Nat Barr confronts Barnaby Joyce about THAT video – as he makes a shocking confession about what really happened

Barnaby Joyce has blamed mixing prescription drugs with alcohol after an embarrassing video showed him lying on his back near a gutter and mumbling profanities into his phone.

Daily Mail Australia unveiled exclusive video last Wednesday of the former deputy prime minister, 56, sprawled on the footpath on Lonsdale Street, in the Canberra suburb of Braddon.

Sources said the Nationals frontbencher was sitting on a large potted plant while having an animated phone conversation with his wife, Vikki Campion, when he fell off, 'rolled on the floor' and continued with his phone call.

Mr Joyce was forced to address the night out during an appearance at Sunrise with Natalie Barr.

“How are you,” Barr asked awkwardly.

Mr Joyce replied: “Look, I clearly made a big mistake. There's no excuse for it.

'There's a reason. And it was a very eventful walk home, wasn't it?

'I'm taking a prescription drug and they say certain things can happen to you if you drink [on it], and they were absolutely 100 percent right. They did that.'

Barr continued to ask Mr. Joyce, “So you mixed alcohol with prescription drugs, and this is what happened?”

Joyce replied, “That's exactly what I said, yes.”

Barr then asked, “Are you a little upset that you were on the ground and someone filmed you and no one helped you?”

Joyce said, “Well, that's a question for them, you know. For me, the Good Samaritan was the… was the Indian taxi driver who stopped as I was walking home and said, 'Do you need a lift, mate?', which obviously I did.”

'Do you need support with this?' Barr asked Mr. Joyce.

“Well, look… I'm not looking for sympathy and I'm not looking for an excuse,” he said.

'I'll just stick with that. What I said is what I said. I came back, sat on a planter, fell off and was videotaped. There you go. What else can you say?'

Barr suggested that if something similar happened to a company director “and they were right there and under the influence of alcohol, they could be reprimanded.”

“Do you think you should be? That's being discussed this morning,' she asked.

Mr Joyce said this was 'not really my decision'. “I'm not going to get into a long dialogue about what other people might want to do,” he said.

Nationals leader David Littleproud said Joyce would “get the support” he needed, while Labor Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek declined to comment.

“I won't add anything to it,” she told reporters.

“It's a matter for Barnaby, his family and his company to resolve.”

Mr Joyce's admission comes after his father-in-law revealed he had received a devastating message shortly before the incident.

“He had some really bad family news that day,” Peter Campion told Daily Mail Australia on Saturday.

'He has already lost a brother to cancer. That's where you should start. He had very bad similar news, which is not for me to reveal, but of the same magnitude, and it affected him deeply.

'As my daughter said, he was in a very, very bad situation and deeply depressed.

'Any decent human being who came across someone in that position, who was so sad that they collapsed on the footpath, would stop and help, not just make a video clip and sell it to the media.

“The biggest part of this story wasn't Barnaby being an emotional wreck on the sidewalk. It is the lack of caring from his countrymen, his fellow Australians.”

'What have we conveyed that people will do that? Walk past a man who clearly needs help.”

Meanwhile, a fake plaque has appeared at the spot where Mr Joyce fell last Wednesday evening.

The artist was in such a hurry that they got the date wrong and said it happened in January and not February.

A local who saw it told Daily Mail Australia: 'It's pretty hilarious. Everyone stops and laughs.

“It's glued down, so it's going to be there for a while.”