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Political games and the exemplary punishment of Brittany Higgins
The campaign to destroy Higgins continues, fuelled by leaked texts and deep anger that she has dared embarrass powerful institutions.
Even by the standards of Coalition-News Corp campaigns against Labor, the conspiracy theory about Brittany Higgins and her partner David Sharaz working with Labor to “weaponise” Higgins’ allegations of sexual assault in the office of then-defence minister Linda Reynolds in 2021 is particularly thin, and particularly hypocritical.
The claim that then-opposition Senator Katy Gallagher misled Parliament turns out, on closer inspection, to have been a heated argument in Senate estimates after Reynolds effectively accused Labor of initiating Higgins’ allegations (“I know where this started”), prompting a furious reaction from Labor’s then-foreign affairs spokeswoman Senator Penny Wong and Gallagher. As opposed to, say, a prime minister standing up in question time with a prepared answer that was a blatant lie about the status of the “Gaetjens review” of how many people in the prime minister’s office knew of the allegations.
🔍📰 **BREAKING NEWS: 9th April 2024 – Media Madness Unveiled!**
🔥 Hold onto your hats, folks! The media circus surrounding Brittany Higgins’ alleged sexual assault case has taken yet another bizarre turn, and boy, oh boy, is it a doozy! 🎪🤹♂️
🔎 Let’s break it down, shall we? On one side, we’ve got Pigsfly News, digging deep into the political maneuvers and noteworthy consequences of this troubling incident. They’re peeling back the layers, exposing the gritty realities often swept under the rug by mainstream narratives. 💡💼
🔥 But wait, there’s more! Enter Richard Ackland’s scathing critique in The Guardian, shining a harsh spotlight on the self-absorbed distortions rampant in media coverage of sexual assault cases. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion, folks, as these media moguls shamelessly exploit every last drop of victimhood for their own gain. 🚂💥
🔥 And here’s the kicker: While the media indulges in its self-serving storytelling frenzy, poor Brittany Higgins is left in the dust, grappling with the underlying destruction of her life and her quest for justice. It’s a tale as old as time, folks: victim sidelined, media hogging the limelight. 🎬🎥
👀 So what’s the takeaway, you ask? Well, buckle up, because it’s a wild ride: The media’s insatiable thirst for sensationalism is driving the narrative off a cliff, leaving justice in the rearview mirror. It’s time to cut through the noise and demand accountability from those who claim to speak for the voiceless. 🗣️💥
💪 Let’s stand together, friends, and say enough is enough! No more feeding the media beast at the expense of real lives and real justice. It’s time to reclaim the narrative and put the focus where it belongs: on the victims and their quest for truth. 💪🔍
🔗 Share if you’re ready to hold the media accountable and stand up for justice! Together, we can make a difference. #JusticeForBrittany #MediaMadnessUnveiled 📣🔍
Scott Morrison’s office also sought to background journalists against Sharaz in an effort to portray Higgins’ allegations as politically motivated. The “weaponise” conspiracy theory has been peddled from day one, and it’s been false since day one.
Many in the media, it seems, still can’t understand the deep anger that Higgins’ allegations (denied by her alleged assailant), historic allegations about Christian Porter (again, denied by Porter), other revelations about how toxic Parliament House was for women, and the Morrison government’s comprehensive failure to address them, elicited among so many people. The tens of thousands of women who attended March 4 Justice rallies not just in Canberra but in other cities could not have been an authentic reaction to a government profoundly out of touch with, if not actively hostile to, the idea of safer workplaces and better protections against sexual assault, bullying and harassment. Instead, it must have been the result of a left-wing conspiracy.
And all along, the desire to destroy Higgins, to publicly punish her as an example of what happens to those who threaten people in power, has driven a sordid media campaign fuelled by leaks. Last year I explored how the campaign against Higgins — the smears, the interference in the trial of the man she accuses of raping her, the extensive leaking of information by the Australian Federal Police — reflected a systemic response to the threat that she posed to those in power.
Since then, particularly with the leaking of her private communications, the campaign to destroy her has only escalated, and its perpetrators — an aggrieved political party and its apparatchiks, its media supporters, a deeply compromised and politicised federal police — have been joined by other media companies (coincidentally, in Seven and the Daily Mail, both owned by right-wing billionaires).
Buried within the most recent attacks, based on the leaking of texts to politicians and staff, is the insistence that there was something fundamentally illegitimate about Higgins and Sharaz attempting to generate political interest in her efforts to obtain justice and expose the toxic culture of Parliament House. Real rape victims, the suggestion appears to be, simply let the criminal justice system do its job, rather than trying to engage politicians, especially opposition politicians.
As every woman in Australia knows, just letting the criminal justice system do its job with alleged rapists virtually guarantees the rapist will walk free. Even with a greater willingness of women to report sexual assault, and a greater willingness of police forces and prosecutors to take the crime seriously, the conviction rate remains a source of national shame, with estimates varying between 3% and 12% of cases. It seems the last place that sexual assault victims will get justice from is the justice system.
If Higgins and Sharaz are guilty of anything, it’s only what there’s an entire industry devoted to in Canberra: seeking to influence politicians to achieve an outcome. In their case, it’s an outcome they should be proud of — the Commonwealth Parliament finally took steps to curb the toxic nature of employment of political staffers and provide more avenues of redress for those who are victims of assault, harassment and bullying.
It’s OK for large corporations, media companies and the super-rich to influence politicians, it seems, but a woman alleging sexual assault? An outrage. Higgins, it’s implied, deserves to have her texts leaked, for engaging in such an activity.
She was, in other words, asking for it.
And no one is demanding that we see the texts exchanged between lobbyists, corporate executives, tycoons and politicians and journalists — something that would be far more revelatory of how power really works in Australia than the leaking of Higgins’ texts.
As many have noted, the signal that the latest attacks on Higgins sends to all women is to discourage them from reporting sexual assault at all, in fear of the colossal invasion of privacy that will be the result. That is one of the goals, not merely collateral damage.
Higgins’ ordeal is exemplary punishment by a system of power, intended to convey to all women that accusing a man of sexual assault will expose them to painful consequences, and not just confined to watching him walk away free. And for women who dare to do so when it embarrasses those in power, the pain will be profound indeed.
This article was originaly published by Bernard Keane Crikey’s Politics Editor Bernard Keane
Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.
The role of the AFP in the trial of Bruce Lehrmann, who was alleged to have raped fellow former Liberal party staffer Brittany Higgins, which he denies, has been under constant scrutiny. A senior detective who investigated Higgins’ allegation admitted they made a mistake providing sensitive counselling notes to prosecutors and defence lawyers, and Australia’s national law enforcement anti-corruption watchdog is currently investigating alleged leaks to the media by the AFP about Higgins during Lehrmann’s now-abandoned trial.
Indeed, questions are only getting louder regarding how personal texts and recorded conversations picked up by AFP as evidence are now finding their way into the media.
Raids, raids, raids
In June 2019, the AFP raided the home of then-News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst over a story she had published a year earlier concerning a deeply embarrassing revelation for the government: that the Home Affairs and Defence heads at the time had developed a plan to empower the Australian Signals Directorate to spy on and target Australians within Australia. It was a busy week — the very next day the AFP raided the ABC’s Ultimo offices over a series of 2017 stories alleging unlawful killing by Australian troops in Afghanistan.
This special treatment seemingly reserved for organisations who embarrassed the Liberal Party wasn’t just limited to the media. The Department of Home Affairs offices in Canberra were raided in August 2018 as part of an investigation into leaks against Peter Dutton, home affairs minister at the time, over his interventions to save from deportation a number of foreign au pairs linked to politically connected figures and Dutton’s old colleagues.
Abandoned investigations
There’s an interesting corollary — the investigations the AFP decided weren’t worth pursuing. In 2017, the AFP, at the behest of the Registered Organisations Commission (ROC) — itself acting on a referral from then-industrial relations minister Michaelia Cash — raided the Australian Workers’ Union offices, following up on decade-old allegations of vague financial impropriety that conveniently might have been damaging to then-opposition leader Bill Shorten.
That someone had helpfully ensured that the media would be there to capture it became the focus of an ongoing investigation. By January 2019, the AFP announced no charges would be laid over the matter, after Cash had pursued the cunning legal strategy of refusing to talk to them.
The next month, The Australian’s Simon Benson received a leaked classified ministerial briefing from ASIO and Border Force that warned the contentious medevac bill — then being debated in Parliament, and aimed at allowing refugees to transfer to mainland Australia on medical grounds — would “compromise Australia’s strong border protection regime”.
Benson and the Oz suffered no equivalent raids to Smethurst and the ABC, and by June, the investigation was quietly dropped, perhaps on account of the effort it would take to follow up on all 11 people who received the classified file.
Michael Bradley recently wrote in Crikey: So here we are, earnestly debating whether Katy Gallagher misled Parliament and whether, if she did, that was worse than the acts and omissions of Linda Reynolds, Scott Morrison or Peter Dutton — a forensic analysis of who knew what and when, playing out daily for our prurient titillation in the nation’s media.
And the weaponry being so freely deployed? Private text messages. Internal notes of rape crisis services. Leaks. Sources. Hansard. The stuff of the happiest days of the Canberra press corps, when they’re on the pack-hunt for a scalp.
For the media, what choice? It’s as newsworthy as news ever gets, the biggest scandal in federal politics ever, tragedy and farce intertwining constantly as the soap opera unfolds, as the mindless quest to get to the bottom of the “truth” ploughs ever ahead, consuming everything in its path.
The truth. Two people know a truth, of what in their minds happened that night in Parliament House. It is an abstract truth, subjective like all human experience, arbitrary when judged through the legal lenses we apply to it. It isn’t the point, much as we’d prefer to believe it is.
The sole truth of relevance is that a young woman reported what she said had happened to her, something horrific and intolerable. She chose a course, as was her right, to forgo anonymity and pursue a criminal complaint. That course failed, with the resulting circus rendering the process unsafe except at unacceptable risk to the complainant herself.
The law having failed to help, various actors have chosen to carry on by different means, but means to what end? A day in court, asking a Federal Court judge to determine on the balance of probabilities whether or not a crime occurred, in the context of a defamation trial? If that’s our idea of good and sensible justice, I give up.
Or what? A continuation of this trial by media, the conflagration that will destroy reputations, maybe careers, but get us no closer to the much-demanded but unachievable reckoning of knowing, once and for all, who was telling the truth.
If, as I keep seeing, people think that the real question here is to ask who gains from the leaks, then no, they’re asking the wrong question. It is obvious that the case of Higgins/Lehrmann was compromised by agendas a long time before it became public property. Whose agendas, some are easy to guess, others far more obscure. The result is that nobody comes out of this shitshow unsmeared.
It will, like every public spectacle, eventually end, when there’s no new revelation to be unveiled, when the competing camps tire of the fight because even they realise it’s going nowhere.
If it bleeds, it leads. What we don’t see, when the story is one of personal trauma, is that the bleeding is arterial. We don’t see that each front page, each leak, each speculation, judgement, analysis and picking over of the entrails, each and every word inflicts new wounds or breaks open old ones. Under all this is a person who, believe her or not, is suffering.
I was asked recently by a journalist, one who cares, what lessons I think there are in this debacle. For me, there’s one, notwithstanding the thousand ways in which so many individuals and institutions have failed during its disastrous course. It is that our starting point and our constant guide should be not judgment, not the insistent rush for truth, but empathy.
Empathy is not sympathy, nor is it uncritical belief. It is the essence of how we can navigate awfulness with humanity.
I would not walk a mile in Brittany Higgins’ shoes.
