Ex-Aussie agriculture minister calls for Heard rap over perjury claims
Australia’s former minister for agriculture says the book should be thrown at Amber Heard if she perjured herself during a trial over her failure to declare two dogs she took into the country in 2015.
Heard avoided conviction in the court case, held in 2016, but Australia’s Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment is reportedly looking into claims that the actor lied under oath in the trial.
“[Biosecurity] is something that’s very important to us,” Barnaby Joyce told Law & Crime’s Sidebar podcast. “People come to Australia, and you don’t have the screw fly, we don’t have rabies, we don’t have bovine tuberculosis, we don’t have brucelosis…
“My father was a vet, and we spent a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of pain trying to get these diseases out of our nation and we don’t want them back, and we don’t want new ones in.
“In my area, if we got foot and mouth or rabies, people would go broke. There’d be people who would lose their houses. That’s how serious it is. If you lost your house, if you lost your income, what would you expect from the court?
“How would you see justice if you realised it was just someone who flagrantly broke the law because they thought they were a little bit special?”
Joyce added that the authorities should look at the role played by those around Heard, including former husband Johnny Depp, in any perjury that might have been committed.
“I would hope that if it was the occasion that someone had perjured themselves, that firstly [there would be] a fulsome investigation of whether anybody knew about it, was complicit in it, gave advice on it. I think that should be investigated,” he said.