Public deserves full truth on Higgins weaponisation

Labor Senator Katy Gallagher is under pressure. Picture: Justin Benson-Cooper/West Australian

There is an acute sense of double standards and hypocrisy in the response from government and some in the media to the public airing of text messages between Brittany Higgins and David Sharaz that exposes the depth of political manoeuvring behind the scenes.

The text messages detail how senator Katy Gallagher, now the Finance Minister, was in close contact with the couple before the allegations of sexual assault in Parliament House were made public. The federal opposition is justified in using parliament to explore the issue further.

On the available evidence, Senator Gallagher appears to have misled a Senate committee in June 2021 after Liberal cabinet minister Linda Reynolds accused her of knowing about the allegations two weeks before they aired on The Project on the Ten Network. “No one had any knowledge. How dare you,” Senator Gallagher told Senator Reynolds. Senator Gallagher is claiming she did not mislead the Senate because she was “responding to an assertion that was being made by minister (Linda) Reynolds at the time that we had known about this for weeks and had made a decision to weaponise it”.

A fair reading of the text messages suggests the Senate was misled. But the federal government has mounted an unbridled defence of Senator Gallagher with ministers lining up to vouch for her integrity. Jim Chalmers said Senator Gallagher had one of the highest levels of “personal integrity” of anyone he had ever worked with. Agriculture Minister Murray Watt criticised members of the opposition for seeking to revisit the “unseemly” debate concerning this chapter in the parliament’s history. He also defended Senator Gallagher’s personal integrity.

The Gallagher affair adds to a growing list of problems for the Albanese government, which is under increasing pressure from rising interest rates, the cost-of-living squeeze, and the possibility of a looming recession. With the opposition pledging to pursue Senator Gallagher when parliament resumes on Tuesday, the government’s lack of enthusiasm for the issue is understandable. It represents a distraction from the main game of the economy and has the potential to reopen deep wounds inflicted around the time of the death of former Labor senator Kimberley Kitching. Kitching had reportedly raised concerns about Labor’s plans for the Higgins claims around the time she made the “mean girls” accusations against senators Gallagher and Penny Wong.

But what is revealed by the text exchanges must be taken seriously. Given what is now known, promises made by the Albanese team in opposition that it would restore political standards ring hollow. Rather than the facts, some in the media instead have focused on the issue of the text exchanges being made public.

Double standards are again at work. The same outlets have had no problem exploiting text exchanges uncomfortable for Coalition politicians in earlier times. There are doubtless sensitivities involved. But Labor’s concern that discussing the Higgins case risked re-victimising the complainant, or other victims of sexual violence, lacks credibility given the extraordinary lengths to which the Albanese team was willing to go in using the same issue to criticise the Morrison government.

There is no question that publication of the text messages between Ms Higgins and Mr Sharaz is in the public interest. So, too, is the personal account of former prime ministerial staffer Fiona Brown, which has raised the prospect that Scott Morrison may have misled parliament as well. Voters deserve to know how parliamentarians conduct themselves when they are out of the spotlight. The Coalition is right to demand Senator Gallagher reveal whether she advised Ms Higgins to go to police before making her rape allegation public, something the Coalition claims to have done. It is also right to seek greater transparency on the issue from Wong, now the Foreign Minister. Voters deserve to know whether the Higgins affair was indeed weaponised by Labor to diminish its opponent with scant regard for the collateral damage it would cause.