At the heart of Linda Reynolds’ story is a gross and gendered hypocrisy. The same women – very senior women within Labor’s ranks – who talk a lot about wanting a safer, fairer workplace culture in parliament, perpetrated a cruel and unrelenting attack on their workplace colleague.
What Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher did to Reynolds is recorded in Hansard. The attacks were relentless, over days and weeks and months. The implications were devastating: that Reynolds had covered up the alleged rape of a young staffer; that she had threatened Brittany Higgins’ employment in a wholly inappropriate way. The results were predictable, with Reynolds breaking down, admitted to hospital, on sick leave.
When appointing Vivienne Thom last week to oversee the implementation of Kate Jenkins’ recommendations in her Set the Standard report, Gallagher said: “Everyone has the right to be safe at work and our parliament should set the highest standard for workplace behaviour and culture.” It is hard to take Gallagher – the Minister for Women – seriously. Her unremitting attacks on Reynolds were low blows. To be sure, Gallagher and Wong were entitled to question Reynolds. Instead, the two Labor senators hounded her, refusing to accept her assurance that she had supported Higgins and that she had not threatened Higgins’ job.
These women didn’t so much cross as leap over the line between acceptable parliamentary scrutiny and unacceptable personal attacks in pursuit of partisan advantage.
So much for the “highest standard for workplace behaviour”.
In the past, Gallagher has encouraged women to come forward: “Your first-hand experiences will be critical to this review and a build a safer, more equal workplace for everyone.”
Isn’t that what Reynolds did when speaking to The Australian? Yet her story was brushed off by Wong, Gallagher and the usual phalanx of journalists who, on any other day, obsess about workplace harassment. Hounded into hospital by workplace abuse? Who cares.
Reynolds explained how she and her chief of staff, Fiona Brown, offered Higgins a great deal of support; that Higgins, at no stage, said to them she had been raped; that Higgins campaigned with Reynolds in Perth barely weeks later; that Higgins praised Reynolds as a great boss; that Higgins was offered a job by Reynolds after the election. This too was belittled.
Higgins brushed this aside. “The facts have been well established,” she said. “Any revisionist history offered by my former employer at this time is deeply hurtful and needlessly cruel.”
Predictable, and also nonsense. The Higgins camp has controlled the narrative for a long time. Reynolds has not been able to present her side in full. She was rubbished in the Senate by Wong and co. Reynolds was treated as a hostile witness by the prosecutor in the aborted criminal trial and she was muzzled from contesting Higgins’ claims about her during the staffer’s civil claim.
Alas, this demented reinterpretation of a free society, where only one side is granted legitimacy to present the “facts”, is not just a common thread on Twitter.
It was echoed by Wong and Gallagher, too. When Reynolds told her story, these two Labor women accused Reynolds of showing “a deep lack of respect for the autonomy of her former staff”. What about Reynolds’ autonomy? Are they suggesting that only certain women may be heard? Higgins, yes. Reynolds, no. If that is feminism, it is a farce. This grand hypocrisy from Labor is made worse by the fact, as Reynolds told me, conservative women are not just invisible to most of the media, they are expendable in the eyes of the feminist movement.
“Conservative women, particularly conservative politicians, we’re invisible to the feminist movement,” she said. “They really don’t understand us.”
Many women who call themselves feminists don’t want to understand conservative women. To quote Reynolds, when “we crack on, when we do things, and we try to make a difference”, that is ignored by many so-called feminists, especially in the media. “Because we don’t identify with that very victim-centric side of feminism – and it’s very tribal – they don’t get that. They don’t want to get it. And so, we’re invisible. Worse than that. They won’t protect you when you’re out there being attacked.”
Think about Lidia Thorpe’s foul comment to Hollie Hughes – it won’t be repeated here. Or the torrent of abuse that Nicolle Flint endured before she left politics. Labor women and so-called progressive women in the media had little to say on that.
Reynolds says she was expendable and so was Brown. Both were painted by Labor and a large section of the media, mostly female journalists, as villains.
Reynolds is right that conservative women are often treated as invisible by so-called feminists in the media. The former defence minister had some pointed words for Annabel Crabb and her ABC Ms Represented program that aired last year. Reynolds told me that Crabb’s show about women making strides in Australian politics was so skewed towards celebrating women on the left that she texted Crabb as follows: “Ms Represented may be interested to know that my side of politics has now had two female defence ministers and two foreign ministers, the first time two defence portfolio ministers at the same time were women, the first and second time Australia was represented at AUSMIN by two women, the first (female) home affairs minister, the current (female) attorney-general. The first time three women are on the national security committee … and the list goes on.
“You have missed what is hidden in plain sight,” wrote Reynolds. “The first time EVER there are eight women in cabinet, all of whom are doing amazing work – in our own way – comfortably in our own skins as female leaders.”
Reynolds told me it was as if these eight women in cabinet were inconvenient truths to Crabb, and history stopped at Julie Bishop.
Exhibitions of performance art in parliament are hardly uncommon. But some Labor women, Gallagher and Wong included, are up to their eyeballs in the toxic culture they complain so loudly about. Their cliquey, catty feminism made a target of Kimberley Kitching, too. Who can forget Wong’s cruel gibe to Kitching in 2018 during a policy debate to the effect: “Well, if you had children, you might understand why there is a climate emergency”? Wong apologised to Kitching only when the exchange was made public.
So the lesson is this: if you genuinely want to establish the highest standards of workplace behaviour, treat your political opponents with respect, not just your political girlfriends.
It’s like free speech. Your belief in it is real only when you recognise the right of your opponents to speak.
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