Andrew Bolt: Questions remain as Brittany Higgins leaves mess behind

It’s reasonable to assume the pampered bliss awaiting Brittany Higgins in her new French home is financed in part by the Albanese government’s payout. So will we get an inquiry into why Labor gave her millions?

Brittany Higgins and partner David Sharaz now live like they’ve hit the jackpot. On Monday, dressed in suffragette white, these crusaders against sexism took a business-class flight to go live in Higgins’s new cottage in the south of France.

A life of ease awaits. Sharaz has advertised for a local to tutor him in French, and for someone else to come do the gardening for them.

How sweet, but it’s reasonable to assume this pampered bliss is financed in part by the extraordinary $2.445m the Albanese government handed Higgins last year after just one day of “mediation”.

That’s compensation Labor gave Higgins after she claimed she’d suffered “hurt, distress and humiliation” from the Morrison Liberal government when she reported being raped in the Parliament House office of then Defence Minister Linda Reynolds.

But Higgins and Sharaz won’t now be in the country to hear Justice Michael Lee rule whether Higgins was actually raped at all, on the balance of probabilities, by former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann.

It’s reasonable to assume this pampered bliss is financed in part by the extraordinary $2.445m the Albanese government handed Higgins last year. Picture: Backgrid/news.com.au

More ominously for the government, Lee may also say something about the horrible treatment Higgins claimed she got from the Liberals – the very thing that had Labor pay her that fortune.

Were her claims of intimidation and cover-up actually false, as Lee this week heard in court?

Indeed, Lee on Tuesday prompted an extraordinary concession from barrister Sue Chrysanthou SC, who is defending journalist Lisa Wilkinson in a defamation case launched by Lehrmann over a Channel 10 program he said turned him into a pariah.

Lee had just heard from Fiona Brown, who was Reynolds’s chief of staff and Higgins’s boss at the time of the alleged rape and had just explained all she had done to help her.

Lee then asked Chrysanthou if she would go ahead with claims made by Higgins and repeated by Wilkinson: “Can I proceed on the basis that no submission will be made Ms Brown was a knowing participant in a systemic cover-up of a rape?”

Chrysanthou conceded: “Not for the purposes of these proceedings, your Honour.”

Higgins told an angry mob at a ‘March 4 justice’ rally in Canberra last year that she’d been treated by her bosses as a ‘political problem’. Picture: Getty Images

This is hugely significant, because Higgins has long traded on this story of being victimised and silenced by her Liberal bosses, and tens of thousands of people were only too quick to believe it.

Most famously, she told an angry mob at a “March 4 justice” rally in Canberra last year that she’d been treated by her bosses as a “political problem”.

“I don’t believe people should be isolated, intimidated and ignored after traumatic incidents inside the workplace,” she said, dressed again in suffragette white.

In her compensation deal with the Albanese government, Higgins got specific, saying she told Fiona Brown she’d been raped three days after being found naked in Reynolds’s office. She accused Brown of not offering legal support or asking if she wanted to go to the police.

Brown, she claimed, even refused to let her see CCTV footage from Parliament House, and later “made it clear” Higgins “ought to remain silent about the sexual assault, in order to keep her job/career”.

She claimed Brown was taking regular instructions on the case from the Prime Minister’s principal private secretary, Yaron Finkelstein.

But Brown in court this week rejected Higgins’s story completely.

Higgins and Sharaz won’t now be in the country to hear Justice Michael Lee rule whether Higgins was actually raped at all. Picture: Backgrid/news.com.au

No, Higgins never told her she’d been raped. No, Brown hadn’t denied her access to CCTV footage. No, she hadn’t told Higgins to shut up, but had instead – after being told at a second meeting Higgins had found Lehrmann “on top” of her, but still denying rape – organised for her to meet police and actually taken her to see them. Nor had she talked to Finkelstein about the case.

Yet none of these denials appear to have been considered at the mediation last year when the Albanese government gave Higgins her millions.

In fact, the government banned the two ministers who Higgins also accused of mistreating her – Reynolds and Attorney-General Michaelia Cash – from attending the mediation to deny any such thing.

It was as if Labor really wanted to give Higgins the cash, rather than admit she might have falsely accused the Liberals.

Lisa Wilkinson and Channel 10 seemed just as keen to run with Higgins’s story, claiming in their report last year that Higgins had been “forced to choose between her career and the pursuit of justice”, in what Wilkinson insisted in court was a “cover-up”.

But after Brown gave her evidence it seems not even Wilkinson’s barrister wants to defend that anti-Liberal conspiracy theory.

So when will we finally get an inquiry into why Labor gave Higgins millions for her story?