It’s time for a corruption hearing into Brittany Higgins’ payout

I feel taxpayers were taken for a ride by both Brittany Higgins and the Albanese government and the stench from the government’s $2.4m gift to Higgins has just got worse.

Brittany Higgins last week announced she’s got a new job at a public relations agency. Picture: Gary Ramage

The stench from the Albanese government’s $2.4m gift to Brittany Higgins just got worse. Bring on a corruption hearing.

Higgins last week announced she’s got a new job at a public relations agency.

What a surprise, because three years ago the government gave Higgins that massive payout after accepting she probably could never work again.

Higgins, of course, is the former Liberal staffer who said she was raped by a colleague in the office of then-defence minister Linda Reynolds.

Three years ago the government gave Higgins a massive payout after accepting she probably could never work again. Picture: Nikki Short

A judge later ruled she was raped on the balance of probabilities, but said Higgins’ claims that her Morrison government bosses treated her badly and tried to stop her telling the police weren’t true.

Yet Labor exploited Higgins’ claims to savage the Morrison government as anti women, hounding it to defeat in 2022.

So the new Albanese government had every reason to be grateful to Higgins and treat her allegations as true.

And – coincidence! – it gave her that payout after just one day of mediation, with Higgins’ two former bosses, Liberal ministers Reynolds and Michaelia Cash, banned from giving evidence her claims against them were untrue.

That stank, but now so too does this part – the nearly $1.5m of payout given “in respect of Ms Higgins’ loss of earning capacity”, after the government accepted her claim that she’d “been diagnosed as medically unfit for any form of employment and has been given a very poor prognosis for future employment”.

Yet Higgins has since worked or volunteered in several jobs.

She said the United Nations had made her an intern, and former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard made her a visiting fellow at Gillard’s institute. Queensland’s Human Rights Commission also gave her work.

Higgins even worked briefly at Victoria’s First Peoples Assembly after telling a friend she believed she had Aboriginal ancestry.

I feel taxpayers were taken for a ride by both Higgins and by the government. Shouldn’t this payout be investigated?

Indeed, it’s now nearly two years since Linda Reynolds rightly referred it to Labor’s new National Anti-Corruption Commission for investigation.

It’s still deciding what to do, but Reynolds isn’t giving up.

She’s also suing the government for allegedly damaging her reputation by stopping her from giving evidence at the mediation, and is demanding to know why she was banned.

That’s the very least taxpayers now deserve to know.