A personal view from an Anglican Vicar in Barnaby Joyce’s seat of New England:
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“My sense from conversations and social media is that there are pretty mixed feelings here about privacy, personal behaviour and whether marital breakdown should cause resignation.
“However, I suspect that whatever our reaction to Barnaby himself, many of us would feel let down by our political system.
“Politicians often seem to put personal advancement before public interest, make promises they seem never intending to keep and are too often found out in questionable behaviour.
“One of the things that made Barnaby Joyce so refreshing was that he seemed to be a man who spoke his mind and followed through. He even crossed the floor 28 times to vote against his own party. Yet he’s resigned his leadership. Whether he was the victim of his own actions or of opportunistic opposition parties, we have been let down again.
“Failure of leadership is all around us. At work, in social clubs, in public institutions, in Churches, in families and everywhere else we might imagine. Don’t those failures make us long for leaders who won’t let us down?
“We want a ruler who would use their position for our good rather than their own. Where can such a ruler be found? Only in the God who gives us the air we breath and food that sustains us.
“So yes, I am a little disillusioned by this episode, even if I’m not surprised. But I’m grateful that in Jesus Christ, I have one who rules rightly and will not let me down.”