For political chutzpah, senior Labor MPs who weaponised a rape allegation win hands down. This week in the federal parliament, Australians were treated to one of the more grotesque displays of political hypocrisy, subterfuge and trickery.
The same politicians who weaponised a rape allegation for their own brute political purposes are now in high dudgeon about the public exposure of material that points to the extent of Labor’s involvement in this scandal.
This newspaper revealed texts that suggested, among other things, that Katy Gallagher received a transcript of The Project interview before it aired. Publishing that text meant we know now that Gallagher was sought out by David Sharaz and Brittany Higgins about the rape allegation – even before questions were put by The Project to people portrayed as the chief villains: Bruce Lehrmann, Linda Reynolds and her former chief of staff Fiona Brown.
Having received private material for political purposes, Gallagher is outraged that text messages revealed both her involvement and that she apparently misled parliament.
It doesn’t matter how many people lined up behind the senator, at the Prime Minister’s urging, to declare her integrity.
In this episode, Gallagher has questions to answer that go directly to integrity. A person can give $100 to a homeless person and mislead parliament, all in the same day. The former does not cancel the latter.
The Attorney-General’s theatrical outrage over leaked texts is equally brazen. If Mark Dreyfus is planning to ban the future publication of material such as that obtained by this newspaper about political collusion, he will need to carve out a couple of exceptions. Let’s call them the Brittany Exceptions – where there is a public interest in disclosure, then Australians have a right to know. In this case, they have a right to know the inner workings of how a rape allegation was weaponised by a political party to the detriment of the criminal justice system. There ought to be another exception for cases where a complainant deliberately uses the media over the justice system.
This newspaper didn’t publish private salacious material shared between Higgins and Sharaz. We published material that went to the heart of the country’s biggest scandal: the weaponisation of a rape allegation for political purposes; the deliberate strategy by a complainant to go to the media first, police second, which had the effect of trashing the presumption of innocence; the continuing public media trial by everyone from then prime minister Scott Morrison to DPP Shane Drumgold to Higgins and her media support group. And then, the payment of reportedly millions of dollars to Higgins in a process where egregious allegations against Linda Reynolds were not contested. Indeed, Reynolds was muzzled by Labor’s Attorney-General who threatened to tear up an agreement to pay her legal fees and any costs awarded unless she agreed not to attend a mediation.
Though it seemed impossible, the stench of this tawdry saga increased this week. Labor wants material that exposes their highly questionable behaviour hidden. In other words, they would ban the publication of material that points to their own political collusion in this scandal.
That won’t end well for the nation. Changing the Privacy Act to stop the publication of the sort of material this newspaper exposed will only allow this sort of scandal to happen again – and guarantee that it can happen in secret.
Right now, it may suit Labor’s political future to restrict media freedom. One day, inevitably, the tables will be turned, and potential wrongdoing involving their opponents will need to be revealed.
Labor’s confected outrage this week, and their default instinct to clamp down on media freedom to save themselves from scrutiny over a matter of public importance, has made two things clear.
First, private material in the public interest should be made public in the right circumstances, unless there are obvious national security issues at stake.
Second, power is dangerous in the hands of the shortsighted and the shameless.
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