Lisa Wilkinson has apologised to Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price over an audio clip that emerged during the week of her seemingly joking about the pronunciation of the senator’s name and her preselection.
“The conversation was private and not intended to appear as it has out of context and in the public arena,” Ms Wilkinson said in a statement.
“I sincerely apologise to Senator Price for any offence I may have caused.”
The audio was recorded at a strategy meeting to package the rape claim for maximum media impact and involved Ms Wilkinson and Brittany Higgins, along with her partner David Sharaz and a producer, Angus Llewellyn.
Ms Higgins would later appear in an interview with Ms Wilkinson on The Project in which she claimed to have been raped at Parliament House, where she worked for then-defence minister Linda Reynolds.
At the strategy meeting, Ms Wilkinson said the Coalition had “preselected over 20 new and wonderfully diverse and strong female candidates like, and what’s her name, Nam … Nampinjumba? … she’s an Indigenous woman.”
‘I have a black friend’
Mr Sharaz chuckles and says: “She clearly got in. Clearly it was a safe seat”.
“That’s the thing, it was [a safe seat] – as soon as I looked at it I thought, ‘Oh, you’re joking’,” Wilkinson responded.
Mr Llewellyn subsequently joined in with a joke about the Coalition preselecting Ms Price, saying: “See, we know brown people.”
Mr Sharaz followed, “It’s like, ‘I’m not racist, I have a black friend’ — it’s that argument.”
Wilkinson then slipped in a final quip: “And our cleaner’s black.”
Ms Wilkinson’s statement paints their conversation as centring on “the need for real, genuine change regarding the role of women in the Liberal Party.”
-with AAP
