Coalition supporters of Barnaby Joyce are pushing back against calls for the deputy prime minister to resign, despite a damning assessment from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Thursday evening.
The Nationals leader will take personal leave until parliament resumes in late February, after a bruising week of intense political pressure over his handling of an affair with his former employee Vikki Campion.
Late on Thursday afternoon, Mr Turnbull announced ministers would be banned from sex with their staff under an update to the ministerial code of conduct and offered a withering assessment of his deputy.
“He has to consider his own position, obviously,” Mr Turnbull told reporters at Parliament House.
“Barnaby made a shocking error of judgement in having an affair with a young woman working in his office. In doing so, he has set off a world of woe for those women and appalled all of us.”
Mr Turnbull does not have the power to sack Mr Joyce. Only the Nationals party room can remove him as their leader, and the agreement between the Liberals and the Nationals mandates his role as deputy prime minister.
Nationals senator Nigel Scullion said the party would not abandon Mr Joyce, who many in the party regard as their best leader in many years.
“We stick with our people, we stick with our leader and we stick with each other,” Senator Scullion said.
There was support for Mr Joyce on the Liberal side too.
Liberal backbencher Andrew Lamming said he supported Mr Turnbull’s “powerful” and “compelling” ban on ministers having sexual relations with their staff, and called for it to be extended to “cover not just one’s own staff but any staff in the building.”
But he said Mr Joyce should remain the deputy PM.
“Every Australian wants the best possible person in the job doing the job, and I think we’ll find after that one week and in the weeks following that that person is Barnaby Joyce.”
Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek repeated the opposition’s assessment that Mr Joyce’s position was “untenable”, but said she doubted the Coalition could resolve the matter.
“It would seem to me that his position is absolutely untenable,” Ms Plibersek told ABC News on Friday morning.
“On the other hand, does the Prime Minister have any authority to do what everybody seems to think is necessary? The answer is no,” she said.
