The Weekly Times Now has announced its annual Personality of the Year award:
Barnaby once again delivered the most memorable quotes of 2011.
What can we say? There was no bigger personality this year than a black streak on four legs: Black Caviar.
Sixteen straight wins and comparisons with Phar Lap and the other greatest horses of all times.
But alas the rules state Personality of the Year must go to a two-legged star.
Honourable mentions include Julia and Tony of course – simply for just being there … every day … every hour …every minute.
But the winner is Barnaby Joyce for keeping it real in Canberra. When most politicians look like cardboard cutouts spouting platitudes and gobbledygook, Barnaby tells it like it is.
Barnaby’s one-man show kept us entertained with a string of quotable moments including this one: “so when your clock radio tells you to get out of bed, that little red light is to remind you that Julia has been taxing you through the night”.
His madcap antics, including writing off his government-issue four-wheel-drive in the floods and mangling his knee in a motorbike accident, were also memorable.
Well done Barnaby.
Motorbike accident?
I like the man even more.
UPDATE:
And it doesn’t get more real than this –
A recalcitrant calf and an ill-timed excursion off his motorbike to turn back the escapee has created plenty of discomfort for The Nationals’ Senator Barnaby Joyce.
Senator Joyce was in Tamworth Hospital yesterday recovering from an operation to remove bone chips and pieces of gravel from an infected wound in his knee while doing cattle work at his parents’ property near Danglemah, about an hour from Tamworth, on Monday.
“It was late in the day and we were pushing cattle across a creek below the yards and this calf kept on turning back,” the senator said.
“I jumped off my bike to stop it and I slipped onto this sharp rock.
“It pierced my jeans and the skin on my patella, driving right down to the bone.”
However, he kept working to finish the job, ignoring his discomfort.
“When I got home I washed it and saw I needed a stitch, so I drove myself into outpatients (at the Tamworth Hospital).
“They stitched me up, gave me some antibiotics and told me if I got a temperature to come back.”
Senator Joyce said an infection set in and he returned to the hospital to be informed he would need an operation.
“They took out 15 bone fragments and a couple of pieces of gravel,” he said.
“Now I’m in a kneebrace and on a course of IV antibiotics.”
He said he hoped to leave the hospital today as the family had cattle to sell at a store sale in Tamworth.
Senator Joyce said his excursion to hospital cost him an opportunity to catch up with the Pollie Pedal pelaton led by Opposition leader Tony Abbott, in Walcha on Wednesday night.
Barnaby Is Right 
Barnaby for PM!
Onya, Barn!
One of a kind ,and we are all the poorer because of that!
Well said Jazza. Great line … I’m borrowing it!