Joyce calls for changes to privacy laws

Barnaby Joyce has called for privacy laws to be changed to protect private citizens from media harassment a week after giving a $150,000 paid interview.

Barnaby Joyce and Vikki Campion during the Channel 7 interview

Barnaby Joyce and his partner Vikki Campion are having another baby. Source: AAP

Barnaby Joyce has ramped up his calls for more stringent privacy laws a week after giving a $150,000 television interview.

The deputy prime minister said the couple did the infamous interview in the hope it would be a "circuit-breaker" which would end the intense scrutiny on their private lives.

"We certainly wouldn't have done the interview if we thought it was just going to continue on, obviously it is," Mr Joyce told the Seven Network on Monday.

Mr Joyce denied a photographer's claims he had shaped up to throw a punch, saying the man was hiding in the bushes outside a church on Sunday.

The former Nationals leader said he accepted public figures would get media attention, but laws needed to be changed to protect people like his partner Vikki Campion and the couple's baby son Sebastian from paparazzi.

"These people have the capacity to destroy someone's life," Mr Joyce said.

He said Ms Campion, his former media adviser, had been harassed for months.

It was revealed in February that Mr Joyce was having an affair with Ms Campion, who was pregnant with their child.

"Private individuals, kids especially, should have greater protections than what they've got. They haven't got any," Mr Joyce said.

Government minister Simon Birmingham was quick to show he wouldn't support the move.

"I don't see any need for Australia's privacy laws to be changed," he told Sky News.

Mr Joyce first called for a "tort of privacy" in his infamous paid interview with Seven's Sunday Night program.

Labor senator Murray Watt said while privacy laws hadn't kept up to date with modern technology, Mr Joyce would get more sympathy if he went away quietly.

"On the one hand he's complaining about people invading his privacy, on the other hand he's taking big money to do interviews on public TV," Senator Watt told Sky News.

Mr Joyce and Ms Campion have answered scores of questions from an expenses watchdog about whether he used taxpayers' money on trips together, with both denying any wrongdoing.

Despite being on two weeks of medical leave, Mr Joyce has been unable to stay out of the headlines.

Last week he insisted he was entitled to lobby NSW Nationals to vote against a bill to provide "safe zones" around the state's abortion clinics that would make it an offence to film staff and patients without their consent.


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Source: AAP


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