Andrew Bolt: Why there’s doubt over motive for Brittany Higgins’ payout

The more Brittany Higgins speaks, the more the mega payout she received from a grateful Albanese government stinks.

Brittany Higgins on Tuesday finally revealed how much a grateful Albanese government paid her – an extraordinary $2.3m.

What’s still a mystery is why. In fact, the more Higgins speaks, the more this mega-payout stinks.

Higgins has just finished giving three days of evidence in court, trying to prove she was indeed raped by a colleague, Bruce Lehrmann, after a drunken night out, in the Parliament House office of the Defence Minister.

I say “trying” because Lehrmann denies it and Higgins’s story of what happened keeps changing. Both of them have admitted in this court hearing to telling lies, and getting details wrong.

She lied to police and friends about going to a doctor after the rape. Falsely claimed she’d had a three-hour panic attack.

Claimed she was “fall-down drunk” that night when CCTV footage from Parliament House shows her steady on her feet, and even scampering down a corridor.

Yet the Albanese government last year agreed, after just one day of mediation, to give her these millions to compensate her for terrible treatment she claimed she got from the then Morrison Liberal government after she allegedly told them she was raped.

The more Brittany Higgins speaks, the more this mega payout from the Albanese government stinks. Picture: Jeremy Piper

Was this in fact a political pay-off by Labor to a woman whose allegations helped it to destroy the Morrison government?

Labor sure had lots of reason to thank Higgins after her boyfriend fed ammunition to frontbencher Katy Gallagher to smear Prime Minister Scott Morrison as anti-women.

“I say to the prime minister, listen to it,” jeered Labor leader Anthony Albanese back then. “Listen to what Brittany Higgins had to say.”

The suspicion that this was a political thankyou grows by the day because none of Higgins’ three main claims in getting this payout has
been proven, and one has turned out to be false.

First, was there even a rape?

In fact, even Higgins this week admitted she didn’t think she could convince a criminal court she was indeed raped, beyond reasonable doubt. But this hearing is a civil case – Lehrmann is suing Channel 10 for defamation – and Higgins said she knew there was now a lower standard of proof: the balance of probabilities. But even here, she’s faced multiple challenges to her story.

Higgins’s immediate boss, then Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, denies Higgins even told her she was raped. Picture: Martin Ollman

Second, what about the key part of Higgins’s separate claim for compensation – that her Liberal bosses supposedly treated her badly when she told them she was raped?

Again, none of that has been proved.

While neither of them are giving evidence in the trial, Higgins’s immediate boss, then Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, denies Higgins even told her she was raped. Her next boss, then Attorney-General Michaelia Cash, also denies being told of the rape, and was even secretly recorded by Higgins telling her staffer she had her support, with no sign Cash knew of any rape.

The two ex-bosses also deny Higgins’s claims, repeated in this defamation hearing, that they subjected her to “victimisation, ostracism” and left her feeling she had to choose between her job and going to the police.

Indeed, Justice Michael Lee was curious about that, asking Higgins what Reynolds and her chief of staff, Fiona Brown, had actually said that stopped her reporting the rape until two years later.

The best Higgins could say was that they’d asked her to tell them if she went to the police, and “it was framed in the context that it was pertinent because of the election”. Reynolds’ office also later offered to pay her out of her job before the election.

Labor sure had lots of reason to thank Higgins after her boyfriend fed ammunition to frontbencher Katy Gallagher to smear then PM Scott Morrison as anti-women. Picture: Jeremy Piper

So, again, plenty of reason to at least question Higgins’s story. Yet the government last year banned Reynolds and Cash from coming to the mediation over Higgins’s payout and challenging her story.

Finally, what about the third element to Higgins’s claim for this payout – that the Liberals treated her so badly that she might not work for 40 years, as she confirmed in court this week?

Well, that’s clearly wrong. Higgins has since worked in unpaid jobs and got a $108,000 advance to write a book about her alleged rape.

Separate to these proceedings, text messages uncovered by the Daily Mail even show a friend at Victoria’s First Peoples Assembly telling Higgins she could work there as a media adviser, apparently after telling her bosses Higgins had Aboriginal ancestry. Higgins replied that her grandfather was connected “to either the Nyawigi or Gugu Badhun people”, but “we’re not entirely sure which one” because he’d stopped checking his family history.

Higgins got the job. And she got the cash. Why?