National Party deputy leader Perin Davey has revealed the real reason why she slurred her words during a Senate estimates hearing last week.
Senator Davey made headlines on the weekend when video emerged of her making a rambling statement at the late night committee meeting.
She later admitted she’d had a couple of glasses of red wine beforehand.
On Tuesday, the previously little-known federal senator from regional NSW told a Bathurst radio station that the incident stemmed from a medical emergency she had five years ago which still causes her to ‘sometimes slur words’.
In 2019, the Coalition frontbencher had two emergency operations after an abscess in her tonsils ‘completely erupted’ on a flight to Germany, which caused damage to her facial muscles and tissue in her throat muscles.
‘I had full blown sepsis, and I was in the hospital for 11 days and kind of lost count of the amount of antibiotic transfusions I had,’ Senator Davey explained 2BS host Dusty Fitzpatrick.
The National Party’s deputy leader Perin Davey (pictured) has revealed the real reason she slurred her words during a Senate estimates hearing last week
When doctors asked Senator Davey at the time what her job was, she said she was campaigning to be a politician.
‘They warned me that it will impact my speech,’ she recalled.
‘I’ve been very conscious of it ever since (but) I’ve always thought I’ve managed it very well.
Senator Davey, 52, added that when she’s ‘tired or if I’ve had a glass of wine, or if I’m stressed my throat catches, sometimes a bit of mucus will fall down my throat and I’ll have a coughing fit, sometimes I slur words.’
She said she had never previously spoken publicly about her medical condition as it was ‘personal’
She’s now speaking out because of the scrutiny of her committee appearance, which came a few days after Daily Mail Australia published a video of her colleague Barnaby Joyce talking loudly on his phone while lying on a footpath.
She said the coverage of her slurring her words has left her ‘distraught’, and that she initially thought the meeting had gone well.
‘I was so happy with my line of questioning, I actually clipped the video and sent it around to some of my arts community mates because, the answers I was getting were so important to have on the record,’ Senator Davey said.
‘And then to just have someone selectively clip the video to make it focus on words that I’m stumbling over and imply that I was incoherent through the whole thing, I’m just distraught about.’
The senator said the publicity around it was ‘really disheartening, and you can sort of understand why young kids look at politics and go, do I want to be part of that?
‘Because you’ve got to be a hundred per cent pure. Now, I admit that I had a couple of drinks before I went into that Senate estimates hearing, but I was not drunk.’
Senator Davey said she should be judged ‘on the content of what I do, and not on how I enunciate’.
Senator Davey (pictured) made headlines when video emerged of her making a rambling statement at a late night committee meeting, and she later admitted she’d had a couple of glasses of red wine beforehand
Nationals Senator Perin Davey (right) has often been pictured with a glass of wine
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