You will have heard the news by now: former Liberal staffer, Brittany Higgins made the harrowing allegation she was raped by a male colleague at Parliament House in 2019. If such an incident wasn’t devastating enough, Higgins’ account of how senior members of the Liberal Party treated her in the aftermath has once again opened up the conversation of the working culture within politics, and the LNP in particular. The initial report was an exclusive from News.com.au – you read it here.
To really grasp the severity of not only this story, but the destructive patterns within Australian politics, you’ll need to connect some dots. Higgins is the third Liberal staffer to make a serious sexual assault allegation in just three years, but talking about her case alone does not paint a true pitcure. Here’s a short rundown of the four interconnected stories you need to know.
UPDATE 6 Aug: ACT Police have announced a 26-year-old man has been summoned to the Magistrates Court, where he will be charged with the rape of Brittany Higgins. He will appear in court on 16 September 2021. He is not named in the media release.
UPDATE 22 Feb: Three more women have made complaints about the same man who allegedly raped Brittany Higgins. Two of these are allegations of sexual assault, the third is of sexual harassment. In the wake of the fourth allegation, the Government has asked for Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins’ help to conduct an independent inquiry.
2021 rape allegations
A picture of the PM posed with sexual assualt survivor and Australian of the Year Grace Tame inspired Higgins to speak about her own sexual assault experiences inside Mr Morrison’s Parliament walls.
She alleged on Channel Ten’s The Project that she was raped by a senior male colleague inside Parliament House in March 2019, after a Friday night work function. At the time, she was just a few weeks into a new role within Defence Industries Minister Linda Reynold’s office.
After being plied with alcohol by her colleague, Brittany recalls being so drunk she could barely walk. She says the colleague orders a taxi and promises to take her home, but instead takes her back to Parliament House. He escorts inebriated Brittany through various checkpoints and security guards. Brittany claims this senior colleague waited until she was unconscious to rape her in Minister Linda Reynold’s suite.
The next day, both Higgins and the alleged perpetrator attended separate formal employment meetings. The disciplinary meetings were about them breaching security by being inside Parliament House after house. The alleged perpetrator ‘agreed to resign’ on the spot.
Over the next few days, Higgins explains her version of events to Fiona Brown, her Chief of Staff and senior advisor to Scott Morrison. She said it felt like Brown was managing the situation as a ‘political problem’. In days following, Brittany says she was called to a meeting with Linda Reynolds in the same office where the alleged assault occurred.
She was offered an employee assistance program and the day off. However, she says that Government officials repeatedly denied her access to the CCTV footage of that night. She told The Project: “It felt like everyone had all this information on my assault and I didn’t have any and I desperately wanted to.”
Brittany was moved to WA to work for Minister Michaela Cash, and eventually resigned from politics in January 2021 due to the trauma of her assault.
She announced this week that she will be making a formal workplace complaint, and will pursue a police investigation with the AFP.
Who is this senior male staffer?
We don’t know. His name hasn’t been revealed to the public.
People online are speculating everyone in Parliament knows, members of the press gallery, members of the Defence department and most importantly Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Why wasn’t this incident reported?
Higgins did report the incident. She was interviewed by the Parliament House Police Unit which acts independently from the Canberra Police. The incident was elevated to the AFP and the Sexual Crimes Unit.
She didn’t pursue a formal complaint to protect the reputation of the LNP. Higgins said the “strange culture of silence” within the LNP discouraged her from speaking out at the time, as she was concerned it would jeopardise her dream job. This implication was amplified by the fact that Yaron Finkelstein, the Principal secretary to Scott Morrison who is nicknamed ‘the fixer’, routinely met with her in the days that followed.
The suggestion is that the Government attempted to roadblock her complaint to protect the party in the leadup to the Federal election.
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2019-2020 Sexual Assault and Misogyny Allegations
Brittany Higgins’ allegations do not exist in a vacuum. Two allegations of sexual assault were made in 2019 by former LNP staffers Chelsey Potter and Dhanya Mani. Their accounts of sexual assault and power abuse are eerily similar to Higgins’.
Potter said a NSW state Liberal staffer sexually assaulted her in her home in 2015. A female senior Liberal colleague suggested Chelsey’s reputation would be tainted if she complained. Similarly, Mani said a Liberal party colleague came to her house, choked her and began masturbating, also in 2015.
Then there was the ‘Canberra Bubble’ episode of Four Corners, broadcast in November 2020. It exposed a dark underbelly of misogynistic treatment of women in Parliament, specifically within the LNP, allowed to exist under the tradition of “what happens in Canberra, stays in Canberra.”
Linda Renyolds features in the episode telling Parliament just one year prior to Higgin’s alleged rape: “I do not recognise my party at the moment. I do not recognise the values. I do not recognise the bullying and intimidation that has gone on.”
Is Scott Morrison’s Response Adequate?
We’re sure you’ve heard what ScoMo said, too. The PM stirred an angry response online after explaining his wife helped him contextualise Brittany’s allegations. “[My wife] said to me you have to think about this as a father first. What would you want to happen if it were our [daughters]?”
Mr Morrison apologises for the meeting held at the scene of the alleged rape. While Brittany Higgins initially released a statement thanking the PM for his ‘long overdue’ apology, she released an updated statement on Wednesday saying “the continued victim-blaming rhetoric by the Prime Minister is personally very distressing to me.”
There is an on-going question about whether or not Morrison knew about the incident, but failed to do anything about it until now. The timeline here is murky.
What is being done to address this?
PM Morrison initially announced two separate inquiries. The first is an inquiry into the workplace culture at Parliament House (which presumably covers all parties). He has tasked Stephanie Foster, a senior staffer within the Department of Premier and Cabinet, to help him develop an external complaints-handling process so that people feel safe in raising future complaints.
The second is an internal project specific to the Coalition (LNP and National Party). He has organised MP Liberal backbencher Celia Hammond to work with coalition members to review the complaint process and cultural issues in the political workplace.
Celia Hammond, Liberal MP appointed by the PM to review the process for workplace allegations is a staunch anti-feminist: “During my formative years … feminism to me was associated with man-hating, anti-everything agitators”. In 2013 she worried about women’s “sexual freedoms”: pic.twitter.com/vxEewgSbK9
— 💥Dr💥 Julia Baird (@bairdjulia) February 16, 2021
After the fourth allegation was made about the same man, Finance Minister Simon Birmingham finally reached out to Kate Jenkins, Sex Discrimination Commissioner for help. The Liberal Party is now under immense pressure to announce a genuinely independent review of its own culture and the culture at Parliament House. So far, no such independent inquiry has been announced.
Celia Hammond’s Anti-Feminist Beliefs
Given the problem is specifically the LNP’s own culture, how rigorously will they assess themselves? And why is Hammond tasked with this job?
The backbencher has a history of conservative anti feminism. She has been quoted as saying: “I have never known a single woman who has been able to have a premarital casual sexual encounter… who hasn’t actually, whether they knew or acknowledged it at the time, been searching for something more… What they’re being sold is a pup.”
She is the former head of Catholic university Notre Dame in Fremantle. In 2019 she told The Australian that the rainbow flag is a “politically divisive symbol”. Then in 2013 she said that feminism “discouraged young women from feeling accepted” and that she personally never felt disadvantaged for being a woman in the 70s and 80s.
In a written statement, Brittany Higgins has called for a comprehensive external review, which Morrison has confirmed he will support.
