news of their MP’s affair with his former staffer Vikki Campion.



“Well, please, half of this town is divorced – half of everywhere is – I think people need to get over themselves,” said Annie Miles, a grazier from Armidale. “Things happen, that’s what life is [but] he’s a strong character and he stands up for what he believes in and says what he thinks.

“Parliament’s full of lawyers who love to hear the sound of their own voices. It’s nice to have someone who sounds like a real person in there. We love Barnaby.”

Since the Daily Telegraph reported Canberra’s worst-kept secret late last week – that Joyce had left his wife, Natalie, for Campion, who is pregnant – Joyce has battled to keep his head above a rising tide of scandal.

Indeed, if the palpitations of Canberra this week are anything to go by, Joyce’s career has entered something approaching dangerously close to a death spiral. Malcolm Turnbull has distanced himself from his deputy, and former Nationals leaders have questioned whether his leadership is tenable.

But how much is an affair worth in 2018? That, broadly, is the calculation Joyce’s colleagues on both sides of the aisle have been making all week.

The answer, if the high streets and front bars of Joyce’s home town are anything to go by, is not much. Or at least not enough to convince many of the 73.6% of voters who elected him in December to change their view of a man who has built a reputation here as a popular local member. A ReachTel poll published by Fairfax on Thursday suggested one in five voters in the constituency think Joyce should resign from parliament, and a further 26.7% think he should stay in parliament but lose his job as deputy prime minister – but this doesn’t yet feel like a large enough groundswell to make life difficult for him locally.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trevor Esplrn: ‘What he does when he’s half-pissed at the pub, I couldn’t give a bugger.’ Photograph: Michael McGowan/The Guardian

On Wednesday the Guardian spoke to more than a dozen residents of Armidale and Tamworth – the two major population centres in Joyce’s electorate of New England – to seek their reaction to the revelations about his affair and the subsequent fallout.

Most who had previously supported Joyce continued to do so. Many said they’d already heard the whispers about his infidelity before the byelection three months ago. A smattering were annoyed to be asked the question.

“It’s none of my business and it’s none of yours either,” one woman shopping in Armidale’s main street told the Guardian. She wasn’t the only one.

“I think, just like anyone else in the world, his personal life shouldn’t come into his professional life,” Georgia Seymour said.

In common with most of the people the Guardian interviewed, Seymour, a 21-year-old University of New England nursing student, said she admired Joyce for his candour and for remaining genuine while in the public eye.

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While conceding that, because of Joyce’s stature, it was “inevitable” that the affair would surface, it “shouldn’t change” his position in public life.

“He’s a down-to-earth, typical Australian guy and he’s been an excellent politician for this area. That’s what matters, in my opinion. One mess-up isn’t enough to taint everything else.”

Trevor Esplrn agreed. A retiree originally from the New South Wales central coast, he said Joyce’s private life was irrelevant. “What he does when he’s half-pissed at the pub, I couldn’t give a bugger,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maria Hitchcock: ‘He’s actually been a pretty good representative for this area.’ Photograph: Michael McGowan/The Guardian

Labor has kept off the personal details of Joyce’s predicament and sought to emphasise possible breaches of process. It has demanded answers about how Campion was shifted from Joyce’s office to jobs in the office of another Nationals minister, Matt Canavan, and then the party whip, Damian Drum, and asked why the couple have been living rent-free in a luxury Armidale townhouse owned by a multimillionaire ­businessman.

It’s fertile ground and it could yet pay benefits. Maria Hitchcock, a former local council candidate who describes herself as “progressive” but says she respects Joyce, says she’s troubled by his “lack of judgment”.

“Look, I try to judge everyone on their merits and I think he’s actually been a pretty good representative for this area,” she said.

“But you expect someone who acts as the fill-in prime minister to have good judgment. And all these decisions he’s made – the affair but also the thing about the house and everything else – that’s all bad personal judgment. That makes me question him.”

But Hitchcock said that if Joyce survived the current imbroglio he was unlikely to suffer too much in the electorate.

“Barnaby really is well-suited to this area because he’s one of these country-type, manly men who want to go to the sheep sales and then the pub,” she said.

“I think that’s a position that’s still very popular in a place like this. He represents, I think, a kind of stability from a past Australia that people find comforting.”