Why I am banning ABC 7.30 from my place

A frequent comment on one of the many viral posts since my husband yelled at our dog to “sit down” has been “Why did Barnaby take his dog to an interview?”

He didn’t take our dog to the interview. The interview came to her farm where she was working.

Against my advice, the One Nation MP for New England agreed to do an interview over Zoom with the taxpayer-funded ABC 7.30 show.

The ABC cast their line into our property and then, from their sanctimonious $1.1 billion a year palace, attacked us for it.

Sorry we aren’t a television studio; we are a working farm, and this is what it sounds like.

An ABC studio has a technician organising your audio and microphone, another technician lighting you perfectly and framing you, and yet another doing your make-up and hair.

Behind them sits another layer of staff, producers and middle management, ensuring the show runs smoothly and most importantly, quietly.

If you turned it around and put Barnaby Joyce in the fully-staffed ABC studio, and host Sarah Ferguson on an iPhone on a tripod on a farm outside in the dark night, would she have gone ahead with the interview?

Thanks to the rise of Zoom interviews, background noise can now be dialled down with a click.

What viewers and a sanctimonious host missed on Monday night was a mostly-black dog, barking into the pitch-black night at a passing vehicle she found suspicious.

Ferguson doesn’t have to conduct her interview with incessant barking in her ear, but Barnaby has to answer her questions with that ongoing distraction without comment, apparently.

Ferguson told him not to worry about the dog, focus on her question.

Where we are, on a farm in rural NSW, the person doing your hair, make-up, lighting, audio, camera, framing, and connectivity is also the “talent”, the person without whom the segment would not be possible.

For nearly seven years, on a rural block with limited power and even more limited phone coverage, we have easily done thousands of interviews from our front verandah, with a series of extension cords, or on top of a hill, when we don’t need light, where we have phone signal.

We don’t have a budget for professional studio lighting. I’ve used everything from the headlights of a truck to light him, to big torches perched on children’s swingsets.

On Monday, a sweet rescue named Stella made herself known.

We took in this little black and white girl only knowing three things: her name, she was desexed, and she desperately needed a home.

Everything else has been a mystery.

Any guess at her breed is just that, a guess.

Barnaby is a big boy and can take the heat. But it is one thing for Ferguson to cast a live stream into my house, and then question whether my dog exists.

She might not have heard the barking, thanks to noise-cancelling audio, but I could.

“People want to know, Hamish, if there really was a dog in that interview,” Ferguson said on ABC Radio the next day when the clips began going viral.

The search “Barnaby yells at dog” was googled 2000 times in 24 hours.

Thanks to an exasperated husband and sanctimonious host, my dog Stella is now recognised by her first name.

If I’m going to open my home to the ABC, the least that the interviewer can offer is some respect for our surrounds, whether that is wildlife, chirping cicadas or Stella going off at something you cannot hear because the studio has dulled her background noise.

We are not in a studio.

We don’t have a team fussing around us.

We are on a farm, doing our best to appease the media, where if you don’t do the interview you are accused of “hiding” from transparency and if you do the interview, you are smashed for yelling at a dog at the end of the place to sit down.

Stella was barking because she was protecting her family, like the boys that I was trying to put to bed, from a vehicle that she saw as suspicious. I’m not going to question her judgment on that.

Having my house filled with live stream interviews from Sydney media is something I’ve come to accept reluctantly, but it should bring with it an understanding from the media that we are not operating under a studio-controlled environment.

Once, a Sydney-based television producer actually asked me if I could stop the cicadas in the bush around us from chirping.

Another asked if I could do anything about the crickets.

The media are always talking about “bridging the divide,” but as soon as they have a clear line of sight to someone on the other side of the creek, they spit on them.

The ABC constantly complains about One Nation refusing to take part in their interviews.

Yet Barnaby yelling at a barking dog in a paddock, about 50 metres away, meant the ABC first refused her existence because the host was too sheltered by her own audio team to hear it, and then opened the way to be crucified on the network arguing it was “unacceptable” to speak to a dog that way.

The Animal Justice Party, in a post liked by current senior federal Coalition staffers, condemned it as “unacceptable”. The SMH suggested he should have “put her in another room”, “napping or engaging with a toy”.

Have these people ever met a working dog?

Apparently, the same people who believe in animal rights are suggesting that we, who gave a dog a home, should send her to be put down rather than have a foghorn farmer yell at her when she is down the paddock.

Stella didn’t even know she was being yelled at, and if she did, she happily ignored him and continued guarding her home.

Farm dogs aren’t on anxiety medication. They aren’t bred in a puppy mill, sold for thousands of dollars and kept in handbags.

As one farmer said to me: “The way my father spoke to working dogs, the bloody ringers would be sitting down”.

If they think “Barnaby Joyce yells at dog” is bad, they should have seen behind the scenes over the past decade where it’s been Barnaby Joyce yells at tripod/light/phone while setting up one of these interviews.

Some commentators tried to draw a parallel between yelling at a dog and domestic violence.

How do they think politicians talk to each other? If you’ve ever been in the chamber during question time at Parliament House, you know you can’t hear anything from the amount of yelling from both sides.

After Ferguson questioned whether Stella existed, she then doubled down last night, lecturing us that a “staffie border collie cross” was a breed that “required a lot of attention”.

How would anyone know what breed she is? She came to us with nothing, and certainly no papers.

Stella likes mustering the cattle into a perfect circle. She loves going out into the house paddock and digging up old bones, and bringing them to the front lawn. She will swim in the creek no matter how cold it is, and will drink out of the bird bath irrespective of how much water is in her bowl.

Stella is pretty happy to ignore the farmer bellowing into a phone on a tripod to the ABC.

For years, I have personally set up cameras, lights and internet connectivity to assist Sydney media to interview Barnaby, often without ever so much as a thank you.

Never again.

ABC 7.30 is banned from my property.

If Barnaby wants to do it, he can do it in Sydney or Canberra, in a studio where lights and microphones and cameras are done for him, just as they are for Ferguson, where he is at least on equal footing to a host who thinks she knows more about our farm than we do.

And far, far away from a good, big girl who would lose her mind if you tried to stuff her in a room away from where the action is.