TONY Windsor’s 240 page autobiography, Windsor’s Way, was released on March 26. In its opening pages, Mr Windsor revealed details of a conversation he held with the Member for New England, Barnaby Joyce, during a ‘changeover meeting’ a few weeks after the 2013 election.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
For Mr Windsor the conversation turned into a surprising and revealing exchange, and the pages reflect his astonishment and disgust.
“I sat there thinking this bloke is an idiot to tell me this."
- Tony Windsor
“And then, without any shame, he said it. ‘You know, Tony, until you decided not to run I had the money for the Armidale Hospital, as well as the funding for the Legume to Woodenbong Road.’ I was outraged,” Mr Windsor wrote.
“I sat there thinking this bloke is an idiot to tell me this. This is a classic example of why the Nats are a waste of space.
“Here they are back in business. But even before they are elected the first thing they do is take the electorate for granted by withdrawing funding from vital projects because they think they have the seat in the bag.”
Mr Joyce has confirmed the conversation took place, and has not denied that any part of the conversation as represented in the book was inaccurate.
“I always believe that somewhere along the line you have conversations with people in private that stay private. It’s always disappointing when you look later on and find that your private conversations become part of a book,” Mr Joyce told ABC radio this week.
The book quotes Mr Joyce’s comments to Mr Windsor.
“I rang Abbott’s office and said ‘the only thing I have going for me up here is the smile on my face.’ That was when they said I could have $5 million but that was it,’ Mr Joyce told Mr Windsor, who also remembered a conversation with another then independent MP.
“Years ago, I used to always say to Richard Torbay, it doesn’t matter who puts the plaque up, the important thing is that it happens,” he said. Despite a certain ‘lash’ in its initial pages, Windsor’s Way is mainly an account of the three years of the hung parliament, and the processes the independent MPs went through during the 17 days of negotiation with Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott to decide which one of them would be best suited to form government.
“It explains the processes we went through, the way the numbers were crunching and particularly what Rob Oakeshott and myself did,” Mr Windsor said. “Tony Abbott would have struggled. He’s struggling now with a hung Senate,” Mr Windsor said.
“It’s an account of how I saw it. A lot of people wanted to know that and that’s why various publishers wanted me to write the book.”