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  Turnbull, Shorten and dozens of other MPs applauded the visitors in the public galleries when the final vote came. It was a joyous moment for many in the House of Representatives, with so many MPs voting Yes that they did not have enough seats on their side of the chamber, and the majority was so convincing there was no need for a formal count. It took time for observers to notice the absences. Some of the MPs who had argued so loudly for a ‘people’s vote’ did not act on what the people wanted. Abbott and Morrison abstained. So did conservatives like Kevin Andrews, Andrew Hastie and Michael Sukkar. Dutton voted Yes, a reminder that he could be pragmatic when Morrison was guided by his faith. Dutton had helped devise the postal survey and therefore voted to put the popular result into effect. Only four MPs voted No: David Littleproud and Keith Pitt from the Nationals, Russell Broadbent from the Liberals and Bob Katter from the crossbench.

  The public galleries erupted at the overwhelming outcome. The applause began long before the final vote and lasted for minutes afterwards, with cheers as people in the public galleries unfurled a rainbow flag. For a moment, it looked like the rancour and division were gone as the public galleries sang and Shorten and Plibersek joined them from the floor of the chamber. Entsch lifted Labor MP Linda Burney and swung her through the air, her shoes narrowly missing Wilson as he crouched to pick up his papers.

  The victory celebrations went on so long that most forgot about one of the speeches earlier in the day. Barnaby Joyce abstained from the final vote but had risen to speak on one of the amendments.

  ‘I don’t come to this debate pretending to be any form of saint,’ he said. ‘But I do believe in the current definition of marriage, which has stood the test of time. Half of them fail; I acknowledge that. Obviously, I acknowledge that I’m currently separated, so that’s on the record.’

  It was an unexpected admission. Joyce’s colleagues did not need to be told his marriage was in trouble, but his remarks led some of them to wonder if he was planning to say more about the changes in his private life. Would there be a magazine feature or television interview to tell voters about his new life? But Joyce chose to lock away the full story. The hunt began to discover what it was.

  6

  NATIONAL SCANDAL

  DECEMBER 2017 TO FEBRUARY 2018

  BARNABY JOYCE HAD ARRIVED in Parliament more than a decade earlier like a Queensland dust storm, choking the party machinery that controlled most politicians. He owed no debts to Nationals Party elders and knew no loyalties to the men he was told to obey when he reached Canberra. The Nationals were stunned when he became their Queensland Senate candidate, because he upset the preselection meeting that was supposed to select someone else, and shocked when he won in the 2004 election. The result meant the Coalition gained four Queensland seats in the upper house rather than three, enough to give John Howard and his government the rare power of a majority in the Senate. Observers thought it was a safe majority until they met Joyce. He defied his own side of politics, up to and including his Prime Minister, and extracted concessions when Howard needed his vote on media laws or the sale of Telstra. He was a party of one.

  The news of Joyce’s marriage separation in the closing weeks of 2017 was the first public hint of an entanglement that would disturb his colleagues, engross the public and eventually shatter his personal alliance with Turnbull. The Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister spent much of 2017 dealing with a complicated private life that began to affect his performance. The aftermath of the marriage equality vote, when ministers and MPs were pitted against each other, required a period of steadiness and cohesion at the apex of the government. In other circumstances, Turnbull might have begun 2018 with a message to win back voters. He began it with a scandal instead.

  Joyce had begun an affair with one of his senior advisers, Vikki Campion, which left him exposed to gossip in the coffee queues of Parliament House and the pubs and clubs of Tamworth, his home in country New South Wales. His enemies knew how to spread the story on social media to get everyone asking a single question: would Barnaby own up to his affair before a journalist revealed it first? Campion, a former journalist with the Daily Telegraph, understood the media and knew the risk of exposure. She had been a press secretary for the New South Wales Nationals in Macquarie Street before helping Joyce in his electorate of New England, where he had moved in 2013 after leaving the upper house. Campion helped defend Joyce during the 2016 campaign against a challenge from the former member, Tony Windsor, and he held the seat with an 8.5 per cent margin. Impressed, Joyce asked her to work with him in Canberra.

  The affair was underway by late 2016 and was difficult to hide in the office.1 Joyce and his chief of staff, Di Hallam, arranged in April the following year to move Campion to the office of Matt Canavan, the Resources Minister and a Joyce ally who could be trusted completely.2 A letter from the Prime Minister’s Office, dated 9 May 2017, approved the routine transfer. While Joyce and Campion could sometimes be seen in the courtyard near his office, puffing on cigarettes together, their relationship was kept secret from most.

  Natalie Joyce had confronted Campion on the street in Tamworth in March: ‘My husband is out of bounds, off-limits, he’s a married man with four children,’ she told Campion.3 Natalie agreed to attend the Mid Winter Ball with her husband in June, easing some of the chatter about their relationship, and then joined him on a government visit to Europe in July to restore their marriage. The effort failed. The two went their separate ways as soon as they landed at Sydney Airport.

  Others in the government thought Joyce grew distant from his work and his colleagues. He looked disengaged. He could be caught in a cabinet meeting with his mind elsewhere, staring at a wall. He went to dinner with Turnbull at The Lodge and was downcast for most of the night and never owned up to his family crisis. When journalist Sharri Markson of the Daily Telegraph contacted one of Turnbull’s press secretaries, Daniel Meers, about a sighting of Joyce and Campion at a doctor’s surgery together in May, the Prime Minister’s press team decided it was time to call in the Deputy Prime Minister to clear the air. Turnbull invited Joyce to the Prime Minister’s Office. What on earth was happening? Joyce insisted he had merely gone to the surgery with Campion as a friend.

  Campion took a pregnancy test alone that winter and discovered she was pregnant.

  It took a political shock, and an overlooked section of the Constitution, to bring Joyce undone. Over the space of six months, from August 2017 to January 2018, he staggered from a sudden furore over his New Zealand citizenship to a forced by-election and a bungled reshuffle that made enemies within his own party, followed by his fall from power when his affair was exposed. At every stage his own decisions accelerated his fall.

  The Parliament slid into a crisis over the eligibility of its own members in a way that seemed at first like no crisis at all, so slowly did the problems emerge and so minor were the casualties. Over more than a year, members and senators fell victim to Section 44 of the Constitution and its sanction against the election of anyone with the citizenship of another country or a pecuniary interest with the Commonwealth. What began as a fine legal argument became a contest of blunt politics and constitutional disputes that put politicians from all major parties at the mercy of the High Court. Joyce was a prime target.

  The first signs of trouble were a mere sideshow: first, a question over whether Family First Senator Bob Day, a former property developer, should be removed from Parliament for having an indirect interest in a property that collected rent from the Commonwealth; second, a challenge to One Nation Senator Rod Culleton, a country salesman chased by debt collectors, over whether his financial affairs also disqualified him from Parliament. ‘Let’s not talk about the Constitution,’ Culleton told Chief Justice Robert French as he represented himself in the High Court.4 Alas, Justice French insisted. Culleton was gone by January of 2017, forever protesting that the court had abused its power.

  This was a minor matter in a Senate with a motley collection of crossb
enchers who held the balance of power. The performers changed, the circus carried on. It took months for the disaster to become clear, as legal vigilantes speculated on who might fall foul of Section 44(i) of the Constitution and its unforgiving rule on citizenship. Under this section, any member could be disqualified if he or she was a foreign citizen or under any ‘allegiance, obedience, or adherence’ to a foreign power. More dangerously, this also applied if he or she was simply ‘entitled’ to the rights or privileges enjoyed by a citizen of a foreign power.

  A Perth barrister, John Cameron, began investigating Greens Senator Scott Ludlam and Victorian independent Senator Derryn Hinch, both of whom were born in New Zealand. Hinch, a former journalist, had been smart enough to renounce his right to New Zealand citizenship. Ludlam had not. He resigned on 14 July and the full horror began to dawn on others elected to Parliament. Greens Senator Larissa Waters, born in Canada to Australian parents, resigned four days later.

  ‘Extraordinary negligence,’ declared Turnbull. ‘These two Greens senators were careless and they’ve paid the price for it.’ He soon discovered how careless his own colleagues had been. Canavan began facing questions about his mother, who had applied for Italian citizenship, and he chose to step down from the ministry so the court could decide whether he was also entitled to Italian citizenship.

  Journalists scoured records to find new targets. Liberals investigated their opponents, while Labor assembled a team to check the citizenship of every government MP. No prize was greater than Joyce, who was not only the Deputy Prime Minister but a member of the lower house in a government with a majority of one. The fact that Joyce’s father had been born in New Zealand left the entire government vulnerable.

  The first question to the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs was sent on 27 July by journalist Rosie Lewis, followed by a similar query from blogger William Summers on 3 August. Labor found a way to force an answer. Labor foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong had a chief of staff, Marcus Ganley, who was born in New Zealand. He contacted New Zealand Labour MP Chris Hipkins, who lodged a question in Parliament on 9 August: ‘Would a child born in Australia to a New Zealand father automatically have New Zealand citizenship?’ The official answer was yes.5

  The New Zealand High Commissioner to Australia, Chris Seed, drove to Parliament House in Canberra on 10 August to deliver the news to Joyce. It was a Thursday afternoon and Parliament was preparing to rise for three days. Joyce could barely speak when he heard the confirmation from Seed in his office. Turnbull joined him and called in the Attorney-General, George Brandis, to seek legal advice from Solicitor-General Stephen Donaghue as soon as possible. They commissioned a barrister in New Zealand to produce advice within a day.

  Joyce headed to Parliament House again on Saturday to discuss his options with Turnbull and his wife, Lucy, in the Prime Minister’s Office. They believed the Solicitor-General’s advice meant the High Court, sitting as the Court of Disputed Returns, would be more likely than not to find Joyce could remain in Parliament. They chose to break with the precedent set by Canavan, who had stepped down from cabinet, and keep Joyce in his role. They knew they would have to answer for this inconsistency when Joyce stood in Parliament on Monday morning to refer himself to the High Court.6

  ‘The government is of the firm view that I would not be found to be disqualified,’ Joyce told Parliament, throwing camouflage over the doubts within the government about its own legal advice. Turnbull dismissed Labor demands in Question Time for Joyce to stand aside.

  ‘The Leader of the National Party, the Deputy Prime Minister, is qualified to sit in this House, and the High Court will so hold,’ Turnbull said. It was a bluff, nothing more, but Labor exploited the moment and claimed it was an attempt to direct the court. The government was buffeted again within days when Senator Fiona Nash, the Nationals Deputy Leader, had to reveal her right to British citizenship.

  There was no need for Turnbull’s enemies to devise new shocks when the Nationals were causing enough instability by themselves, with three cabinet ministers facing an uncertain future, all at a time when the government was trying to settle its internal arguments over same sex marriage. Turnbull had no choice but to back Joyce, Nash and Canavan.

  The High Court spared Canavan but disqualified Joyce and Nash at the end of October. It decided Ludlam and Waters were invalidly elected. It also removed Malcolm Roberts of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, a Senator who had gone on late-night television to declare he would win his case despite being born in India to an Australian mother and a Welsh father. Sky News host Paul Murray decided the matter live on air after seeing the Roberts documents — ‘a million per cent correct, and very clearly prove you aren’t a dual citizen’, he said — but the High Court inconveniently disagreed.7 It did not stop Murray and his evening co-hosts declaring something to be true because they wished it so.

  Joyce resigned from Parliament and prepared for a by-election on 2 December. While he fought the campaign in full confidence he would keep his seat, he was also on alert for accusations about his private life. Campion had jumped from Canavan’s office in July, when he stepped down from cabinet, and landed as an adviser to Nationals backbencher Damian Drum. She was now the subject of innuendo. The fact that Joyce was a bigger target than ever, vulnerable at a by-election, made her the subject of rumour during the campaign. Joyce discovered that a woman behind the bar at the Emmaville Hotel knew all about his private life, while a man at the Graman Hotel near Inverell taunted him about the affair in a way that started an altercation.8

  Windsor, who had never forgiven Joyce for taking his seat in 2013, used social media to drop hints about ‘Vicki’ without elaborating, such as a 16 September tweet that said ‘Vicki’ was ‘rooting for BJ’ while the Nationals polled New England. The messages encouraged speculation among the journalists of Parliament House, but conjecture was not proof. The hearsay was not strong enough to rush into print. Any publication of the rumours being circulated would have thrown a newspaper or television network into an unwinnable defamation case. Sharri Markson of the Daily Telegraph penned a newspaper profile in October that said Joyce was battling ‘vicious innuendo’ about his private life.9 It was the closest anyone came to uncovering what was going on inside the office of the Deputy Prime Minister, a man who told voters he stood for family values and traditional marriage.

  All this was overshadowed by the government’s capitulation on one of the longest arguments of the Parliament, the call for a royal commission into banks and financial services. Shorten had proposed the inquiry in April 2016 and Turnbull had resisted the idea so resolutely, over nineteen months, that it became easy for Labor to portray the Prime Minister as a defender of the banks who not only wanted to spare them from an investigation but give them a company tax cut. The government had put itself in an unsustainable position when some of its own backbenchers, including George Christensen and Barry O’Sullivan from the Queensland Nationals, were willing to vote for a parliamentary inquiry into the banks.

  Even now, Turnbull and Morrison could not launch a royal commission into the banks without smoothing the way with the companies. In an unnecessary orchestration, they waited for the chairmen and chief executives of the big four banks to write a letter to the government asking for the inquiry to go ahead. ‘It is now in the national interest for the political uncertainty to end,’ wrote the leaders of the ANZ Group, Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank and Westpac. They put their terms in a draft letter to Morrison on 29 November. When this met with approval, they sent it formally the next day and the government announced the royal commission, to be led by former High Court judge Ken Hayne.

  ‘The nature of political events means the national economic interest is now served by taking what I describe as a regrettable but necessary action,’ Morrison said when announcing the inquiry alongside Turnbull. It was a revealing statement and was used against him within hours when Shorten argued the government was only holding the ‘regrettable’ inqu
iry to prevent a revolt from the Nationals rather than feeling any deeper concern about misconduct and the abuse of customers. This was personal for Shorten, who had faced derision from Turnbull for months for demanding this inquiry. Shorten considered the delay to the royal commission one of Turnbull’s great failures as leader. ‘He wanted to lecture the banks but he didn’t want to do anything about their conduct,’ he said later.10

  Joyce was hailed a hero on the night he won the by-election on 2 December. He and Turnbull, an unlikely combination of the rough and riotous with the smooth and cerebral, looked closer than ever. Turnbull flew to Tamworth for the celebrations. The crowd chanted ‘Barn-a-by, Barn-a-by’ at the Southgate Inn and barely stopped to hear Turnbull speak.

  ‘We’re getting the band back together,’ Turnbull said.

  ‘I just want to say how completely and utterly humbled I am,’ Joyce yelled. ‘I say to the people of New England, that I never take anything for granted.’ His Nationals colleagues were not so sure. Some of them saw complacency in the way Joyce dealt with his party and his private life. He seemed to think he was bulletproof.

  The victory helped expose a clumsy scheme to destabilise Turnbull. Two weeks before the ballots were cast, Andrew Bolt had told his Sky News viewers of a Coalition MP who intended to sit as an independent member in Parliament unless Turnbull was replaced by a leader who could appeal to conservative voters. One of the conditions on this anonymous ultimatum was that the new leader could not be Bishop. Who could this renegade be? All eyes in the Press Gallery turned to George Christensen, the Nationals member from Mackay who wanted to ban the burqa, loved taunting the Greens by posing with a handgun, called for the Nationals to leave the Coalition, sought ordination as an Anglican deacon and courted a Filipino fiancée. Christensen, who came to Parliament with a journalism degree and a few years as a political adviser, had a talent for provoking the media. This time, however, he denied causing trouble.