James Campbell: Denial of ‘weaponising’ unlikely to disarm critics
No one has suggested Katy Gallagher had anything to do with Brittany Higgins’ allegations – the question, asks James Campbell, is Gallagher telling the truth about what she knew and when?
Opinion
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When the Prime Minister agreed to appear on Sunrise on the occasion of the last appearance by its long-time host David Koch, he probably assumed it would be an easy start to the day.
Unfortunately before he could get down to the real reason for his appearance – offering Koch “congratulations on an amazing career on this show” – he was forced to deal with the far from small matter of whether his Finance Minister Katy Gallagher misled parliament over what she knew about Brittany Higgins’ allegation she was raped in the office of the then Defence Industry Minister Linda Reynolds in March 2019 – and when she knew it.
And for a few moments, instead of the avuncular figure we have grown so used to seeing preside over these great occasions in our national life, Australians were treated to a partisan and petulant side of the Prime Minister which is usually kept well in check.
Had his colleague misled parliament, Koch asked. No, the PM answered, to which Koch suggested the relevant footage showed she clearly did.
At issue is what Gallagher meant when at a Senate Estimates hearing in June 2021 she yelled at Reynolds: “No one had any knowledge. How dare you. It’s all about protecting yourself.”
Gallagher was responding to Reynolds’ claim that, before Higgins went public with her allegations, she was warned Labor was planning to politicise the allegation.
“I was told by one of your senators two weeks before about what you were intending to do with the story in my office. Two weeks before,” Reynolds had told the hearing.
Since then messages sent between Higgins and her partner David Sharaz have emerged which strongly suggest Gallagher knew about the story for at least several days before it was broken by Samantha Maiden of news.com.au.
So how did the PM deal with the critical issue here: does footage show Gallagher was lying when she said “no one had any knowledge”?
Sadly aside from asserting “It did not,” he had no explanation for the discrepancy between his minister’s statement to parliament and what the Sharaz-Higgins messages show.
Instead we got this: “Take a step back here, Kochie. What is being suggested here by Peter Dutton, you had allegations by a Liberal staffer that another Liberal staffer had a sexual assault in a Liberal minister’s office and somehow Katy Gallagher has some responsibility for what was going on here? This is bizarre. You had a circumstance also where Scott Morrison had an inquiry by Phil Gaetjens, his former chief of staff who was then the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, into who knew what in his own office. We still have never, ever seen that report. I mean, for Peter Dutton to talk about transparency, frankly, is quite farcical here.”
In reality, neither “Kochie” nor, for that matter, Dutton has suggested Gallagher had anything to do with “allegations by a Liberal staffer that another Liberal staffer had a sexual assault in a Liberal minister’s office”.
The question is, was Gallagher telling the truth?
As for the Gaetjens inquiry, the reason we have never seen this report is because it was never completed and the reason for that, as Albanese well knows, is because it was suspended on legal advice it could prejudice the outcome of Bruce Lehrmann’s trial and because the ACT DPP Shane Drumgold had advised Higgins not to participate in it.
Oh, and the reason Gaetjens hasn’t gotten around to completing it is because he isn’t the Secretary of the Dept of PM&C anymore because, one of the first things Anthony Albanese did upon becoming Prime Minister last May, was to sack him.
On Saturday, Gallagher finally emerged into public to face the big guns of the Perth weekend media to say no, she had not misled the parliament.
“I was responding to an assertion that was being made by the Minister Reynolds at the time, that we had known about this for weeks and had made a decision to weaponise it. That is not true. It was never true.”
Gallagher also came clean that she had been in contact with Sharaz but was vague as to what exactly he told her: “Well look, that there was going to be some public reporting that a young woman making serious allegations about events that had occurred in a minister’s office were going to become public. I was given some information. I did nothing with that information.”
Which is surprising really, because what with the days of questions in both houses of parliament, the senate estimates hearings, the attendance of the Opposition Leader and most of the Labor caucus at the March 4 Justice, etc, an objective observer could be forgiven for concluding the record shows Labor did in fact weaponise it.
In that sense, the revelation that a Labor senator had foreknowledge of the story before it became public only adds an extra tile to a mosaic that was already pretty clear.
As for Gallagher’s assertion she “did nothing” with the information Sharaz had given her, the only thing I would say is that, if nothing else, it casts her relationship with Penny Wong in a new light.
Got a news tip? Email weekendtele@news.com.au
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