The tone was casual, bordering on blithe.
That morning, Sally Rugg had sat at her Canberra desk and watched with dread as the twin red lines became visible on her rapid antigen test. Yet here she was, five hours later, texting the most demonstrably COVID-cautious MP in federal parliament to say she’d checked the virus onto a Melbourne flight.
Kooyong MP Monique Ryan and her estranged chief of staff, Sally Rugg, proved to be an uncomfortable fit.
“I’m on a mostly empty plane home, couldn’t face the drive or hotel isolation and figured half the plane could be COVID positive with or without me on it. So will be offline for 90 mins or so – good luck with your speech if I miss it, you’ll be great.”
This episode, perhaps more than any other that punctuated the ill-fated relationship between the prominent social campaigner and Kooyong MP Monique Ryan, points to two things at the heart of an increasingly bitter workplace dispute.
The first is that Rugg didn’t understand the woman whose political prospects she had agreed to work slavishly long hours to promote. The second is that in Rugg, Ryan thought she was getting something she wasn’t.
Monique Ryan outside court on Friday.Credit: Jason South
Ryan, until a year ago the director of neurology at the Royal Children’s Hospital, is the only MP who habitually masked up during the most recent parliamentary sittings. Staying COVID-safe is central to her political brand. She also sees it as a moral imperative.
Her immediate response to Rugg on November 22 was laced with disapproval, disbelief and a tinge of sadness. “I wish you’d let me know you were considering doing that.”
This was followed, two weeks later, by a formal warning letter that set in train the dispute which on Friday burst into full view in the Federal Court. Ryan said Rugg getting on the plane while infected was “wilfully selfish” and had eroded her trust in her chief of staff.
The sworn, written evidence of both Rugg and Ryan before the court makes it clear that, by the time of her positive test, there was a fundamental disconnect between what Rugg thought her job was and what Ryan thought she should be doing.
According to Rugg, Ryan’s political ambitions stretched all the way to the Lodge and she needed someone to build community support and events for her on a scale that would get her there. “I need the best, this is bigger than Kooyong,” Ryan purportedly told Rugg during an impromptu performance review.
Ryan said after the day in court that she was joking about any ambitions to become prime minister, but Rugg did not take it that way.
Rugg did not believe this was the job she had signed on for. She thought she had been hired as a chief of staff, albeit on a relatively junior staffer’s wage, to run Ryan’s office and support her parliamentary, policy work and media work.
Rugg’s fascination with Canberra – she told the court she aspires to be an MP herself one day – is now part of the material put against her.
“Ms Rugg loved going to Canberra,” Ryan said. “She was previously an advocate for various causes and, in my view, she enjoys being involved with the media and being ‘where it’s all happening’.”
To the immediate benefit of neither woman, it is now all happening in the Federal Court. Justice Debra Mortimer will decide on Tuesday whether Rugg and Ryan can work together until the trial. An idea that appeared odd from the start looks faintly preposterous now.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.