It’s time to go through Labor’s Christmas trash

The outrageous Higgins payout process is an insult to our heroic veterans.

Brittany Higgins arrives to give evidence in front of an ACT Supreme Court jury on the third day of the trial of her alleged rapist, Bruce Lehrmann. Picture: Getty Images.

Few government spin doctor techniques are as venerable as sneaking out bad news late on the Friday night of a holiday long weekend. It’s called taking out the trash. When governments have something especially smelly and dishonourable to hide, they use the Christmas variation of this trick. Confess to something just before Christmas, hoping the voters will be so diverted by last-minute shopping and cooking that the bad news will go unnoticed.

Of course, if the government can get past Christmas without any ruckus, the long January snooze of cricket and the beach means they are home free until February. And by then who cares?

The Albanese government was surely working that theory to its maximum extent when it raced to settle Brittany Higgins’ civil claim over alleged workplace mistreatment just before Christmas. With obscene haste and thumbing their noses at any suggestion they appropriately investigate and test Higgins’ claims, the government reached a confidential settlement of these vigorously contested claims just in time for the Christmas hibernation.

While we do not know how much Higgins was paid, we do know she was claiming something in the order of $3m.

The process followed by the government, and in particular the Department of Finance, to settle this claim was so outrageously out of line with what taxpayers were entitled to expect that this matter should not go away in 2023. While the government will undoubtedly continue to use every trick in the book to shut this down, every crossbencher, especially those elected on integrity platforms, should race to join the Coalition in pursuing this at Senate estimates, with the Australian National Audit Office – and, ultimately, at the National Anti-Corruption Commission.

One wonders what Mr Integrity, Glyn Davis, makes of this process and this payment. In 202l, the professor, who is now secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, delivered the The Jim Carlton Annual Integrity Lecture, focusing on the public service’s need to provide frank and fearless advice to ensure integrity and accountability of government. Before that, Davis was a member of the Independent Review of the Australian Public Service – called Our Public Service Our Future – commissioned by then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

In other words, genuine integrity was meant to be a core KPI for this government.

That flies in the face of what public servants did with the Higgins claim. And the best way to understand the secretive, unaccountable, unprofessional and ­apparently profligate use of taxpayer money in settling claims of workplace misconduct in parliament is to contrast it with the way other claimants on the public purse are treated.

Our injured or disabled military veterans, in particular, must look at the way the Higgins claim was finalised with disbelief at the comparative injustice of it all.

A quick recap of the Higgins’ workplace claim is necessary. Higgins claims that following the night she alleges Bruce Lehrmann raped her, she was mistreated at work by then ministers Linda Reynolds and her chief of staff Fiona Brown, and subsequently by minister Michaelia Cash. These claims were, and are, hotly disputed by each of the ministers and Brown. Key elements of Higgins’ claims about her treatment, and about what (if anything) Higgins told the three women about the alleged rape were contested under oath by each of Reynolds, Brown and Cash at Lehrmann’s criminal trial.

Higgins never had to file a formal Statement of Claim or detailed particulars. Rather, the Department of Finance rushed to settle her claim voluntarily and in an enormous pre-Christmas hurry. Despite the fact that, as a result of the criminal trial, it was highly public that there was a massive dispute about the facts, the government not only did not seek witness statements or any formal evidence from Reynolds, Cash or Brown but positively avoided doing so.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus used his powers to muzzle Reynolds in particular, and to demand she not attend the mediation. Dreyfus appears to have done everything in his power to ensure these claims were never appropriately tested.

Mark Dreyfus used his powers to muzzle Linda Reynolds. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Perhaps that was no surprise given that he, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had conflicted themselves by making public statements in support of Higgins.

Finally, as if to confirm to voters that it was ashamed of the disgraceful way it had flouted the requirement of the Legal Services Directions to act “in accordance with legal principle and practice”, the government agreed to keep the settlement confidential.

At a time when Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins and the government are demanding private sector entities avoid confidential settlement of workplace bullying and other claims using their own money, the government hushes up how much taxpayer money it paid to a woman whose heavily disputed allegations contributed in no small way to its election win. This confidentiality is another apparently clear breach of the Legal ­Services Directions, but by this stage who’s counting?

And, by the way, a quick hark back to the case of Rachelle Miller reminds us that this is not the first time the Department of ­Finance has made a very substantial payment in hotly contested circumstances.

Surely, as a starting point, the ANAO will be investigating how many of these payments have been made so the public can understand what is going on here. In the meantime, while the Department of Finance appears adept at showering money on those complaining about the conduct of former Liberal ministers, are other complainants treated as generously? Well, in a word – no.

Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie and former SAS soldier Heston Russell hold a press conference to discuss the problems faced by military veterans. Picture by Sean Davey.

Our injured and disabled military veterans are probably the most obvious category of deserving claimants who are entitled to feel outraged at the comparative injustice of their treatment. Former soldier, now senator, Jacqui Lambie, is the best known of those veterans who must ­compare their personal experience of seeking compensation to the Higgins experience and weep, but there are many people in her category.

The Department of Finance may be the fairy godmother, but veterans are stuck with the Department of Veteran Affairs.

In Lambie’s autobiography, Rebel with a Cause: You can’t keep a bloody Lambie down, she tells her own harrowing story of seeking compensation for the ­significant physical and mental ­injuries she suffered as a result of her service.

Lambie writes that “leaving the army was the start of an almost decade-long legal and medical fight” for compensation. No quick and generous payout with no questions asked, for Lambie. On the contrary, she says, “unbeknown to me, the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service … started spying on me with a local private investigator”. Lambie reached the point where she contemplated suicide.

She wrote: “There is a saying in the veterans’ community that the method the DVA uses against veterans is conveyed in three simple words: delay, deny, die. Well, I had had a gutful of the first two, so now I only had the third left.”

Jacquie Lambie with her ibography. Picture: Glenn Ferguson

Lambie was, and is, no outlier. A 2019 Productivity Commission report – A Better Way to Support Veterans – describes numerous submissions to it concerning poor experiences of veterans with the DVA, including one veteran who wrote “nothing in the DVA process … is easy and the treatment of veterans at times applying for a claim is nothing short of contempt for their service of their country”.

The problems continue. In ­August 2022, the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide produced its interim report which said (among many other critical findings) “the Australian government has known for years that the system requires fundamental reform”.

Adding insult to injury, veterans who are permanently impaired or die as a result of their service in the armed forces are paid paltry compensation sums.

No doubt Parliament House, and ministers’ offices, can be a stressful place to work. But can it really compare with the risks and dangers, pain and suffering that our military face? Afghanistan or Canberra – which deserves the solicitude of taxpayers more?

Even judged on its own as a stand-alone matter, taxpayers are entitled to a thoroughgoing investigation into, and explanation of, the settlement of the Higgins claim. Given the role of the Higgins scandal in bringing down the Morrison government, some are wondering whether this was a political payment by the department and the Albanese government.

That is not the end of the matter. This scandalous lottery of different compensation sys­tems with vastly different standards of proof and payment needs root and branch reform. Canberra will no doubt always look after its own first, but does it have to be so unashamedly greedy and ­unjust about it?