Scott Morrison deserved slapdown on rape claim shame

The lack of curiosity and humanity shown by our Prime Minister over the past fortnight has been thoroughly disturbing.

It’s ironic how quickly the PM’s media team is to complain about stories it doesn’t like, but when it comes to answering awkward questions or even telling the boss about a Parliament House rape allegation, that urgency fades away. Picture: Getty

The lack of curiosity and humanity shown by our Prime Minister over the past fortnight, following revelations of rape allegations in the nation’s capital, has been thoroughly disturbing. You get the sense that Scott Morrison sees this as a political problem first, a tragedy in need of reform second.

No less than three ministers were aware of the allegations before the PM was, and not one of them bothered to inform him. Morrison’s office was aware too, but apparently didn’t think the issue was important enough to tell the boss about it.

Apart from members of Morrison’s team who knew about the allegations for months and even years without informing the PM, when his office was formally told about them by the media ahead of the matter being made public, no one told the boss even then. Or so we are told.

According to the Prime Minister, he only found out about the alleged rape that occurred just metres from his private office in the parliament when they were posted online. It beggars belief.

Morrison’s office was formally told on the early afternoon of Friday, February 12 by news.com.au and The Project about allegations of rape in the ministerial wing of Parliament House but it didn’t pass that information on to the PM? The media reports went live on the morning of February 15 and that was the first Morrison knew of the matter?

We are supposed to believe that Morrison was kept in the dark between those times. Despite his office going back and forth with the journalists for days. At worst, the claim Morrison knew nothing is a lie. At best, it is incompetent or reveals that his team deliberately kept the PM in the dark, representative of a deeply dysfunctional office, or part of a don’t-ask, don’t-tell culture.

None of these options is acceptable.

Why hasn’t anyone in the PM’s office been summarily dismissed for rank incompetence? Can it be that they haven’t been because they did what was expected of them? As part of a don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy, implicitly or explicitly understood?

But it doesn’t stop there. Morrison has used the floor of parliament to refer to the alleged victim by her first name time and time again. An attempt to project a caring familiarity that belies how the victim feels about her treatment by the PM and others in the government. Brittany Higgins has released a statement accusing Morrison of victim blaming, yet still he disrespects her by calling her by her first name. She has asked that investigations into what his office knew are done independently, yet Morrison has commissioned his former political chief of staff, now head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, to run the investigation. And he won’t even guarantee that the report is made public.

We’ve been down this road before, of course. The same thing happened when the sports rorts saga was at its zenith.

When the rape allegations first surfaced, the PM turned to a rhetorical device he’s used many times: he spoke to his wife, Jenny, and she really cleared things up for him, illuminating how serious the issue was. Putting it in a context he could understand: imagine if it happened to our girls. But this time that framing backfired. At the media conference one journalist asked what most were thinking: shouldn’t you, Prime Minister, have already come to that conclusion as a human being? Without having to get a moral steer from your wife. It was the perfect question, with the PM of course contesting its premise.

Then this week minister Peter Dutton referred to the “he said-she said” allegations. What a wordsmith. That came after it was revealed that last week the Prime Minister’s media team was spreading smears about the alleged victim’s now partner, suggesting her claims were somehow being coloured by his disaffection with the government. It was as grubby as you get. But that is how Team Morrison operates much of the time. It plays its politics hard and sees everything as a political issue.

Labor asked about it in the Senate, with Senate leader Simon Birmingham saying he’d check the veracity of such claims with the PM and report back. That happened this week, with Birmingham issuing a statement that Morrison was unaware of any such backgrounding.

As the person who revealed said backgrounding, I inquired directly with the PM’s director of communications, Andrew Carswell, if Morrison was unaware because of blissful ignorance, or if any effort had been made to find out if backgrounding of the nature alleged happened.

No response. It’s ironic how quickly the PM’s media team is to complain about stories it doesn’t like, but when it comes to answering awkward questions or even telling the boss about a Parliament House rape allegation, that urgency fades away.

Then we have the Defence Minister, who Higgins worked for at the time of the alleged rape, Linda Reynolds. After avoiding media appearances since the story surfaced, she skipped Wednesday’s National Press Club appearance (booked in well in advance) too, because of health issues.

There are plenty of questions she needs to answer, but near the top of the list surely is this: Reynolds has consistently claimed she did the right thing not passing on the allegations to the PM, yet the PM has said she was wrong to keep him in the dark about the allegations. Who is right, the minister or the Prime Minister? Because they can’t both be right.

Finally, for nearly two weeks now we’ve had to listen to Morrison and others claim that they were “empowering” the victim by not reporting the alleged sexual assault to police. To Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s absolute credit, he rejected this view when he said if such an allegation were made in his office he’d report it to authorities.

By the end of this week we found out that the head of the Australian Federal Police has written to the PM warning that delays in reporting crimes can seriously damage investigations and such delays risk alleged perpetrators reoffending. A timely reminder of the consequences of the government’s woeful handling of this matter.

As far as slapdowns of a prime minister go, that one was right up there.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.