It was no surprise to hear that Barnaby Joyce doesn’t give a toss what you think of him. That much was obvious from Australian Story’s recent episode of ‘Unleashed’. What still surprises me is that the people who made it think the rest of us should have to pay for the exercise.

The program covered Joyce’s defection to One Nation and his life with his wife, Vikki Campion. The ABC presented it. The ABC produced it. Joyce talked. So did former colleagues, critics, and friends. The ABC’s own companion piece framed him as ‘King Rat’. They still got the interview. They still spent it assembling the prosecution.

If you don’t know Vikki Campion, she is a journalist and former media staffer to Joyce. They are now married and have children together. She manages the family and the farm while he tries to fix a broken country. If she were a radical leftie, she would be upheld as a legend. The woman who left the Canberra bubble, raised children off the grid, and kept a household standing through public humiliation. Instead, she is target practice for everyone from former colleagues to the ABC’s running gallery of Joyce-hunters.

As Jesus put it, take the plank out of your own eye before pointing to the speck in your brother’s. Or, in this case, your sister’s.

You might recall, back in the day, Turnbull’s press conference where he waxed lyrical about Joyce’s life choices and unveiled the infamous ‘bonk ban’ was the tipping point of the Liberal Party’s low, slow slide towards irrelevance…

Your ABC’s Australian Story reached for a Turnbull when he still had colour in his hair and let him play moral auditor. The Liberals have never recovered from him. In my opinion, he will be remembered as the reason the party of Robert Menzies found the rubbish bin of history. That the national broadcaster still treats that presser as respectable commentary tells you more about the ABC’s idea of virtue than about Barnaby (he insists I call him Barnaby, not Mr Joyce).

Please don’t give me the ‘retail politician’ routine. Barnaby cannot be divided into retail and wholesale. He is not an end-of-aisle display designed to trigger an impulse buy. What you see is what you get. That is why people watch him, and why the people who cannot stand him keep asking him back.

So, when the ABC profiles him and leaves his wife as the main voice prepared to speak for the life they actually live (while the rest of the cut is a chorus of anti-Barnaby), you have to ask the obvious question: Does the ABC do anything now except classy, biased bigotry?

The double standard is the tell. The ABC holds itself up as a moral standard, provided the story has the right vibe. Vikki Campion is a mother, a journalist, a farm manager, and the wife of one of the few politicians who still sounds like the country he claims to represent.

None of that is easy. She bears the brunt of the personal attacks. She does not have staff to filter the nonsense. She manages the family, the farm, and the fallout from the same taxpayer-funded outfit that advertises itself as a champion of women.

Campion has spoken, including in this latest round of coverage, about how the 2018 intrusion shattered her. About postpartum depression. And about moving off the grid because public life had become unliveable.

A newsroom that actualised its own rhetoric about women, mental health, and media pile-ons would have heard that and paused. The ABC heard it and kept the Turnbull clip handy.

That is not a one-off lapse in an otherwise fair institution. It is the method. Barnaby still talks to them. The livestock in the ABC stable still treat One Nation as a pathology to be managed rather than a constituency to be understood. The broadcaster claims to speak for the nation and then performs its distaste for what is increasingly becoming the largest part of it.

I am angry about ‘Our ABC’ because the pretence is the insult. They behave like a political movement with a bottomless public subsidy, then affect surprise when the people who fund them have their own opinions. It is my view that they represent themselves. They represent their staff. They do not represent the country that pays the bill.

The sooner the ABC is defunded, the better. They will keep asking Barnaby to sit down for the camera. They will keep treating his wife as collateral.

If the ABC continues to use Barnaby and Vikki as rage-bait for its audience, perhaps that audience should start paying a subscription for its partisan content.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.