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Katy Gallagher misled parliament on one simple fact when she told a Senate estimates hearing she did not know about an alleged rape before Brittany Higgins went public with her shocking claims in February 2021.
But the finance minister is not the only one with questions to answer about the dirty game being played with the backstory to the sexual assault claim against former ministerial adviser Bruce Lehrmann.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Brittany Higgins.Credit: Bloomberg; Alex Ellinghausen
Gallagher’s own words show how she misled a Senate committee in June 2021 after Liberal cabinet minister Linda Reynolds accused her of knowing about the allegations two weeks before they aired on The Project on the Ten Network.
“No one had any knowledge. How dare you,” Gallagher told Reynolds.
Gallagher made a sweeping claim – not just that she did not know the details, but that she did not have any knowledge. This was false. We know this because of what she said on the weekend.
“I was aware of some allegations in the days leading up to the choice of Ms Brittany Higgins to make those allegations public,” Gallagher told reporters in Perth on Saturday.
Gallagher confirmed that Higgins’ partner, David Sharaz, told her something about the claims. How much is not clear. Her comment on Saturday was: “I wasn’t aware of the full allegations that were made public when the interviews went to air.”
This means Gallagher knew something on Thursday, February 11, 2021. This was not a head start on others. Peter Dutton was told about the case on the same day because he was responsible, as home affairs minister, for the Australian Federal Police. The media put questions the next day, February 12, to then-prime minister Scott Morrison, who later said his staff did not tell him. Higgins went public on Monday, February 15.
Reynolds, on the other hand, had known about the allegation for two years. That is why the more important questions will always be about what the Morrison government did when Higgins first made her allegation, privately, in March 2019.
For now, the government pretends Gallagher has explained herself. That pretence will not survive the next few days, however, when the minister has to answer questions in the Senate.
Is this a sackable offence? The furore is not about Gallagher’s performance as a minister because she was merely a Labor frontbencher at the time of the estimates hearing. So the onus is on the opposition to prove that this should matter to voters in terms of Gallagher’s performance or the running of the government as a whole.
The code of conduct for ministers tells them they must not mislead parliament, but is silent on whether this covers their conduct before they became ministers. It also gives them a way out of the problem by saying they should correct or clarify any error as soon as practicable. Gallagher should do this with a statement to the Senate.
Gallagher is not the only one with questions to answer. The latest revelations suggest Morrison misled parliament as prime minister. One of Reynolds’ former advisers, Fiona Brown, says Morrison had a cursory conversation with her on February 18, 2021, but this was after he had told parliament he had spoken with her about the rape allegations. He says he was accurate in parliament.
There are other questions too. What exactly happened inside the prime minister’s office? The inquiry into that was stopped in August 2021.
The text messages revealed in The Australian last week certainly paint Higgins and Sharaz as plotters against Morrison. “He’s about to be f—ed over. Just wait. We’ve got him,” Higgins says in a text to Sharaz in April 2021. There is no screenshot and the words are reported as a text message “described to The Australian” without any context.
Yes, Higgins and Sharaz were on a mission and were playing the media almost as hard as anyone in the prime minister’s office. They sound at times like adolescents in their leaked text messages. But Higgins forced change on the government and the parliament by going public with her story. Nothing much happened when she made her allegation in private.
Higgins now has the contents of her mobile phone splashed on newspaper front pages. The phone she handed to police to assist their investigation is now used against her. A woman who made an allegation of rape is now being humiliated by having her private conversations leaked to suggest it was all a political conspiracy.
Are those who run the justice system happy with that?
The Lehrmann trial was aborted and the charges were dropped, so nobody can be sure about what happened between Lehrmann and Higgins that night in the ministerial wing. Of course, nobody can be sure that other facts might not emerge over time.
The backstory is not the real story. Who knew what and when in February 2021 is a minor footnote to who knew what and when in March 2019. Or, more to the point, who did what and when.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.
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