An Australian politician’s live TV interview took a bizarre turn Monday when he suddenly stopped answering a serious question about race, deportations, and the direction of his party — and instead screamed at his dog.
Barnaby Joyce, a 59-year-old lawmaker with Australia’s right-wing One Nation party, was speaking with ABC host Sarah Ferguson when the interview veered into unexpected territory. The topic was party leader Pauline Hanson, 72, and her push for Trump-style mass deportations, a stance Ferguson suggested was pulling Joyce deeper into a politics of “intolerance and racial discrimination.”
“[Hanson] is dragging you further into a place of intolerance and racial discrimination,” Ferguson told him during the live segment. “You’re defending your leader, but are you really comfortable with where she is taking you?”
Joyce began to respond, saying, “I think…” before suddenly exploding off-camera.
“SIT DOWN!!!” he shouted.
For a moment, the interview appeared to freeze in awkward confusion as Joyce’s face flushed and the outburst hung in the air. He quickly tried to recover, explaining that the command had not been aimed at the host or anyone on the program.
“Sorry, it’s the dog,” he said.
The strange on-air moment instantly added another wild chapter to Joyce’s long history of headline-grabbing public blowups. And for anyone who remembers his infamous feud with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard over their dogs, the timing could not have been more ironic.
Back in 2015, Joyce was Australia’s agriculture minister when Depp and Heard were accused of illegally bringing their two Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, into the country on a private jet. Australian authorities said the couple had violated the country’s strict biosecurity and animal import laws.
Joyce did not hold back. He warned that if the dogs were not removed from Australia, they could be euthanized.
“If we start letting movie stars — even though they’ve been the sexiest man alive twice — to come into our nation and break the laws, then why don’t we just break the laws for everybody?” Joyce said at the time.
He argued that Australia’s strict rules were necessary to keep diseases such as rabies out of the country.
“If he doesn’t take Boo and Pistol back, we do have to euthanize them,” Joyce said then. “The reason you can walk through a park in Brisbane and not have in the back of your mind, ‘What happens if a rabid dog comes out and bites me or bites my kid?’ is because we’ve kept that disease out.”
The dogs were eventually flown out of Australia, but the controversy became an international embarrassment and a lasting celebrity-politics feud. Heard later apologized online, though she clearly never forgot the episode.
Years later, Joyce found himself at the center of another political mess when he discovered in 2017 that he had inherited New Zealand citizenship through his father. Under Australia’s constitution, dual nationals are barred from sitting in parliament, and Joyce briefly lost his seat.
Heard mocked him on Twitter, writing that she had sent him “a box of New Zealand’s finest kiwi fruit” to comfort him, assuming it could get through his own biosecurity rules.
The actress revived the joke again in 2021 when she adopted a dog and named it Barnaby Joyce. Joyce, who has also served twice as Australia’s deputy prime minister, brushed off the dig and said he was flattered, claiming it meant he was still living in her head rent-free.
Now, after barking orders at his own dog during a live interview, Joyce is once again making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
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