Brittany Higgins’ compensation payout clouded by ‘secret’ email
A previously secret email has raised further questions about a multi-million dollar compensation payout to Brittany Higgins.
A previously secret email has raised further questions about the multimillion-dollar payout to Brittany Higgins in compensation for the alleged failure by former minister Linda Reynolds and others to support her in the wake of her rape allegations against fellow staffer Bruce Lehrmann.
Ms Higgins reached a confidential settlement with the commonwealth, believed to be worth up to $3m, at a one-day mediation in December. The Albanese government barred Senator Reynolds from providing evidence in the case, threatening to tear up an agreement to pay her legal fees and any costs awarded unless she agreed not to attend the mediation.
However, an internal departmental email obtained by The Weekend Australian reveals that six days after the alleged sexual assault, the federal agency responsible for overseeing parliamentary staff welfare concluded that all “appropriate” steps were being taken to protect Ms Higgins.
Senator Reynolds’s chief of staff, Fiona Brown had contacted the Department of Finance to ensure all necessary support was being given to Ms Higgins, although at that point, on her own evidence, she had not yet disclosed a sexual assault.
An email from assistant secretary Lauren Barons sets out the steps Ms Brown had already taken, including, notifying Ms Higgins that “should she choose to, she is able to pursue a complaint, including a complaint made to police” and that Ms Brown had “made it very clear that if she requires assistance in making a complaint, you would be willing to support her”.
“In addition, I understand you have discussed with her on several occasions that if she does choose to pursue a complaint, either now or at a later date, she would have the full and ongoing support of yourself and the minister,” Ms Barons writes.
Ms Barons confirms that “I consider the steps you have taken are appropriate … Ultimately any decision as to whether to lodge a police report or pursue any other form of complaint relating to this matter would be a personal choice of the person involved”.
Ms Barons draws attention to recommendations that the person should have “as much control as possible over what to do next” and “may decide not to report to police, or not to have a medical or examination … This is their choice and must be respected. For a referral to be made on her behalf or without her consent or against her wishes could be harmful to her”.
The Barons email was never presented in evidence during Ms Higgins’s civil claim against the commonwealth. Neither Senator Reynolds nor Liberal Party frontbencher Michaelia Cash, on whose staff Ms Higgins later served, was asked for evidence that contested Ms Higgins’s claims.
Senator Reynolds says the Barons email confirmed in writing “that we had actually done everything in the circumstances that we could have done and should have done” for Ms Higgins.
“If we’d done anything more at the time, we would’ve been violating her agency,” she says.
“Fiona had done all the right things, absolutely everything that she was advised to do, but she was also advised about agency. And you can see that in that note that if Brittany or anybody else hasn’t made an allegation of rape, then you can’t force them to do anything. But you can be there to support, which as you can see from all those actions, (Fiona) was.”
Senator Reynolds says she acted in the way that any executive in a major corporation would have done under the circumstances.
“If you were a staff member in BHP … thinking about whether you were going to make a complaint, if you were talking to police and counsellors, would you want someone else to tell the CEO? Doing so without their permission is a violation of their agency.”
Senator Reynolds says she requested a private meeting with Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins on February 23, 2021 and in late September 2021 met her again for an extended interview for her report that was precipitated by the Higgins scandal. “She (Jenkins) was unable to advise me what more I could have done.” A previously secret email has raised further questions about a multimillion-dollar compensation payout to Brittany Higgins
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