There are no winners from the Brittany Higgins affair

From a tactical standpoint, it worked a treat. Amid a tsunami of media outrage that swept all before it, including such inconvenient legal principles as the presumption of innocence and sub judice, Morrison, helped by his own hamfisted responses, was destroyed politically.

Nothing damaged him more in the eyes of female voters than this.

Others who dared question or put forward their own version of events as to how the issue was handled were mown down.

Higgins was egged on by many, some of whom were motivated as much by their own self-interest, as they were helping the young former staffer mired in a national whirlwind of her own creation.

Did anyone counsel her to try to do it by the book first, and then only go public if dissatisfied?

Higgins alleged she was raped late at night in then-defence minister Linda Reynolds’ office on March 23, 2019, by fellow staffer Bruce Lehrmann. Lehrmann has always denied the allegation.

Fiona Brown, who was Reynolds’ chief of staff, tried to do the right thing. She, along with Reynolds, were among the few who counselled her at the time to go to the police.

“The minister stated that the reports of what had happened made her feel ‘physically ill’ and that she was ‘shocked and appalled’ by what had taken place”, Higgins recounted of a meeting she had with Reynolds and Brown a week after the alleged rape.

“They both repeated that if I chose to report the incident to the authorities, that they would be supportive.”

Pressure on Morrison government

After Higgins met police in 2019, and then decided subsequently to not pursue the matter, both Brown and Reynolds respected Higgins’ wishes that the matter be kept confidential.

Reynolds, who shared a house in Canberra with two fellow Liberal senators when parliament was sitting, did not even tell her housemates.

Two years later, when, against the advice of the police, the allegations were aired, Labor, from Anthony Albanese down, piled the pressure on the Morrison government. As Albanese told his caucus this week, Labor would not have been doing its job in opposition had it not pursued the allegations in parliament.

After all, it had been alleged a Liberal staffer had been raped in a Liberal minister’s office and no one told the prime minister. From a political perspective, it was a legitimate story of interest, if not outrage.

This week, however, there was less enthusiasm among those who dined out on the first iteration when the leaked text messages shed light on the tactics employed by Higgins and Sharaz to prosecute the allegations in parliament.

This included revelations they sought to co-opt Labor senator Katy Gallagher and others in Labor in the lead-up to the announcement.

As Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said, pursuing the issue in light of the new information neither “demeans the allegation of sexual assault” nor “seeks to second-guess the court process that’s already taken place in the ACT”.

“It doesn’t seek to draw innocence or guilt from any party that’s involved in this matter. It seeks to hold the government to account.”

Gallagher, now Finance Minister, was the opposition’s main target given she angrily told a Senate estimates committee in June 2021 “no one had any knowledge” of the allegations prior to them being reported.

The text messages suggested otherwise, and Gallagher came clean, saying she was informed days in advance of the publication of the allegations but said nothing because she was asked to “keep it to myself”.

“I was provided with information in the days before the allegations were
first reported, and I did nothing with that information, absolutely nothing,” she said.

“I was asked to keep it to myself, and I did. I did nothing differently on this occasion, compared to hundreds of other times that people have reached out to me in my time as a politician and asked me to keep their information private, including women seeking support over alleged sexual assaults, violence, and harassment.”

Which is not dissimilar to the honour code cited by Reynolds and Brown for keeping silent but for which they were given no latitude. By Thursday, Gallagher was in tears in the Senate, so brutal had the week been.

The other interesting contribution came from those demanding the media stop reporting the text messages because they were private messages between Higgins and Sharaz that were produced to a court in response to a subpoena and never intended for release.

Chief among them was a handful of teal independents who are in parliament due in large part to the political weaponisation of the rape allegations in the first place. The teals were first and foremost an anti-Morrison movement and nothing turbocharged their appeal like his unpopularity with women.

Moreover, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus assured independent MP Zoe Daniel he would consider banning the reporting of such material in future as part of a review of the Privacy Act.

So much for transparency

“Material produced to a court in response to a subpoena is subject to an implied undertaking from the parties who receive it that it won’t be used for purposes other than for those court proceedings,” he said.

“It’s vital that victims of alleged sexual assault have confidence that if they come forward and report what happened to them, they will be treated fairly by our justice system.”

The same Attorney-General who approved a large, undisclosed settlement payment to Higgins soon after Labor came to office for the way she was treated by her former employer. Reynolds was barred from putting her side of the story at the settlement mediation and the government refuses to say on what grounds the money was paid.

The Prime Minister, in his first Canberra press conference since April 24, refused on Thursday to answer a question on it. So much for transparency.

One of those who disagreed with Dreyfus’ concern for other victims of sexual assault being frightened off by the latest saga was former Crown prosecutor Margaret Cunneen, SC.

“Not in the least,” she told The Australian when asked whether the leaks would act as a deterrent.

“It may remind women to pursue criminal allegation through the criminal justice system, which will always protect their anonymity, and not to take the option to publicise it even before the criminal justice system has commenced.”

At the end of the day, Higgins can draw comfort from the fact she changed the workplace culture of parliament, but beyond that, there are no winners from any of this.