Pauline Hanson laughs off ‘unusual’ moment Barnaby Joyce snaps at dog during TV interview
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has laughed off her MP Barnaby Joyce’s wild blow-up at a dog during a live interview, saying she does not know what the situation was.
Joyce, a high-profile defector to One Nation from the Nationals, was speaking to ABC’s Sarah Ferguson on 7.30 on Monday night from what appeared to be his rural property.
Barnaby Joyce snapped at a dog on-air in a bizarre interview moment. ABC/7.30
Ferguson asked Joyce whether he was comfortable with the direction One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was taking his current party, after she met British far-right agitator and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson during a high-profile trip to the UK.
“Well, I think - SIT DOWN!,” Joyce responded, turning to yell at an offscreen canine.
“Sorry, it’s a dog.”
Joyce apologised again for the dog later in the interview, which Ferguson pushed back on.
“Don’t worry about the dog, just answer the question,” she said.
“Don’t be rude, don’t be rude,” Joyce replied.
“Otherwise, this interview will come to a grinding halt… what was the question actually?”
During an event in Western Australia on Tuesday, Hanson said she watched that clip and laughed.
“It’s funny. That’s Barnaby. This is why I love the people around me. We’re just human,” she said.
Pauline Hanson at a Seven West business breakfast in Perth on Tuesday. Ross Swanborough
Later at a press conference, Hanson said she did not know what the situation was to have caused the outburst.
“I don’t know what sort of day he had, or you know what was going on,” she said.
“It’s unusual for anyone doing an interview to turn and tell your dog to keep quiet.”
During the interview, Joyce suggested Channel Seven had pushed for the Robinson meeting, and he denied Hanson supported the White Australia policy.
On a podcast with Robinson, Hanson suggested Australia had suffered immigration problems since former prime minister Gough Whitlam ended the White Australia policy in 1973.
The policy, which is shorthand for a series of laws and government practices that had been in place since Federation, sought to restrict immigration to Australia to preserve it as a white, predominantly British society.
Post-WWII it began to fall out of favour and was gradually reduced, until Whitlam took an axe to its final elements in the 1970s.
Joyce told 7.30 Hanson had said “quite clearly” that she did not support a return to the White Australia policy.
During her maiden political speech in parliament in the 1990s, Hanson claimed Australia was in danger of being “swamped by Asians”.
On her election to the senate in 2016, Hanson riffed on the speech to say Australia was in danger of being “swamped by Muslims”.
Hanson has worn face coverings twice in the senate. Dominic Lorrimer
During her time in the senate, Hanson has twice worn Islamic full-face coverings as part of her campaign to ban the garments, both times drawing reprimands from colleagues.
Joyce on 7.30 claimed Hanson had been clear that she did not take issue with Muslim Australians in general.
“There is an issue in Australia that if people go into a form of Balkanisation where you – where there’s not an assimilation, where you go into a form of an alternate culture which is at odds with the egalitarian ethos of Australia, then that creates massive problems,” he said.
“And we saw that in Bondi.”
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