I was among political staffers sexually abused. We’ve won change, but our work isn’t done

It was never a case of life before, and then after, I was sexually assaulted. But there is before, and then after, I spoke publicly about it. After all, I experienced something that will affect one in five Australian women, a well-worn statistic that should anger us all.

Chelsey Potter, a Liberal Party member who continues to campaign for the prevention of sexual abuse in the political workplace. Credit: Ben Searcy

Nearly a decade ago, when a fellow parliamentary staffer pinned me down and removed my underwear, I could not have anticipated that it would feel almost like a footnote today.

Don’t get me wrong, the whole experience remains vivid. I can still remember the words he whispered to me. I can recall the panic taking hold.

The moments after the assault, when I phoned my then boyfriend, wondering where I could possibly go in the middle of a cold night in Canberra. The next day, sitting at my desk in Parliament House, furiously scrolling my Rolodex, trying to find a spare hotel room and somewhere safe to stay in a busy, booked-up sitting week.

At one stage – in one of my more desperate moments – I considered sleeping in our ministerial office. Of course, I now know that could have been a security breach.

Eventually, I returned to the apartment where it all happened, with the man who hurt me, in one of the more unsafe situations I’ve found myself in. I had no other choice but to return to that lion’s den – but for my suitcase, not my hat.

Feeling that I couldn’t tell a single soul. Certainly not if I wanted to keep working in politics. Back then, however, I didn’t know that the most frightening experience was to come.

Some five years later – and five years ago last week – with my permission, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age published my story. And that day remains, by far, the most terrifying thing I’ve lived through. There was certainly no rule book on speaking about sexual assault in politics. There was no community of practice for coming forward.

In 2019, my dad learnt about my assault through the media, such was my shame. My phone imploded. My face was splashed across the televisions and computer screens at work. The horrific and cruel off-the-record comments from senior politicians – and my former colleagues, people who had been my friends – started to find their way to me.

Even today, the memory of that week can make me physically ill.

But I felt something was very, very wrong – in the Liberal Party, in politics and in Parliament House. Little did I know how right I was.

A week or so after that media storm, I was connected through a mutual friend to a woman, another Adelaidean, who had experienced something. Her name was Kate. Her alleged assault occurred in the year of my birth. We spoke for hours. Before the end of things, she would play a significant and, devastatingly, a posthumous role in the departure of an attorney-general from office. (No charges were ever laid against Christian Porter, who identified himself as the cabinet minister at the centre of a rape accusation – an allegation he strongly denied.)

There was Dhanya Mani, who spoke out alongside me, alleging she was indecently assaulted by a senior staffer when she was working for the Baird government in NSW. There would be Kate Johnson, who alleged bullying by a fellow Liberal staffer. There would be Rachelle Miller, who alleged bullying, harassment and discrimination as a federal ministerial staffer.

A little while later, I noticed a view on my LinkedIn profile. It was a staffer. Her name was Brittany.

It wouldn’t be until one afternoon, back in Canberra, where the leaders of our country acknowledged the findings of former sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins’ landmark report into the culture of parliamentary workplaces, that Brittany Higgins and I would finally meet. After Four Corners shook the political establishment with its 2021 episode, Bursting The Canberra Bubble. After the March 4 Justice rally united women across the country. And as the teal movement emerged, showing the Morrison Liberal government that women were a political force to be reckoned with.

This was all before the judgment from Justice Michael Lee in a defamation case, handed down earlier this year, that Bruce Lehrmann had raped Brittany Higgins. It captured everything we’d spent years trying to articulate and provided sorely craved comfort to so many.

You see, I’ve learnt that change may seem slow. It’s far from easy or often comes in ways we don’t expect. In those lonely months after my story broke, I wondered why I bothered. Naively, I had thought things can change overnight. Yet, looking back at these last five years, so much has rapidly evolved.

Yes, some things will take longer. Like the senior men, across business and the law, who lecture me about the movement we created, and their reluctance to mentor young women. I mean, they say, these days they might make something up.

After sitting in federal parliament’s public gallery in 2022 to hear a statement of acknowledgement of harm from bullying and sexual harassment: consent advocate Chanel Contos and former political staffers Rachelle Miller, Brittany Higgins, Chelsey Potter and Josie Coles.

Lingering legal matters continue, stretching from regional Queensland to Western Australia.

Only last month, a senior Liberal invited the perpetrator of my assault to his birthday party. He was completely aware of who that man was, and what I had alleged happened that night. Of course, my invitation never arrived.

I can’t take credit for all that came after my story. This period in politics has many mothers.

Primarily, a group of young women – the names of some you know and some you don’t – who created real political change, without stepping foot inside a caucus or sitting in a partyroom. We surveyed our work from the public gallery and quietly in our offices, rather than on the floor of parliament.

Women who were underestimated. Women who were cast aside. They were women who did so much with, as someone once said, what little they had.

Some identified themselves as victims, others as survivors. For me, despite the pain of the media maelstrom, I was never really either. After all, I’m a political campaigner.

Chelsey Potter is a Liberal Party member and former long-time staffer to a Liberal minister. Since leaving political work, she has advocated on the prevention of sexual harassment in political workplaces.

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