Australian politics has a reputation for combativeness, but even seasoned watchers were shocked at how the last week played out.
By Friday, politicians across the political divide were in private agreement: it had been one of the worst weeks in politics in recent memory.
What started with an opposition convinced it had found a chink in the popular Labor government’s armour ended with the conservative Liberals calling for one of their own senators to resign, after allegations of sexual harassment and assault were sensationally aired in parliament.
But the damage from the week will reverberate for some time. After three days of political mud slinging, where both sides of parliament accused the other of having “weaponised” a rape allegation, staffers and politicians appeared shell-shocked.
The parliament has spent the past two years striving to do better on sexual violence and how allegations are handled.
In February 2021, a former Liberal party staffer, Brittany Higgins, rocked the parliament – and the nation – when she went public with allegations she had been raped inside a minister’s office by a colleague. Her colleague always maintained his innocence. A criminal trial was aborted after juror misconduct and prosecutors dropped the charges amid concerns of what a second trial would do to Higgins’ mental health.
In coming forward, Higgins said she was telling her story because she wanted to see change: in parliamentary culture and in how political parties handled complaints from staff, who at that time had no independent avenues for complaints.
The failure of the then-Liberal government, led by former prime minister Scott Morrison, to respond adequately to the allegations led to a wave of protests around the country, and further damaged the party’s standing with voters. The party was roundly voted out at the next election and is still struggling to recover, with women and young people having turned against it in droves.
Public pressure led to an independent inquiry into the culture of parliament house, an independent support and investigation service and a promise by all parliamentarians and political parties to do better. To “set the standard”.
Then, last week, private text messages between Higgins and her partner exchanged in the week before Higgins’ story was aired were leaked. In that exchange the pair discussed telling Labor senator Katy Gallagher about the coming story and the allegations.
Two years prior, Gallagher had been involved in a heated senate committee exchange with Higgins’ former boss, the then-Liberal minister, Linda Reynolds. Reynolds had alluded to Gallagher being involved with the story being made public, saying she had been told that Gallagher had known “two weeks before”. Gallagher had responded that “no one had known anything”.
The leaked text exchange called that statement into question and the opposition announced it would pursue Gallagher for misleading parliament. Gallagher gave a statement to the Senate on Monday saying she had been told four days before Higgins’ story went public, but was asked to keep it confidential, and had done so. She denied she had misled parliament.
The tenor of the questioning over the next few days became increasingly toxic. The Greens and crossbenchers wanted no part of the issue. The end game seemed unclear. The prime minister had backed in his minister “1,000%”.
Inside parliament, there was growing despair that all the progress which had been made on the issue of creating safe work places was lost. Worse, that it had gone backwards.
Two Liberal MPs publicly broke ranks by calling for an investigation into how Higgins’ phone messages had been leaked in the first place. Labor MPs made pleas for those leading the opposition “questions to answer” attack against Gallagher and senior government figures to think of how it would be portrayed to people who had been considering coming forward with their own allegations.
The parliament became a pressure cooker. And on Wednesday it blew, with independent senator Lidia Thorpe raising allegations against Liberal senator David Van in parliament.
Thorpe first accused Van of having “harassed me [and] sexually assaulted me”. Van immediately denied her allegations and under parliamentary rules Thorpe was made to withdraw the statement. The next day, Thorpe made a second statement to the parliament and said she had been “aggressively propositioned” and “inappropriately touched”, without naming anyone.
As conversations about the abuse of parliamentary privilege played out, the Liberal leader, Peter Dutton called a sudden press conference. He announced he was expelling Van from the party room after further allegations had been raised with him. Hours later, the former Liberal senator Amanda Stoker – also former assistant minister for women – put her name to the further allegations. Van said he remembered speaking with her about the behaviour, but did not recall it.
On Friday, Dutton was calling for Van to resign from the parliament, confirming he had been told of more allegations, which Van denies. Later that day, the party stripped him of organisational support.
Van said he was “shattered” his reputation had been dragged through the mud without due process, and that he would cooperate with any investigation.
The turnaround in the week was clear when the deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, who had been leading the attack against the government, called for cool heads as the Van issue was investigated.
“It is always difficult for women to come forward. That’s a general comment that I also want to make. It is always difficult to step up and talk about things that have happened and workplaces do have to improve,” she said.
Parliament returns on Monday.
