Vikki Campion: Nothing will change in wake of report into parliament culture
Whistleblowers who make complaints about the parliamentary workplace do so at their peril, copping torrents of abuse, campaigns of lies — and often a hefty legal bill, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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The overwhelming response to the Jenkins report into behaviour in Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces has been bewilderment. Why didn’t they blow the whistle earlier if things were so bad? When we did, you made us choke on it.
When James Ashby raised sexual harassment complaints about his employer, former Speaker Peter Slipper, he copped a $4.4 million legal bill while Mr Slipper had his legal fees paid by the taxpayer.
And did anyone kindly report Ashby’s Hell?
No. He was smeared and attacked.
When other women spoke out, (who I won’t name at their request so that they can go on with their lives), they were leaked against, sacked, refused access to documents that concerned their case, even under FOI.
One was left with a $40,000 legal bill. Another was left jobless for two years after being black-listed and hounded out of the building. She had no media resources to cope — and it was only one journalist who was honest and told her that the ministry was leaking against her.
When I spoke out about being urged to consider an abortion by staff to protect the senior leadership, “anonymous sources” slammed me for “defaming” Coalition staff, with no investigation or report ever, only introducing a ridiculous bonk ban that protects no one.
There was no call from the then Turnbull prime minister’s office about my welfare — only intense backgrounding, leaking, and an onslaught of spin, lies, and outrageous claims that even the most basic documents, including pay slips and phone records, easily proved untrue.
Yet elements of the media lapped it up, even when provided evidence to the contrary.
At the time, I was jobless, heavily pregnant, distressed, effectively living out of my car and AirBnBs booked by my brother, with a prepaid phone. It was meagre resources against an entire ministry of spin fuelling thousands of stories.
Three times, in three different homes, in two different states, I put together my baby’s cot in my third trimester, only to have to take it apart, pack and move again because of parliament-fuelled hounding.
Some members of the press gallery, who have been so shocked by the Jenkins report, often fed this bullying — mediated it, aired it, published it and were overwhelmingly part of the problem, skipping from anonymous source to anonymous source, each more desperate to force someone else under the bus to not only protect themselves, shield their behaviour, but also to propel their own advancement.
We are targeted, dehumanised, and obliterated; our choice is massive legal bills, as Mr Ashby inherited, or disappearing into an abyss, as I tried.
But sometimes they don’t leave you alone.
Kate Jenkins provided the first avenue for parliamentarians and staff to tell their story without being cruelly shamed, scapegoated or made unemployable.
But the report doesn’t vindicate us.
It made us angrier. Women on both sides of the house don’t believe it will change.
When Rachelle Miller spoke of coercive control within her relationship with her former boss Alan Tudge this week, she was described as a “disaffected party” — even days after the report came out.
That Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe slut-shamed Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes on the floor of the Senate, and Liberal Senator David Van was accused of growling at Senator Jacqui Lambie while the report’s findings flashed across the television, shows that the culture won’t change, and females are just as much the perpetrators.
Lobbyists, who face no disciplinary action for their bullying behaviour, who lurch over long lunches that finish at dinner with favoured journalists on corporate credit cards, who swan around parliamentary offices and have affairs themselves, have escaped unscathed.
And why should you care?
Forget all that crap about parliament setting the standard — it never has and never will.
You should care because once you drive out the people with empathy, who dedicate their lives to a cause only because they care enough about their community to make it better, who learn how to work the bureaucracy and manipulate the processes of the parliament, who can think around corners to find solutions, who listen and engage with the people who others want to forget, once they no longer want to come here, what do you have left?
Whether that’s getting a small town a visa to keep their doctor, helping a veteran who has ground the teeth out of his head with nightmares, or herculean effort to bring on the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, those are political results that you only get if you have people with empathy and the respect to listen.
Without it, you will be left with a house of narcissistic psychopaths, who only took this job to make contacts for the next big job, who want to swan around the halls of power, and humiliate, ostracise, and obfuscate as long as they get that next plum gig.
Then you don’t have a parliament that governs for you. You have a parliament doing what’s politically expedient for themselves.
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