A few years ago, Katy Gallagher appeared to be the junior member of Labor’s mean girls. Overshadowed by Penny Wong and former Labor senator Kristina Keneally, Gallagher may have been mistaken for an apprentice to more skilled political apparatchiks.
With Keneally booted out, now telling the world that politics is a dreadful business, and Wong morphing into something of a regal political dowager, Labor’s Finance Minister has been revealed as a disturbing central player in the distasteful Higgins saga. Unless Gallagher changes her tune, this won’t end well for women or for justice.
What it means for Labor will be determined by voters in due course. The full account of Gallagher’s role in the Higgins scandal may never be known. Certainly, Gallagher and other Labor ministers are keen to shut down further discussion, deploying all kinds of specious arguments to do so.
But here’s what we know so far. Kimberley Kitching dubbed Gallagher along with Wong and Keneally as Labor’s mean girls. The trio, according to Kitching, were involved in a campaign to ostracise, belittle and bully the first-term senator.
Kitching didn’t fit their cliquey mould. She befriended Liberals. She defended a Liberal woman – Nicolle Flint – against sexist abusive behaviour.
Kitching was aghast when she learned that senior Labor women intended to weaponise a rape allegation. One of those women was Gallagher. She learned about the rape allegation before it was made public.
Gallagher says she did nothing with that information. But how can we be assured of that? And, given what we know now, why would we believe her?
Texts between Brittany Higgins and her partner David Sharaz reveal that Gallagher received a copy of The Project transcript before it aired, indeed, before questions were put by The Project to people Higgins portrayed as the chief villains: Linda Reynolds, Fiona Brown and Bruce Lehrmann.
Sharaz texted Higgins about Gallagher being “invested” – before Higgins’s allegations of a rape and political cover-up were revealed publicly. Sharaz was in contact with Gallagher not once or twice but apparently many times, before and during the political and media trial of Lehrmann and Liberal ministers.
Did Gallagher encourage Higgins to go to the police before turning this into a political scandal? There is no record of that.
What we do know is that Gallagher – and other Labor politicians – used an untested, uncorroborated rape allegation for their own crass political purposes instead of ensuring that a rape allegation was first prosecuted, with all attendant principles, through the criminal justice system.
How did that serve Higgins? Many people may know her name, but Higgins will forever be associated with a sex scandal in Canberra that Labor used to swing a few seats its way. Gallagher’s contact with Sharaz meant Labor had the inside running on how to politicise a rape allegation.
Gallagher’s behaviour risks hurting other women, too. If Gallagher’s investment in the Higgins model of choosing politics and media as the first and second ports of call, and police coming third, encourages a single woman to follow this path, it will be a terrible thing for the woman.
Gallagher has also undermined the criminal justice system. Last Friday, the senior minister used parliamentary privilege to say she believed Higgins, thereby branding Lehrmann a rapist. Just when it seemed hard to imagine it, this marks a new low in political leadership.
There is no opportunity for a new trial, no chance for a judge to rap Gallagher over the knuckles for treating an allegation as fact, and no path for Lehrmann to sue Gallagher for defamation. In other words, what Gallagher did, using the cover of parliament to make an accusation she would never make outside, was cowardly and irresponsible.
We are entitled to expect serious, considered judgment from ministers of the Crown, not casual trashing of the presumption of innocence. A minister of the Crown is supposed to uphold our system of justice, not tear it down for political convenience or sisterly solidarity.
How can an uninformed Gallagher, ignorant of the actual evidence, reach a conclusion a jury armed with weeks of careful analysis of evidence was unable to reach in the days before a mistrial was declared? What secret reserves of information or intelligence enabled Gallagher to be so definitive about something a properly informed and instructed jury could not decide on?
The criminal justice system has developed over hundreds of years, carefully working out the best accommodations between a complainant and a defendant, between innocence and guilt, between privacy and publicity. The legal system is far from perfect, and reforms that improve justice for the parties are important.
But bypassing the legal system – as Gallagher did in parliament last week, is like saying: “I, Katy Gallagher, know better than hundreds of years of legal practice and principles. I, Katy Gallagher, have publicly labelled Bruce Lehrmann a rapist because I believe Brittany.”
Gallagher’s contempt for Lehrmann’s right to the presumption of innocence and for the proper workings of the criminal justice system is matched only by her contempt for the processes of parliament.
Gallagher has misled parliament. While she told Senate estimates during a stoush with Reynolds that “no one had any knowledge” of Higgins’s allegations before them being made public, Gallagher admitted last week that she was “provided with information in the days before the allegations were first reported”.
Gallagher’s apology to Reynolds last week does nothing for her credibility either. Gallagher apologised that Reynolds felt upset for being targeted by Labor in 2021.
“Senator Reynolds is clearly upset about everything that’s happened to her, I am sorry about that,” Gallagher said.
That is not a genuine apology.
It wasn’t Gallagher saying: “I am sorry, Senator Reynolds, for what I did to you, for what Labor did to you.” It was Gallagher saying sorry Reynolds was upset by their behaviour. Gallagher refused to own her own behaviour.
Worse, Gallagher refused to answer questions about her involvement in this scandal on spurious grounds of protecting the wellbeing of other women. She said she was concerned at how women who come forward (with rape allegations) “are being treated right now”.
What utter baloney. This episode has nothing to do with other women unless you are bonkers enough to believe that other women should follow the Higgins-Sharaz model.
Gallagher and other Labor women are responsible for weaponising a rape allegation for their own political purposes. Crying foul for no sound reason to questions about their involvement is akin to Anthony Albanese saying he found the “mean girls” label offensive – and showing no interest in dealing with the substance of serious allegations by Kitching against senior Labor women.
Having reached high office by promising a new era of accountability, integrity and transparency, not to mention acting in the best interests of women, Gallagher and her colleagues have failed at the first real test.
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