Liberal MP Nicolle Flint breaks down in Parliament over women’s safety

Liberal MP Nicolle Flint broke down in tears as she recounted her experience of sexist abuse and said women’s safety should not be about politics.

Liberal MP Nicolle Flint broke down in tears in Parliament as she recounted her experience of stalking and sexist abuse and said women’s safety should not be about politics.

The outgoing South Australian MP said she had been stalked and harassed in person and over the phone and had her office vandalised.

“The safety of women in this place, of female staff, of female MPs and senators should be above politics,” she said.

The MP for Boothby, who announced two weeks ago that she was quitting her role following the recent flood of abuse claims from women, criticised Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s response to recent allegations.

Outgoing Liberal MP Nicolle Flint breaks down over the treatment of women in Parliament, saying 'this can't be about politics'.

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“Yesterday, the Leader of the Opposition decided to crawl down into the gutter and make this about politics,” she said.

“I will not be lectured by your side of politics, about the treatment of women.

“I ask the Leader of the Opposition, where was he and where was his predecessor and where were the senior Labor women when GetUp, Labor and the union supporters chased, harassed and screamed at me everywhere I went in the lead-up to the 2019 election?”

Ms Flint said she had been “subjected to horrendous sexist and misogynistic abuse for all of my campaign.”

Please watch this brave, powerful speech by @NicolleFlint

No woman should endure the systematic abuse, harassment & misogynistic attacks to which she was subjected by Labor, with @SenatorWong in charge, Getup & the unions.

We’ve lost a first class Liberal MP.

This must stop. pic.twitter.com/XNMFEzP70s

— Senator Sarah Henderson (@SenSHenderson) March 16, 2021

Last September, Ms Flint told a parliamentary committee looking into the 2019 election that she was stalked and photographed by a man and had her office vandalised with graffiti calling her a “prostitute” during the campaign.

Speaking in Parliament on Tuesday, she said: “What I say to the Labor Party today is they may not have held the spray can to vandalise my office with sexist slurs, they may not have held the camera pointed at me by the stalker or called me evil in GetUp’s phone calls, but they did create the environment in which hate could flourish.”

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She called on women in Labor Party to do more, concluding: “I say to the Leader of the Opposition, what will you do about this. I say to the Leader of the Opposition, get your own house in order. And I say to the Leader of the Opposition, this can’t be about politics anymore.

“We all bear the responsibility for change.”

In July last year, Ms Flint stripped down to a garbage bag in a video message against sexism, saying it was time women in public life are judged on what they stand for, “not what they look like”.

She hit out at ABC Radio Adelaide host Peter Goers for making comments about her appearance in a Sunday Mail column. And she highlighted a tweet in which she said former journalist Mike Carlton had written that singer Jimmy Barnes showed “great restraint” in an episode of Q&A for not leaping from his chair and “strangling” her.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young commended Ms Flint at the time for standing up and calling out the “constant sexism dished out to women in politics”.

“Doesn’t matter what side you are on, no woman should have to put up with sexism in the workplace,” she wrote in a tweet.

SA Labor Senator Marielle Smith wrote she was “rarely in furious agreement” with Ms Flint but was 100 per cent behind her decision to call out “gendered nonsense”.