Vikki Campion: Rape, murder ignored in favour of salacious pollie sex stories

A 15-year-old girl was raped and killed but the public outcry was nothing compared to the national coverage of parliament’s alleged gay sex rings and revenge porn. It’s a disgrace, Vikki Campion writes.

I wish the visceral reactions reserved for a work-jerk in Parliament House had been the response for the blind spot of the Australian psyche, the rape and death of 15-year-old Layla Leering.

We are so powerfully sucked into salacious stories of sex that the desk involved in the act got more than 1200 media mentions at the time of writing; Layla got only 10, three being in her local paper nowhere near the Canberra press gallery heart-set on exposing scandal at the excuse of example-setting.

Layla was a slight girl, moved out of her parents’ care as a baby and raised by her aunt, found raped and, her family believe, murdered hanging from a boab tree in Bulla with plant material in her buttocks and bra.

While so many were spending an inordinate amount of time investigating an unsavoury event between a piece of furniture and a staffer that occurred when Malcolm Turnbull was Prime Minister, Layla’s cousins joined director of Indigenous research with the Centre for Independent Studies and anti-violence campaigner Jacinta Price in Canberra.

Three Aboriginal women, including Layla’s softly-spoken cousin Cheron, were desperately trying to get the federal government to address girls being raped and beaten right now.

Media were nowhere to be found, preoccupied in alleged gay sex rings and revenge porn distributed without the staffer’s knowledge.

Nor were those who flocked to last week’s women’s march spitting on men and hissing about equality.

Mother of 15-year-old Layla Leering, Justine Jingles, with daughters Jasmine and Keely Jingles. Picture: Che Chorley

Not a single Green attended to hear the plight of raped girls, known to child protection, found hanging from trees.

Saturday night, Sunday night and every day after in remote communities across regional Australia, the conditions of violence, sexual molestation and despair that surrounded Layla remain.

Communities, if you could call them so, where mum and dad and have been replaced by grog and drugs, where suicide is sickeningly high, and support is mythical.

If only they could have got a fraction of the coverage that the desk got. We’ve seen this before.

A nation was so enamoured with the affairs of a consenting white couple who met through parliament, that we received unrelenting press coverage for weeks, while the horrendous damage to a toddler raped at Tennant Creek was virtually ignored.

There is a very simple response to the issues at parliament. Anyone involved in the story about masturbation should be sacked, including the whistleblower who refuses to talk to the Prime Minister’s Office and instead chooses to protect the former minister and members who he alleges had sex with prostitutes in Parliament House.

Why should one whistleblower who sent images of a staff member without his knowledge or consent enjoy a cover-up? Why should former ministers get off just because one person enjoys the protection of the media?

No one gets in without photographic ID – so there will be a written record. In the ACT prostitution is only legal on a licensed premises. Sex with a prostitute outside of that has legal recourse.

Parliament House in Canberra has been embroiled in recent sex scandals.

Every story with a sniff of sex is not part of a larger narrative.

The rape of a staffer is not the same as lewd but consensual photographs which, in turn, is not the same as allegations of historical rape by the Attorney-General, which are being fought in court.

Instead of hearing Layla’s story, the media reported more clumsy advances, such as Annastacia Palaszczuk’s encounter with someone who shook her hand too hard.

It is the manifestation of nuns and whores syndrome, where victimhood is reserved only for the pure — and women in muddier circumstance do not deserve the same level of sympathy as when it could be innocence corrupted.

Front and centre of the ABC was discussion on gender quotas, harking back to a perception that the parliament operates as a piss-soaked frat club and would be a sensitive utopia if only there was a mathematically perfect representation of women.

If the Nationals adhered to gender quotas, they would have less women in the Senate than they do now.

Even with quotas the most vulnerable Labor seats are held by women – so if the vote slides even minimally, it is the women who lose out.

Instead of bringing in quotas, support the perfectly capable women like Nicolle Flint, who did turn up and listen to Layla’s cause, who is leaving parliament for good because of how she was treated at the so-called top of the political tree.

There is a sad and shouty, hypocritical and hysterical, narrow-minded culture of intolerance which must be overcome if we are to bring about real change to improve standards in the Canberra bubble and across the nation.