Yes, Prime Minister, this is all your responsibility

It’s now clear why so many trolls ­within parliament loathed Peta Credlin and why it suited them to get rid of her.

Former Liberal staffer Peta Credlin.

What does any of this have to do with Scott Morrison? How is he responsible for the rancid workplace culture in Parliament House?

Spinners within the Prime Minister’s office have been putting that question around for the best part of a week.

Well, here’s how — but hold onto your hats, because what follows isn’t pretty.

Imagine, if you can, a security guard doing the rounds at, say, a high-end car dealership.

It is after 2am when he opens the door to one of the offices and finds a completely naked woman comatose on the floor.

What does he do? What would you do? Get on the walkie-talkie — and maybe even call the police?

Well, not if you’re in Canberra, where you can apparently just leave her there, because she’s an employee with a security pass, so apparently it’s all OK.

Except that she will later say that she was raped.

Now try to imagine a situation where a junior employee of, let’s say, one of the big four banks saunters into his boss’s office and ejaculates all over the desk. Mind-boggling. But it, too, happens in Canberra.

Now, just as an aside, try to imagine a young woman doing such a thing: sitting with her legs apart, self-pleasuring in the CEO’s corner suite, and taking a video to share with her friends?

Impossible.

Womens’ Minister Marise Payne has been MIA. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Morrison’s team tried this week to put around the idea that such behaviour in fact happens everywhere.

It doesn’t happen everywhere. It happens where employees think that they can get away with it — because they have always got away with it. Where it has been normalised.

Those young men who ejaculated on an MP’s desk didn’t fear dobbing and they didn’t fear consequences. Therefore, the culture in Canberra allows it. Therefore, we can conclude that many who work with that poor MP inside our Parliament House hold the institution, and the women who work there, in contempt.

From there, we can conclude that it isn’t the people’s house. It’s their house. They set the rules, and the rules inform the culture, and it’s a vile one for women, brimful of gossip and nasty slurs, drunken groping, sexual abuse and harassment.

Anyone who has ever been near the place already knows this, of course, which is why ­sensible people never go there.

Can you also now see why so many of the flogs and trolls ­within parliament loathed Peta Credlin?

She was tough, uncompromising, and insisted on high standards. So they smeared her, and — with a little help from political commentators — put rumours of an affair with her boss on the record. Hardly anyone stood up for her. It suited them to get rid of her. How pathetic of the Fourth Estate to join them.

Peta Credlin and husband Brian Loughnane. Picture: Nikki Short

But she was right, wasn’t she?

This is the nation’s capital we’re talking about. Parliament House should be the gold standard when it comes to professionalism. Canberra is where you send your representatives — say those last two words slowly, to let the meaning really sink in — to take up your interests. It is where public servants — saythose last two words just as carefully, since they’re equally important — toil on your behalf.

How is it that these people — politicians, and their offices — are employing staff who run around drunk, groping women, playing with themselves, and ­giggling about it?

That is what this scandal around stinking male behaviour at Parliament House is really about. How has this become the standard?

There is some weight to the argument that the PM can’t be blamed for the rank behaviour uncovered this month.

No one doubts that he finds such behaviour abhorrent. He does need to take responsibility, however. He needs to say, this is intolerable. This. Is. Intolerable.

He then needs to say: we are going to eradicate this behaviour from our midst. We are going to make Parliament House the best — the fairest and boldest — place in the country to work. Everyone will be treated with respect.

It is one thing to talk. He also needs to act. Morrison on February 17 announced an “independent review” of the workplace culture, which has seasoned types rolling their eyes. It will be in the form of a report, which will gather dust.

Under pressure, Scott Morrison gets narky. Pushed on an issue, he becomes defensive and argumentative, as he tries to shift blame and avoid responsibility. Nathan Edwards

He has announced an investigation into the Brittany Higgins matter, which stalled before the lead investigator even got around to speaking to the young woman, who was found passed-out, naked, in Linda Reynolds’ office.

He has a Minister for Women, Marise Payne, who declined to show her face at the women’s march. She was busy, she said.

But she was listening! From inside the building, with a drinking glass to the wall maybe.

Show some courage, Marise. They weren’t going to bite you.

Morrison could and should have ordered his minister to go out to meet the marchers.

What a moment, to hear those women roar. But no.

Then we had the performance of the Prime Minister himself, on Tuesday this week.

He started so well.

“We must get our house in order,’’ he said. “I’m shocked and I’m disgusted. It is shameful.

“I was completely stumped (by the most recent revelations) as I have been on more than one occasion over the course of this last month.

“These events have triggered, right across this building and indeed right across the country, women who have put up with this rubbish and this crap for their entire lives, as their mothers did, as their grandmothers did.

“There are some people who have done some despicable things in this place and these things are just so foreign to me that I can hardly process them.

“I have heard about being marginalised, women being intimidated, women being belittled, women being diminished, and women being objectified … That is not OK. That is not ­acceptable.”

This was a good, strong speech.

Close observers of Morrison may be able to guess what happened when he was pushed on the detail, however. He spat out some gossip, insisting that other workplaces also have issues with harassment, by referring to News Corp. He got it wrong. The event of which he spoke had nothing to do with sexual harassment, but that’s how it sounded, coming out of the PM’s mouth.

Reporter Sally Whyte said on Twitter: “How horrific for the woman who made an HR complaint about being harassed by someone in her workplace, to have it used as a comeback by the PM.”

This isn’t what happened, and so the Prime Minister had to spend Tuesday evening apologising all over again.

But that’s not Morrison’s biggest problem. In his petulant exchange with reporters, he again displayed what many on the Labor side long ago detected. Gleefully, too, since this information will be handy come election time.

Under pressure, he gets narky. Pushed on an issue, he becomes defensive and argumentative, as he tries to shift blame and avoid responsibility.

It’s a variation of what happened after the bushfires.

I don’t hold the hose, mate, he said then. Yes, you do, Prime Minister. Yes, you do.