A few quiet words about Barnaby.

I had a long and genuinely fascinating conversation with Barnaby Joyce once. It was an interview, probably for some weekend feature at the Herald or the Age. They’d occasionally dispatch me on these missions if they had somebody who wouldn’t talk to anyone else at the paper. As ‘that Felafel guy’, I could be disarming. I forget why I was talking to Joyce, but he was a good storyteller, and he had the ability, unusual in politicians, to just talk like a normal person.

I do remember what we were talking about. Suicide. He’d seen a lot of it on the land. I’d seen a bit of it in the city, but that wasn’t the subject of the piece. It was just a black hole that we circled. I think he’d lost someone the previous week. A friend or constituent, I don’t remember, but he was upset and talking about it, again in a way that politicians don’t.

It's hard to reconcile the man I spoke to back then with the runaway winner of Clown of the Week for his backarsewards tumble to the concrete in Canberra. But then it’s hard to reconcile my memory of that conversation with any number of other Barnaby moments these many years past. We all contain multitudes, I guess, but a solid plurality of Barnaby’s multitudes stagger into the world in big floppy clown shoes and bright red noses, munted in extremis, and mumbling “fuckin’ dead cunt” into the batphone.

Like the friend, or constituent or whoever it was he’d lost in the way-back-when, his unfortunate encounter with a planter box this week was a moment both intense and personal but also, this time, a moment inescapably political. Not because it became an issue of partisan divide, but because for anyone who cared to look twice, it freeze-framed the usual divide in a way that exposed the underlying power structures that never change.

Many saw the obvious double standard. If Joyce had been a black man in any city in Australia, his life would have been endangered, if not forfeited, simply for losing his grasp on sobriety, whether by an ill-fated mix of medication and Shiraz or not.

If Joyce had been a woman, his life would also have been at some measure of risk, but his career would definitely have perished there on the footpath. One of the privileges afforded white blokes by the gravitational pull of ‘larrikin culture’ on the Australian imagination is the exclusive right to shrug off otherwise career-ending displays of extravagant arse-hattery with a perfunctory defence of ‘fucked-on-the-piss-maaate’.

As Amanda Vanstone wrote, causing me to shake my head in disbelief that I am quoting Amanda Vanstone, it’s hard to imagine Penny Wong getting herself into that situation.

Because she wouldn’t, of course.

Nor would Vanstone, or High Court Chief Justice Susan Kiefel, or Air Vice-Marshal Catherine Roberts, the head of the Australian Defence Force’s Space Command, or Shemara Wikramanayake, Managing Director and CEO of Macquarie Bank or Michele Bullock, Governor of Reserve Bank of Australia, or any one of an unknowable number of women in responsible positions, private or public.

But Barnaby? He has a non-zero chance of being deputy PM again one day.

And this isn’t to say there’s anything special about him. Dialling in on his personal circumstances, all you’ll find is sorrow, turmoil and trauma, as much for those around him as for the man himself. The message he’s been getting all week is that he needs help, which is also worth thinking about in context – because so much of Barnaby’s career in the decade or so after I last spoke with him was not about helping people. It was about denying them help, punishing them, and choking off their progress. For all that his humiliation and probably even his genuine pain this week was intimate and personal to him, so were those issues with which he’s made merry hell. Marriage equality was intimate and personal to many people. The Voice, as well. Some of us even think of climate change as intimate and personal, wondering as we do how our children and grandchildren will live in a changed and terrible world.

It’s all a bit Milan Kundera, innit? The unbearable lightness of being Barnaby? All of the personal turmoil and public controversy, navigating the paradoxes of freedom and responsibility. Of lightness and weight. The absence of burden and the ephemeral nature of our existence held in constant tension with the significance, responsibility, and permanence of life's decisions and actions.

Perhaps, lying on the footpath in Canberra, the once and possibly future Deputy Prime Minister might even have contemplated Kundera’s thesis that the pursuit of lightness ultimately leads on to a sense of emptiness and disconnection from the essential weight of human experience and empathy.

He’s been shown remarkable compassion this week. It’s almost as though some people are capable of finding balance and meaning, where the faint and gentle whimsy of being is tempered by the recognition of its inherent weight and the shared responsibility we hold to one another. Lighter than a feather, heavier than mountains.

Perhaps Joyce might even recognise the need to reconnect with the weightier aspects of existence we discussed all those years ago: responsibility, compassion, and genuine engagement with the issues affecting the lives of those he sought to represent. Perhaps everyone inside the political machinery that extrudes amusingly upside-down former DPMs as easily as it throws off robodebt suicides might make that same connection.

Or perhaps things will go on as they always have, a carnival of suffering and sorrow and laughter and forgetting.