Brittany Higgins says Barnaby Joyce ‘didn’t believe’ PM office's claims over rape allegations

Brittany Higgins has doubled down on a major revelation about a leaked text from Barnaby Joyce calling Scott Morrison a “liar”.

Barnaby Joyce’s leaked texts describing Scott Morrison as “a liar” have dominated the headlines, but one question remains unanswered: why was he so keen to tell Brittany Higgins that he believed the Prime Minister wasn’t telling the truth?

Brittany Higgins believes the answer is obvious: he was telling her that the Prime Minister’s claim that his office didn’t know about the rape complaint until February, 2021 doesn’t stack up.

The message calling the Prime Minister “a hypocrite and a liar” was sent via an intermediary at 9:30pm on March 22.

“Tell BH I and Scott, he is Scott to me until I have to recognise his office, don’t get along. He is a hypocrite and a liar from my observations and that is over a long time,’’ Mr Joyce wrote.

“I have never trusted him and I dislike how earnestly he rearranges the truth into a lie.”

Speaking at National Press Club on Wednesday, Ms Higgins said she was “flabbergasted” by the meaning she gleaned from it - that Mr Joyce did not believe the PM’s claims his office was ignorant to her rape allegation.

“The context here, is what he was implying was he didn’t believe that the Prime Minister didn’t know about my rape,” she claimed.

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Barnaby Joyce has apologised for the text message in which he called Prime Minister Scott Morrison a ‘hypocrite and a liar’.

The night Ms Higgins received the text was the same night that Four Corners aired its investigation, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell into what the Prime Minister’s office knew about the incident.

Ms Higgins believes his “liar” claim relates to the suggestion that the Prime Minister’s office didn’t “know”, despite the fact that people who dealt with the matter in the ministerial office in 2019 worked there.

“That was my interpretation,’’ Ms Higgins told news.com.au earlier on Wednesday.

“The inference was that Barnaby Joyce didn’t trust the narrative coming out of the Prime Minister’s office that nobody in the office knew.

“I thought he was sending a sign of solidarity that he didn’t believe what was coming out of the Prime Minister’s office.”

Speaking of the leaked texts at National Press Club, Ms Higgins said she “perceives that conversation to be between myself and the Deputy Prime Minister”, though the message had been passed to her through an intermediary.

Brittany Higgins said her interpretation of the text was that Mr Joyce ‘didn’t believe’ the PMO didn’t know about the alleged rape earlier. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Damian Shaw

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce made an official apology to victims of sexual harassment, bullying and violence in Parliament House on Wednesday. Picture: NCA Newswire/Gary Ramage

The Prime Minister has always maintained that he didn’t know about the complaint of alleged rape until February 15, 2021, when news.com.au broke the story as parliament returned for the second sitting week of the year.

That’s despite the fact that news.com.au approached his office for comment three days earlier on February 12, 2021.

He later revealed he had told staff he was “not happy” he wasn’t alerted to the story over the weekend before publication.

However, he also insists his office didn’t “know” about the allegations until it was approached for comment in February.

That’s despite the fact that Ms Higgins’ former chief of staff Fiona Brown, who dealt with the issue at the time and urged her to go to police, now holds a senior role in Mr Morrison’s office.

The PM maintains his office first knew about an alleged sexual assault on 12 Feb 2021.

Yesterday we found out his office was involved in firing the alleged rapist in April 2019, 10 days after the alleged rape.

It’s simply not believable for the PMO to maintain they didn’t know. pic.twitter.com/Qtqq5G32kK

— Katy Gallagher (@SenKatyG) May 28, 2021

The Prime Minister’s chief of staff John Kunkel and another staffer were also dealing with the departure of former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann from the Defence Industry Minister Linda Reynolds office at the time.

Mr Lehrmann will face court in June over the alleged rape. He has pleaded not guilty.

Mr Kunkel and the other staffer insist that they knew there was a late night security breach but never knew any details of an alleged assault.

There were also two other senior staffers that Ms Higgins believed knew something.

Yaron Finkelstein, the Prime Minister’s top political adviser, was one of the men Ms Higgins has named but he insists he was completely in the dark over the rape allegation until 2021.

He was aware of the departure of Mr Lehrmann from the Defence Industry Minister’s office.

There are also text messages that appear to show another senior member of the Prime Minister’s staff was contacted by a friend of Ms Higgins to try and get her another job in a different office after the 2019 election.

But he now also says he doesn’t remember a rape allegation being made.

Scott Morrison's Chief of staff John Kunkel insisted he didn’t know details of Ms Higgins' alleged assault.

Yaron Finkelstein, one of Scott Morrison’s top advisers, also insisted he was in the dark over the alleged assault until 2021. Picture: Nikki Short

All up, there were at least five members of the Prime Minister’s staff who were either told directly by Ms Higgins in 2019 in the case of her former chief of staff, two other men including his chief of staff who were involved in the termination of Bruce Lehrmann for Mr Lehrmann’s alleged “security breach”.

Despite this, Mr Morrison says his office was not aware of the allegations until 2021.

The Prime Minister did ask his most senior bureaucrat, secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, to test whether the advice he’s been given by his staff is correct.

However, that investigation was placed on hold ahead of the rape trial at the request of the Director of Public Prosecutions in Canberra. It will not be released before the election, if ever.

On Sunday, Barnaby Joyce’s fiancee Vicki Campion declared the leak of private text messages to Brittany Higgins was “a betrayal” of another woman who was just trying to help.

Ms Campion said the “woman whose messages were leaked has now become collateral damage.”

The texts were not sent from Mr Joyce’s phone to Ms Higgins phone but were passed on by another woman who was trying to get the Nationals MPs help on Brittany Higgins’ behalf.

Ms Campion wrote, “It was a message from a woman, another victim, that was leaked to journalists by someone she trusted, indeed someone she was trying to help, to change a situation she didn’t want anyone else to go through,’’ she wrote in the Sunday Telegraph.

“She was acting from her heart, not in any paid capacity or lobbying role, a rare thing in those halls, and now she has been twisted in knots as since 9pm last night her messages have graced the front of every major national paper.”