‘I just started screaming’: The finance minister on the tragedy that changed her life

This story is part of the March 8 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

Katy Gallagher is singing the praises of her “ripper” electric chainsaw when an insistent warbling cuts into the conversation. It’s a clear Canberra evening, and we’re sitting on the deck, overlooking her well-tended garden. “Here come my magpies,” she says, as five of them descend from the tree which dominates her back lawn, demanding a snack of mince mixed with something called Insectivore.

Dave Skinner, her genial partner of the last 21 years, is mildly disapproving. “You’re not meant to feed the wildlife – and they crap all over the deck, incessantly,” he says.

“Well, I’m a nurturer,” Gallagher shoots back. “I like to nurture everything. I get a lot of enjoyment out of them; they’ve all got different personalities.”

The 54-year-old Labor senator for the ACT, holder of multiple ministries and chief Senate wrangler for the Albanese government, is passionate about animals. She dotes on Pip, her kelpie-cross rescue dog, who was meant to be “cheap as chips” but instead has “cost me a fortune” owing to various canine maladies, including epilepsy.

During extreme drought conditions in the lead-up to the Black Summer fires, Gallagher grew so anxious about a small mob of kangaroos living on parched bushland behind her north Canberra home that she began carting food and water up the hill for them. One day, she lugged five bags of ice up as well. Even her kids thought that was a bit nuts.

The finance minister’s deft touch with wildlife has served her well in the human zoo that is federal politics. Inside Labor, she has an enviable reputation for being a high-level empath. “Some people are tough or empathetic. Katy’s both, and that’s her superpower,” says Treasurer Jim Chalmers. “Nobody in politics is irreplaceable but in our team, she comes the closest.”

Lidija Ivanovski, a former senior aide to Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, says she’s “almost too normal to be a politician”, while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says “there is no one whose influence in government is so much greater than the perception [from the outside] of what her influence is.” Dropping unannounced into her office in late November, the PM says Gallagher’s the only minister apart from him to sit on every cabinet subcommittee: “Wherever I am, she is.”

With PM Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who says Gallagher is “the closest” in their team to being irreplaceable.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Not everyone is a fan. The Opposition has her in its sights over government spending and Labor’s expansion of the public service, now shaping up as a key election issue. Liberal senator Linda Reynolds slams what she says was Gallagher’s unrelenting “demonisation” of her over the Brittany Higgins saga, “without a care in the world for the devastating trail of human consequences left behind”. Of which, more later.

Over the decade she’s been in the Senate, Gallagher has become one of the PM’s most trusted, part of a tight ministerial group that includes Senate leader and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Health Minister Mark Butler and Marles. Last year, The Australian Financial Review put her at No. 4 on its list of the country’s most “covertly powerful” people, describing her as “one of the most powerful finance ministers in Labor history”.

When veteran Bill Shorten left politics in January, Albanese loaded Gallagher up with a fourth portfolio – government services – adding to the three she already held: finance, the public service and women. If you want a job done, give it to a busy woman. “I have no problem with working hard,” Gallagher says, when I ask if she’s feeling overburdened. “I thrive on trying to land a lot of things all at the one time.”

It’s just as well then that Gallagher, a vegetarian since her 20s, appears to function effectively on four to five hours’ sleep a night plus plentiful cups of black tea through the day (she’s not a coffee drinker). Her partner, Skinner, observes that “being still is not one of Katy’s greatest strengths … [she’s] a bit like a shark in the sense that you’ve got to keep on swimming, have the water go through the gills, keep moving. She has boundless energy.”

Managing the government’s business in the Senate – the fifth of her jobs – may sound humdrum, but it demands constant attention when parliament is sitting. Labor holds just 25 out of a possible 76 votes in the fractious upper house, which means legislation only passes if Gallagher can wheedle enough votes from non-Labor MPs. Her colleagues saw it as a major triumph when she and Wong wrangled 45 government bills through the Senate in one week at the end of November, a vital step in clearing the decks for the forthcoming election. An unhappy Opposition railed against the government’s repeated use of the “guillotine” to ram the bills through (a motion gagging or cutting short debate, which needs a majority of MPs to back it).

“I thrive on trying to land a lot of things all at the one time,” says Gallagher, who has five different Senate roles.Credit: Rohan Thomson

“Without Katy, it doesn’t happen,” said an ebullient Albanese, who’d been calling the shots behind the scenes in that 45-bill Senate marathon, immediately afterwards. “She defines competence – yeah, competence and effectiveness.” Gallagher said drolly: “I’m so dead I’m functioning with one eye.”

Her “soft power” across the government is bolstered by her close personal relationships with both Chalmers and Albanese. “The PM and Jim have had their differences,” points out Ivanovski, “but she’s the person that provides the ballast in that relationship. She’s not about seeking glory for herself – that facilitates a healthy and functional family relationship.”

Gallagher’s lengthy political career hasn’t all been plain sailing. She had to leave the Senate for a year after the High Court ruled she was a dual UK-Australian citizen. And during the bruising political clash over the handling of the Higgins rape allegation, when she was accused of misleading parliament, she had to face down a Senate censure motion (which failed) and was labelled a “mean girl” on the front page of News Corp papers, along with Wong and then fellow Labor senator, Kristina Keneally.

Unwavering support from her colleagues helped her through. But she also had an inner toughness to fall back on, forged in the aftermath of the profound tragedy which befell her on a summer’s day in 1997. Having survived that, she was primed to survive almost anything.

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Against the backdrop of Canberra’s bland suburban sprawl in the 1970s, the Gallagher family must have seemed exotic to neighbours. Parents Charles and Betsy were British émigrés who’d arrived in the national capital just as it was emerging from its country town torpor. Katherine Ruth Gallagher was born in 1970, 18 months after her older sister, Clare. Not long after, two boys, Richard and Matthew, were adopted from orphanages. While Charles found work in the parliamentary library, Betsy was left wrangling four children under the age of five. (Richard, whose Papua New Guinean background saw him bullied at school, was a so-called “failure to thrive” baby and remains a vulnerable adult. When Betsy was dying, she asked her daughters to keep a protective eye on him; Gallagher cooks for him every Sunday evening.)

Gallagher with parents Charles and Betsy at her graduation.Credit: Courtesy of Katy Gallagher

Betsy found overnight work as a nurse, then joined and helped develop the Woden Community Service, which she later headed. “She was very focused on women who were at home with children in a new city without any services,” Gallagher recalls.

The Gallagher kids became used to seeing new children at the dinner table. “It’s a lasting thing of my childhood,” Gallagher recalls. “You would come home and there would be a couple of little faces, kids that had had their hair done for the first time in a long time, sitting around a family table, which probably happened rarely in their lives.” These were the children of struggling mothers, brought home by Betsy for informal respite care.

Her mother’s “huge capacity for care” also extended to animals. There was an abandoned joey, named Tippy, which Betsy would carry around in a pillowcase tied around her waist. “We had sheep, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, mice – if there was something needing love and care, Mum would be right there to take it,” she says. “Sometimes, as a child, I remember being like, ‘That’s a lot. Haven’t we all done enough without adding in all these other layers?’ ” (When I describe this background to a ministerial colleague, he jokes, “Katy does that with the cabinet – brings in all the animals.”)

Tippy the joey and Gallagher’s mum Betsy.Credit: Courtesy of Katy Gallagher

The family was not religious, but Charles was also a strong believer in giving back to the community. He gained a law degree, joined the health department, volunteered for Lifeline and campaigned for better rights for ACT prisoners. Clare, now assistant director of nursing at Canberra Hospital, recalls her sister as a watchful child who was “always trying to be part of the adult world, even when she was pretty young” – and who was a bit of a telltale. “She was a bit of a target of mine because she was such a good child, and I was not the good child.”

Gallagher attended local government schools, where she appears to have been a diligent rather than stellar student. She learnt the cello and joined a local youth orchestra. (She still loves the instrument, which sits forlornly in her home office, no longer played.) At 18, she began working part-time with intellectually disabled kids, and after completing a degree in political science and sociology at the Australian National University, continued that work as an advocate for people with intellectual disabilities.

Playing her beloved cello, which now sits untouched in her home office.Credit: Courtesy of Katy Gallagher

Out at a bar one night she met Brett Seaman, a charismatic former trainee merchant navy officer, union organiser and rising star in local Labor politics. The two were soon engaged and expecting a child. He was about to take a new job with the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU); she was finding fulfilment in her community work. Life shimmered with promise. Then, nearly three months into her pregnancy, that promised world came crashing down.

On January 30, 1997, Gallagher and Seaman were holidaying near Merimbula when Seaman, then 33 and a keen cyclist, decided to head out for a ride. Gallagher took a photo of him as he set out that morning. They were to meet on the beach at noon.

Lunchtime came and went with no sign of him. Gallagher began combing the back roads, thinking he might have had a flat tyre. Mid-afternoon, she was driving down the town’s main street when a call came over the radio. Police were seeking anyone who could identify a male cyclist who’d been killed on a local road.

‘I just shut down. It was like an explosion in my head. I couldn’t bear people seeing me that way.’

Katy Gallagher

“I knew – immediately, I knew,” she says quietly, as we sit alone in her ministerial office on the morning after that marathon last week of parliament in November – her first chance to slow down in days. “I was in the middle of the road and just stopped the car. I was running, and I just started screaming, ‘Where’s the police station?’ ” A woman pointed her in the right direction. She ran into the station, near hysterical, crying, “I know who it is!”

Seaman’s father came to identify the body, a task Gallagher couldn’t face herself. Nor could she return to the Canberra home she and Seaman shared. Friends stepped in, moving her possessions out to a small house in Hughes – a suburb that still has painful associations. Just shy of her 27th birthday, she was pregnant, alone with a stray cat “and all Brett’s stuff around me.

Partner and keen cyclist Brett Seaman, killed in 1997 when Gallagher was pregnant.Credit: Courtesy of Katy Gallagher

“I just shut down. It was like an explosion in my head,” she remembers. “I couldn’t bear people seeing me that way. I didn’t want to be vulnerable to them, I just wanted to be alone. I kept in contact with Clare but I shut my mother out, which must have been awful for her. My friends used to drive over and sit in the driveway, waiting for me to come out of the house. I was just …” – she pauses, trying to find the words – “totally broken”.

Clare recalls her as “almost catatonic”. After 10 days of watching Gallagher not eat and barely drink, Clare and Betsy took her to hospital, worried she was endangering herself and the coming baby. An obstetrician told her “you are not capable of caring for this baby and you have to do something about it”. This cut through and she started a course of antidepressants.

Abigail (Abby) was born safely in August that year. Gallagher remembers panicking when the nurses wanted to move the infant to a neonatal unit because she was underweight. An understanding midwife came to the rescue, placing an extra-heavy clasp on the baby’s umbilical cord to get her over the required weight to remain with her mother.

But Gallagher’s battle with separation anxiety continued. When Abby was 2, Gallagher heard about the death of a toddler over the car radio. “I just completely broke down,” she remembers. “I drove straight to where Abby was in day care, took her out, drove straight home and was like, ‘Right, we are not going anywhere.’ ” She went back on antidepressants, under the care of a psychiatrist, for another couple of years. (Abby, now 27, works as a lawyer in the Northern Territory; mother and daughter are in contact several times a week.)

Unsurprisingly, Seaman’s death left a lasting mark. Gallagher is prone, for instance, to what she calls “catastrophising”. Not about work, she insists, but about “other things”. “You know that line, that ‘this will never happen to me’?” she says. “Well when something does happen to you that you think will never happen, that line doesn’t work any more.” She adds, though that, “Since Brett died, I try to live with no regrets. I don’t waste time going over what could have been, what should have been. When you see someone who has their life taken away from them like that, you don’t want to kind of waste your own life … From that worst place, I found a way out.”

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After the accident, the Labor movement rallied around Gallagher, setting up a trust fund for Abby. A senior official at the CPSU gave the grieving young woman a desk and light receptionist duties, and placed her under the wing of a union colleague, Margaret Gillespie. Six months after Abby’s birth, Gallagher returned from maternity leave and graduated to a union organiser’s position.

The 86-year-old driver was ruled at fault in Seaman’s accident, the resulting settlement giving Gallagher the means to buy a house for herself and Abby. They acquired a troublesome beagle named Tommy, who would play a key role in the next stage of their lives. (“I love dogs,” Gallagher says. “I’d have 100 if I could.”)

In 2001, Gallagher was asked to join Labor’s ticket for elections for the ACT
legislative assembly but was placed in a seemingly unwinnable position. Gillespie (who later became her chief of staff in the ACT) recalls Gallagher doggedly “sitting outside shopping centres through the bitter Canberra winter with the fog around her”. She not only won a seat, but a year later
became a minister in the assembly, rising to deputy chief minister within five years. In 2011, she took over as the territory’s chief minister, succeeding her friend and mentor, Jon Stanhope. She led a competent and reforming government but weathered several crises, including controversy over her decision to buy back over 1000 asbestos-contaminated Canberra homes during the “Mr Fluffy” saga.

With kelpie-cross rescue Pip – Gallagher would have “100” dogs if she could.Credit: Rohan Thomson

When she transitioned into the Senate in 2015, she came “fully formed”, says one ministerial colleague. “Some people become ministers after having run nothing more than an electoral office.”

Over the summer of 2003, Gallagher found love again with Dave Skinner, a senior staffer with the ACT legislative assembly and serendipitously, a fellow beagle owner. In a twist worthy of a Hollywood romcom, the pair bonded over their dogs. Gallagher recalls turning up for dates with “a five-year-old, a box of pencils and a colouring book”, not sure if it was going to work out. But the relationship flourished and in 2005 Gallagher fell pregnant with her second child, feeling lucky to have found “someone again that you can create a life and family with”.

Once again, fate had a series of cruel shocks in store. Five months into Gallagher’s pregnancy, her mother Betsy succumbed to cancer at the age of 62. (Her father Charles had died 10 years previously, also of cancer, at almost 57.) Not long after Betsy’s death, Skinner collapsed at home and was diagnosed with a brain tumour. “There were a couple of days when I just thought, ‘Ah, I can’t do this again,’ ” Gallagher recalls. She refused to leave Skinner’s hospital room, remaining in a reclining chair despite the advanced stage of her pregnancy. He was still recovering from a major operation to remove the tumour (which turned out to be benign) in mid-January 2006 when Gallagher gave birth to their son, Charlie.

With partner Dave Skinner and (from left) children Abby, Charlie and Evie.Credit: Martin Ollman

Nineteen months after Charlie’s birth, the couple’s “surprise package”, Evie, was born. By then Gallagher was deputy chief minister in the ACT. Evie brought fresh challenges to the busy household. She struggled at school, could be disruptive and seemed to need constant attention. Eventually she was diagnosed with a form of autism spectrum disorder, accompanied by dyslexia, dyscalculia (resulting in difficulties with maths) and ADHD. The diagnosis came as a relief for mother and daughter. “I just remember the pressure being off,” Gallagher says. “I’d tried to rewire a brain that wasn’t going to be rewired, because I didn’t know any better.”

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As a 10-year-old, Gallagher would overhear her father, an avid Labor supporter, railing against a murderous-sounding cabal dubbed “the razor gang”.

“I was absolutely terrified of it”, she remembers. The razor gang was a 1980s label applied to a team of senior cabinet ministers set up by then Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser to slash public spending. Its modern iteration is cabinet’s powerful Expenditure Review Committee, which runs the ruler over all Commonwealth spending. Gallagher and Chalmers are its key members; it’s a rich irony that she’s now a member of her own razor gang.

Saying no to colleagues isn’t easy, but Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke says at least there is “absolute clarity” to her decisions. “I’ve not seen people come away frustrated that she hadn’t considered their case.”

Gallagher and Chalmers regularly cite two successive budget surpluses – and $92 billion in savings – as evidence of their government’s fiscal discipline. But the Opposition, backed by some significant voices in the business community, argues the pair haven’t been tough enough, and that Labor’s spending has prolonged the pain of inflation. “Those surpluses weren’t through a laser-like focus on containing spending,” says Liberal senator Jane Hume, the shadow finance spokesperson. “This government has spent $12 for every dollar they’ve saved.” She also slams a 20 per cent growth in the public service on Gallagher’s watch.

“I can understand why Katy has that urge to grow the public service – she’s got a background as a former CPSU official and she’s a senator for the ACT,” Hume adds. “But she’s essentially the minister for a Big Canberra.”

Gallagher claims the budget “was a mess” when Labor came into office, riddled with underfunded programs. She also insists that “relative to population and size” the public service is smaller than it was in 2008 and badly needed to grow to improve frontline services in areas like Centrelink and Veterans Affairs. “I’m a social democrat who believes in the institutions of democracy, and I don’t see the public service as simply a delivery arm of executive government, I see it as something owned by the people for the people,” she says. “That was the most devastating thing about the last 10 years, it had become so hollowed out … we had consultants sitting on executive teams, consultants writing cabinet submissions, the Robodebt saga.”

The argument is set to intensify, with Opposition leader Peter Dutton aiming to slash public service jobs and appointing Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to a new, Elon Musk-like role of shadow minister for “government efficiency”. (Hume and Gallagher also clashed fiercely in Senate estimates in February, with Hume labelling as “grubby” questions about Dutton’s bank share dealings during the global financial crisis in 2009. He has denied any impropriety.)

Gallagher says her biggest challenge as finance minister is deciding what’s “the most worthy of the worthy”: “I’d love some of the commentators to face a public meeting of all of those parents arguing for more services! It’s very comfortable to sit and point the finger.” When she and Albanese decided to increase the age of dependents at which the single-parenting payment cuts out, from eight to 14 years, life improved instantly for tens of thousands of women. She brought her own experience to the table on that one. Commonwealth subsidies for aged-care and childcare workers have bumped up wages in highly feminised industries, helping to close the overall gender pay gap. In early February, she unveiled a $500 million women’s health package.

“A lot of her work isn’t necessarily flashy,” says one Labor insider, “but she talks in terms of shifting the dial … making incremental positive changes. She brings to the table the fact that she’s a true-blue feminist.”

With Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who praises their working relationship and calls Gallagher “a very good listener”.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

For that, she has Chalmers on side. The pair are personally close and seem to have each other’s backs. “I love Jim,” Gallagher says of her treasurer colleague. “I just see him as hugely talented. I love the way his brain works … trying to think high-level, bigger-picture, and then pulling it all together. I’m more operational.” With Albanese, a fellow left-winger, she also has deep trust. “I trust him completely. He trusts me … Jim and Anthony are very different politicians, with a huge set of skills between them. At times they don’t agree, which I think is probably healthy. I’m a different type of personality to them. It’s not necessarily a gender thing, but I’m calmer, kind of quieter, it just works – a balance, yeah.”

Albanese’s contempt for the Greens is legendary, but in the upper house, Gallagher has forged a constructive relationship with her Greens counterpart as manager of Senate business, Sarah Hanson-Young. “It’s a relationship which needs to work, otherwise the Senate doesn’t work,” Hanson-Young says. “Katy is very good at it because she is a straight shooter, she is a very good listener – and she also has a great sense of humour, [which helps] when things are tense or delicate.”

Tasmanian independent Jacqui Lambie says she and Gallagher have a friendship which goes beyond politics. “We can sit there and have a bitch, let off steam, and it never goes anywhere. And that’s a trust game. I have great respect for her.”

‘I was sobbing in the car, and [on the phone, PM Anthony Albanese] was saying, “This isn’t the end, you know, this will be fine.” ’

Katy Gallagher

Relations between Gallagher and Anne Ruston, the Coalition’s manager of Senate business throughout most of the current term of Parliament, have been businesslike (“We kind of acknowledge that we are just the messengers,” Gallagher says) but Ruston has condemned the number of times her opponent shut down debate through use of the guillotine. “Over 70 per cent of the government’s bills this year have gone [through] without the scrutiny of parliament,” Ruston claimed in December, accusing Labor of betraying its election promise to bring more accountability to government.

Until the Brittany Higgins case, the worst crisis Gallagher had weathered was her expulsion from the Senate in 2018 for breaching the constitution’s ban on MPs holding dual citizenship. She maintains the fault lay primarily with slow processing by UK authorities, but as a self-described “goody-two-shoes”, she was mortified. “Whenever her sense of integrity has been questioned, they have been her real tough moments,” her sister Clare says.

Albanese was the first on the phone to encourage Gallagher to run again, which she did a year later. “I was sobbing in the car, and he was saying, ‘This isn’t the end, you know, this will be fine,’ trying to gee me up. That sort of stuff sticks with you.”

On the first day of Labor’s campaign in the lead-up to the federal election in 2022, the roles were reversed – she came to his aid in front of a rabid press pack when he failed to answer basic questions about the cash and unemployment rate. As Ivanovski observes, “It wasn’t the best spot to be put in, having to upstage the leader.”

The long-running Brittany Higgins saga began as a crisis for the Morrison government. On February 15, 2021, journalists Samantha Maiden and Lisa Wilkinson reported Higgins’ allegation that she’d been raped two years previously in the office of then defence industry minister Linda Reynolds. Higgins said she’d felt politically pressured to stay silent about it. The cover-up story was given extra momentum by Higgins’ then boyfriend (now husband) David Sharaz, who began seeking contact with Labor politicians to ensure political traction.

After Wilkinson’s interview with Higgins went to air, Gallagher and Penny Wong launched a barrage of questions at Reynolds in the Senate. Gallagher accused her of leaving a “traumatised and stricken woman to navigate her way through this”. Reynolds protested that, far from a cover-up, she and her senior aide, Fiona Brown, had supported Higgins, encouraged her to go to the police, and prioritised her privacy. (Reynolds received some vindication three years later when Justice Michael Lee, presiding over an unsuccessful defamation case brought by the alleged rapist, Bruce Lehrmann, found there had been a rape but no political cover-up.)

Shortly after Higgins’ interview was broadcast, Reynolds was hospitalised for heart problems, which she blamed on hostile questioning by Labor senators. Speaking now, Reynolds tells Good Weekend it was a “persistent, aggressive, targeted and cruel attack [which] would not be tolerated in any other workplace in this country”.

In June 2021, there was a blistering public exchange between Reynolds, Wong and Gallagher in a Senate committee hearing. Reynolds disclosed that she’d been tipped off by an ALP senator who claimed Labor had been told of Higgins’ allegations two weeks before they became public, and had devised a plan to “rain hell” on Reynolds. Gallagher, in high dudgeon, admonished Reynolds: “No one knew anything. How dare you! It’s all about protecting yourself!” It was an outburst she would come to regret.

Gallagher and Penny Wong, both described as “mean girls” in News Corp headlines.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In mid-2023, text messages surfaced between Higgins and Sharaz, which seemingly contradicted Gallagher’s assertion that “no one knew anything”. “Katy is going to come to me with some questions you need to prepare for,” Sharaz texted Higgins four days before the interview with Wilkinson went to air on Network Ten’s The Project. “She’s really invested now, ha ha.” He described Gallagher as an “old friend” and said he’d sent her an advance copy of the interview.

Gallagher disputes the “old friend” characterisation (she says she knew Sharaz as a local TV journalist from her ACT assembly days). Her denial of “any knowledge” in the committee hearing was, she insists, directed at Reynolds’ assertion that Labor knew about the affair two weeks beforehand, and had schemed an attack.

“I got drawn into this web unwittingly,” Gallagher insists now. “When David [first] told me, I did nothing with it because I didn’t think it was mine to do anything with … The idea that we set the thing up was just so abhorrent to me on so many levels.” She acknowledges liaising with Sharaz in the days following the interview, but says this was to check that Higgins was comfortable with the questions Labor wanted to pursue.

“This notion that I was best buddies and colluding with them, it’s just not right … I have never met [Higgins], I don’t think I have ever spoken to her,” she says. “I would certainly text him [Sharaz] and say [in estimates], ‘We are going to ask some questions of Linda, is Brittany OK with that?’ because I didn’t want to be asking questions that were going to trigger her and send her to hospital. That was the extent of it.”

On March 10, 2022, Kimberley Kitching, a divisive figure within Labor and the senator who’d tipped off Reynolds, died suddenly of a suspected heart attack, aged just 52. It triggered a headline in The Australian branding Labor’s senate leadership group of Wong, Gallagher and Keneally as “mean girls” who’d ostracised Kitching after learning of the backchannel to Reynolds.

Reynolds recently told the Western Australian Supreme Court, where she is suing Higgins for defamation, that she carried a “lot of guilt” over Kitching’s death because “what I said to them [the Labor senators] caused them to bully her to death”. (In March 2022, this was emphatically denied in a joint statement by Gallagher, Wong and Keneally.)

“[Gallagher] and her colleagues so badly wanted the allegations about my conduct to be true that they failed to exercise any proper judgment or independence.”

Linda Reynolds

Reynolds remains furious, telling Good Weekend that “not even the delivery of a Federal Court judgment confirming that Ms Higgins’ allegations … were baseless … has encouraged Senator Gallagher to apologise to me or my staff. What is clear to me is that she and her colleagues so badly wanted the allegations about my conduct to be true that they failed to exercise any proper judgment or independence before becoming so publicly involved in perpetuating aspects of a story Justice Lee has described as ‘insufficiently scrutinised and factually misconceived conjecture’.”

Gallagher responds by saying, “She was a minister that had to be accountable for what happened in her office.” However, she now rues her 2021 outburst. “I’ve spent my entire life being the opposite of a mean girl. That’s all you’ve got, your integrity, and the way you conduct yourself in politics. If I had my time over, I would have just kept my mouth shut [in the Senate committee … but] I was so affronted. I accept Linda got really hurt through this, too. Could I have done things differently? Would I? I definitely wouldn’t have reacted the way I did when she accused me of setting it up.” (The saga blew up again in Senate estimates two weeks ago, with Reynolds again demanding an apology, Gallagher saying, “I am sorry that you have been hurt by all of this” but defending her actions, prompting Reynolds to leave the room.) Gallagher flatly denies misleading the Senate.

Jane Hume disagrees: “I don’t think there’s any doubt that she did mislead parliament, but I think that she managed to batten down the hatches herself, put her head down and essentially push her way through. I don’t think Katy is a bad person, and she sets a very high bar for herself. But that one was an unforced error.” Jacqui Lambie’s take is that both Gallagher and Reynolds got unfairly “smashed”: “I believe both of them had the best interest of Brittany Higgins [at heart]. And I believe they paid a really heavy price for that.”

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Inside Katy Gallagher’s electorate office in Canberra, they’re gearing up for the coming election. (Unlike most senators, territory upper house members go to the polls every three years, not every six.) Placards are stacked in the backroom alongside a pile of tote bags emblazoned with the 1970s feminist slogan: “A woman’s place is in the House – and the Senate.” Gallagher doesn’t take her re-election for granted. The ACT fields only two senators, and until the last election, that meant one Liberal and one Labor. Now, however, the second Senate spot is held by popular independent David Pocock, meaning he’s her rival for the progressive vote in Canberra. (Pocock declined a request to be interviewed.)

Environmentalist Dr Maxine Cooper drops by to lobby Gallagher over more water for the upper Murrumbidgee River, but soon they’re discussing a recent news article on her daughter Evie, which Gallagher authorised to help promote Labor’s national autism strategy. It becomes a long conversation
between two women comparing notes on how to manage neurodivergent children.

Evie is doing well but her fear of being left alone complicates life for the family. Recently she told her parents she wanted to build a house across the road, with a window looking into their lounge room. “I’m like, ‘Evie! That does not sound fun to me! I’d be looking out my window, at you, looking at me in my window. No!’ ” her mother says, with gales of laughter. She says that “Evie teaches me a lot, every day” and that her youngest (who aspires to be a model) has become proud of who she is.

It’s clear Gallagher is a born organiser and likes an ordered environment, evidenced in the clean lines of her mid-century furniture, and the garden with its “nice borders”. But how she manages so many demands on her time remains something of a mystery. Albanese, a fellow neat-freak, tells me she never gets flustered. Even Hume agrees on that score. “One of the things I admire most about her is that … she rarely, rarely loses her cool.”

There’s more going on below the surface than Gallagher lets on, however. “I don’t want to present like some kind of magician – you can be quite stony-faced and panicking on the inside,” she says. “Something changed in me after Brett’s accident. I just go completely into myself and I rely on myself to problem-solve, or try and navigate a way out. That can be good in certain situations, but bottling things up is not always great.”

She finds it hard to be in the moment, “one of the psychological scars of going through not just one, but a few traumatic experiences”. The whole mindfulness thing she finds tedious. But going on long walks with Pip, her kelpie, gets her close. So does “watching my little magpie family – I can just watch, and be away from everything else”.

When public life is behind her, Gallagher would love to set up an animal rescue shelter, on a “tiny little farm” somewhere, be like her mother Betsy with her menagerie. For now, though, it’s hard to imagine this self-described natural-born warrior coming to rest any time soon.

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