What an edifying spectacle parliament is going to be this week.
The Coalition’s two-year-old wound caused by accusations it mishandled Brittany Higgins’ rape allegation has been reopened, and they’re out for vengeance.
The target is the finance minister, Katy Gallagher, who told Senate estimates in June 2021 that “no one had any knowledge” of Higgins’ allegation before it was aired. That comment has been called into question by text exchanges between Higgins and her partner, David Sharaz.
Gallagher has denied misleading parliament, admitting that she was “aware of some allegations in the days leading up to the choice of Ms Brittany Higgins to make those allegations public” but explaining she “was responding to an assertion that was being made by Minister Reynolds at the time that we had known about this for weeks and had made a decision to weaponise it”.
“That is not true, it was never true,” she said at a Labor women’s conference on Saturday.
To the Coalition, contextualising away the blanket denial of “any knowledge” by claiming she was only refuting the specific claim of a few weeks advance knowledge is the stuff of Trumpian alternative facts.
Labor has offered up another half-defence: the aged care minister, Anika Wells, noted on Sunday that Gallagher “wasn’t answering questions as a minister, she was the person asking the questions in the first place”.
This one doesn’t really fly.
The clerk of the Senate, Richard Pye, told Guardian Australia: “Senators are accountable to the Senate for their remarks in the Senate and its committees, regardless of whether they are ministers.”
He said the Senate privileges committee had investigated about 18 matters involving possible false or misleading evidence, mostly from witnesses, at least once from a minister, and one case in 1997 about misleading the Senate about use of travel allowances. None resulted in a finding of contempt of the Senate.
Labor and the Greens have a majority on the privileges committee and, with the Greens backing Labor that nothing they’ve heard suggests the need for an inquiry, the alleged mislead will be tried in the court of public opinion only.
It’s unclear whether the National Anti-Corruption Commission will take on the case of the finance department settling Higgins’ personal injury claim, which Gallagher denies having a role in.
That leaves question time, where the opposition will seek to broaden the attack to examine Gallagher’s claim that she “did nothing with that information” after she became aware of Higgins’ complaint.
Why do the text messages suggest Gallagher had follow-up questions on the matter? Did she tell Anthony Albanese or others? If not, how did Linda Reynolds come to be warned Labor would go after the issue before The Project went to air?
Despite all the lack of transparency on their own side, not least of which is the failure to release the Gaetjens report into what Scott Morrison’s office knew, we know the Coalition will go there.
The shadow attorney general, Michaelia Cash, has told us so: arguing Gallagher’s explanation is “flimsy”, accusing Labor of first “weaponising” Higgins’ allegation and suggesting there was “collusion” with senior Labor members.
Of course Labor didn’t weaponise the allegation itself. Bruce Lehrmann, the man who was accused and denied the rape, had long since been sacked when the matter became a public controversy. He’d later be tried, but the case was dropped after jury misconduct. Lehrmann has consistently denied the accusations against him.
No, Labor probed what it perceived as a Morrison government cover-up of the complaint or what was, at best, an attempt to respect Higgins’ privacy that happened to align with institutional incentives to hush it up.
That’s why you can expect Labor’s defence this week to be: so what?
We got a foretaste of that in Albanese labelling it “bizarre” that Labor is under attack for “allegations by a Liberal staffer that another Liberal staffer had a sexual assault in a Liberal minister’s office”.
Gallagher and others stress it was Higgins’ decision to make the complaint public.
Once you let go of any sort of paternalistic notion that Labor ginned the complainant up, all you’re left with is Gallagher wanting to support a young woman alleging she had been raped, and an opposition wanting to hold the government to account about what it did about it.
Reynolds continues to feel aggrieved over the way she was portrayed as unsympathetic to Higgins.
And that’s the scariest thing about the week in prospect: there really is no bottom to how low the debate could go, because both sides think the other is the one politicising the complaint.
