Brittany Higgins' shocking story must be a turning point. Women in politics have had enough.

Extract from The Guardian 

Katharine Murphy on politics Australian politics

Katharine Murphy

The former Liberal staffer says she has found her voice and intends to use it. She will be joined by a chorus of others

The revelation of the grotesque indignity Brittany Higgins believes she suffered on a couch in Parliament House has had a galvanising effect on the women who work in Canberra politics.

Sat 20 Feb 2021 06.00 AEDT

Last modified on Sat 20 Feb 2021 06.02 AEDT

Brittany Higgins should be the one to tell you, in her own words, about the first time she told the office chief of staff that she believed she had been sexually assaulted by a more senior colleague on a couch in parliament house in March 2019.

“At that point I hadn’t processed the trauma of what had happened,” the former Liberal staffer told me this week. “I hadn’t articulated it broadly to myself, and I was kind of scared of this person because he sort of outranked me and I was new to the office.” Higgins had only been working for Linda Reynolds for a few weeks.

“Then on the Tuesday [26 March 2019] … my former chief of staff came in. She wasn’t normally Canberra-based and she came into the office that day. I think she stated that she wanted to speak to [my colleague] and I – and it was in front of other people.

“At that point she took him into the room first, had a discussion with him that probably lasted about 45 minutes or so, and then he immediately left and started packing up his corner of the office. It was then my turn to go into the office. At that point I assumed I was about to be fired.

“It was a strange white noise thing where I hadn’t processed it yet. In that meeting they asked me to recount the events of that night. I was very candid. I thought I was going to lose my job. I was extremely honest about what had happened.

“That was the first time when I said it out loud, that I full internalised the [alleged] rape – that I fully understood what had happened. That was when I had a bit of a breakdown, and after that, they sent me home, because I was a bit of a mess.”

We need to begin here because this marks an important point in time. This was the first time, according to Higgins, that the government was made aware that something criminal could have happened.

Higgins told Fiona Brown, who was Reynolds’ chief of staff. I don’t know Fiona Brown, but I reckon I can posit the following as a person who manages people in stressful environments: having a young subordinate tell you that she believes she’s been raped by another colleague, whom you also manage, is not a conversation anyone would easily forget.

Brown worked for Morrison before she worked for Reynolds, and then went back to work for Morrison after the 2019 election.

The point of me laying this out is not to make any reflection at all on Brown, but to make a simple point about her boss, the prime minister.

Morrison has been saying all week his staff didn’t know about the Higgins allegations until last Friday, 12 February.

This isn’t true.

Unless Brown had her memory erased when she crossed the threshold of the prime minister’s office, one of Morrison’s current staff knew about these allegations, and had since March 2019, because she was the first person that Higgins says she told.

When Morrison was challenged on this obvious contradiction in the House of Representatives by Labor – how could he continue to say staff didn’t know when at least one of his staff demonstrably did – Morrison said at first: “If someone has worked in another office, they have been bound by the issues in that office, particularly when they are working in an office of a sensitive nature in the defence portfolio.”

Just in case it’s not obvious, an alleged sexual assault has nothing to do with “sensitive” matters of defence.

When Labor kept pulling on the thread, Morrison said: “The member of staff … was formerly the chief of staff to the minister for defence industry. That knowledge related to her time in that role. Not in her role in my office”.

If we take this observation at face value, Morrison is contending political staff are only permitted to know or ventilate things relevant to their current political master – which thrusts us all into a weird episode of Downton Abbey, or Upstairs Downstairs, where the cognition or recall or corporate memory of subordinates in political offices is quantifiably different to other professionals.

At some level, Morrison’s deeply strange observation provides a penetrating insight into parliamentary culture: hierarchical, boss-centred, and need to know.

It also gives us a hint about what might need to change.

But sticking with knowledge – who knew what, when – I don’t believe it is disputed by anyone that Brown, who works for Morrison, knew about the allegations. Reynolds also knew about the allegations, a point which is not disputed.

Two other Morrison staff assisted with the termination of Higgins’ colleague – although the government says advisers John Kunkel and Daniel Wong believed they were dealing with misconduct after a security breach, not an assault.

Higgins says another Morrison adviser, Yaron Finkelstein, “checked in” via WhatsApp around the time a Four Corners exposé of parliamentary workplace culture screened in 2020. Another text message emerged on Friday suggesting that another member of the prime minister’s staff was aware of the allegations about the sexual assault and was “mortified”.

In addition to this, Parliament House police knew. The Department of Parliamentary Services knew police were involved shortly after the incident because there were requests to view CCTV footage. DPS officials knew there might have been a sexual assault allegation by 18 April 2019. Anonymous allegations also turned up in correspondence shared with the president of the Senate, Scott Ryan, and the speaker of the House, Tony Smith, the following March, which triggered two separate investigations into the conduct of parliamentary officials.

When Higgins left Reynolds’ office she went to work for Michaelia Cash, another senior minister. Cash says she was aware something had happened involving Higgins in October 2019 because a journalist made an inquiry that involved “her previous employment”. That inquiry triggered coordination with Reynolds’ office. By 5 February this year, Cash knew about the alleged rape. She says she offered to go to Morrison’s office with Higgins, but her staffer declined the offer.

The point of laying all this out should be obvious: in a building and an ecosystem that thrives on unofficial talk, a lot of people knew either a bit or a lot about what is alleged to have happened to Higgins.

Morrison insists that he, personally, didn’t know. The prime minister’s denial is unqualified, and it could be right, given bosses in politics don’t always know everything for a bunch of different reasons.

But the idea that no one around Morrison – that a competent office tasked with knowing things and managing incoming problems for the boss (including human resources problems across government staff) knew nothing, when others in close proximity either knew everything or something, really stretches credulity.

Given there are contradictory accounts in some instances, Morrison now says he will get his department head, Phil Gaetjens, to check the communications of his staff to make sure the records align with his account that his staff didn’t know until 12 February this year. It is unclear whether this audit will begin and end at government-issued phones and devices, or whether it will extend to private devices and unofficial communication via apps like WhatsApp or Signal.

But regardless of how this eventually washes out: whether Reynolds is made to suffer a career-threatening penalty (I’ve lost count of the number of parliamentary women predicting that eventuality this week, given the natural way of things), or whether yet more damning evidence emerges contradicting the official script, I hope Morrison might finally understand this much at least.

I don’t say this lightly.

This story, the gut-wrenching story of Higgins and the grotesque indignity she believes she suffered on a couch in the people’s house late at night – coming after a succession of stories about women struggling in a professional culture that remains institutionally hostile to women – has opened a wound in the building I’ve worked in for more than two decades.

Women who work in politics to serve their country have had enough.

They are tired of being stoic.

Women around this building have wept this week.

They have raged.

They need this to be a turning point.

The young woman at the centre of this storm, Brittany Higgins has, as she put it in a statement on Friday, found her voice, and she intends to use it.

• If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault, domestic or family violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au