Andrew Bolt: Why did the government accept Brittany Higgins’ claim that she might never work again?

The Albanese government handed Brittany Higgins up to $3m in a confidential settlement after she claimed she’d been “diagnosed as medically unfit for any form of employment” – so how could she now be working at the UN?

Pardon? Brittany Higgins is now working at the UN? In Switzerland?

Odd, given the Albanese government last year gave Higgins up to $3m after she claimed she’d been “diagnosed as medically unfit for any form of employment”, with “a very poor prognosis for future ­employment”.

Yet she’s now posed for pictures outside the UN building in Geneva and announced she’s “honoured to intern this year at the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women”.

Higgins is the former Liberal staffer who claimed she’d been raped in 2019 by a colleague in the Parliament House office of then Liberal defence minister Linda Reynolds.

Brittany Higgins poses for pictures outside the UN building in Geneva.

The man she accused denied it; the jury in a trial was dismissed for a juror’s misconduct before reaching a decision, and a retrial was called off on the grounds it could kill Higgins, who’d been exposed in the witness box saying things that were untrue.

But her claims were hungrily exploited by the Labor opposition to smear the Liberals as misogynists and beat them in last year’s election.

The grateful Albanese government then handed Higgins up to $3m in a confidential settlement after just one day of mediation. It banned Reynolds and fellow minister Michaelia Cash from testifying that Higgins’ claim that they did not support her was false.

So how could Higgins, too damaged to work, now be working at the UN?

Higgins was handed up to $3m in a confidential settlement after just one day of mediation.

She’s also enrolled for a Masters of Business Administration, a course usually for people with business ambitions. Indeed, Higgins in February registered a company called Power Blazers, along with her father and a lobbyist friend.

Even more strange, Higgins was given at least three other jobs between the alleged rape and her payout. For instance, in March 2021, she worked as a media adviser for the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria.

Former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard made her a visiting fellow at the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, and Higgins also worked five 15-hour weeks with the Queensland Human Rights Commission within four months of her payout.

True, the jobs weren’t full-time and were unpaid. Mind you, some might add it’s better they were not, given her claim to be unable to work at all.

Yet jobs they were, so why did the government accept her claim – always strange to me – that she might never work again, and pay her out?