Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister representing the Prime Minister (Senator Birmingham) to a question without notice asked by Senator Waters today relating to allegations concerning ministerial staff.

We have a culture problem in this building. How many more examples are we going to be faced with before this government does something about it? We saw this morning incredibly confronting reporting of an actual rape in this very building. That was almost two years ago now. The government has sought to sweep it under the carpet. In examining this issue today I had cause to trawl through history. There have been so many other examples. I'm so disheartened that there still seems to be no action to fix either the culture of this place, and of the Liberal Party in particular, or, ideally, the systems that might prevent this or, at the very least, support survivors of sexual violence and assault.

I asked the Minister representing the Prime Minister a question. Earlier today the Prime Minister belatedly stated that he 'regrets' if Ms Brittany Higgins, the woman who was raped in this building by a Liberal staff colleague, felt unsupported. That does not cut it. Ms Higgins deserves appropriate redress. She deserves a formal apology. She deserves an actual process to clean up this sordid mess so that no other woman has to be subjected to this sort of treatment in the future.

The Prime Minister 'regrets' if she felt unsupported. Well, she did feel unsupported. You can imagine why. She was brought into her employer's office—the very office in which she was raped—and she said she was essentially told not to pursue the matter with police. She left that meeting with the implication that, if she did pursue this matter with police, her own career would be at stake. We know that that is such a common theme in these types of incidents.

Ultimately the AFP got involved, but it has been almost two years and still we have seen no result. The government hasn't even admitted that there is a problem, let alone done anything about it. I asked the minister if they have a policy about this. I asked him if they reviewed that policy—if they even had one—after the example of Ms Higgins; after what happened with Ministers Tudge and Porter, which was recently revealed on Four Corners; and after the examples of Ms Potter and Ms Mani, which was reported nigh on two years ago. The examples just keep coming. Where is the review of your inadequate policies?

The minister saw fit to bang on about the Employee Assistance Program. I'm sure it is a noble program, and, yes, it exists for everyone working under the MOP(S) Act to access, but this is hardly an appropriate response when I asked about Liberal Party policy and whether that has been reviewed to clean up the fact that women are not safe in this building. It is an entirely inadequate response. It is a dodge to the question and it is an insult to all survivors of sexual harassment, assault and rape in this workplace—and anywhere, for that matter. So I was extremely disappointed that the government had the opportunity to say they were doing something and didn't take that opportunity. The natural implication is that they're not doing anything about this. They just want these women to shut up and go away.

Minister Reynolds, who was the woman's employer at the time, was asked, 'What has happened to Ms Higgins?' and she ultimately conceded that Ms Higgins went to work for Minister Cash and might even have had a promotion. That's pretty rare; usually it's the woman who loses her job. One wonders whether or not this promotion, presumably with a slight pay increase, was the price Ms Higgins had to pay. Was that what she got so that she didn't speak out? It just boggles the mind that the government continue to think they can ignore this issue and do nothing about it. The Prime Minister didn't face the media today. That camera-loving Prime Minister, who loves to entertain us all with extremely lengthy press conferences, forwent that opportunity today. One wonders whether or not it is because he is complicit in this cover-up. He should be the person showing some leadership in tackling these issues, because they keep on happening, and yet there's nothing. There's a blandly worded statement where he's sorry—no, he's not even sorry; he 'regrets'—that she feels unsupported. What an absolute joke! I note Brittany said that when she saw the Prime Minister standing with the Young Australian of the Year, Grace Tame, she felt sick in the stomach and thought the government were complicit in silencing her. They are. Fix it! Do better!

Question agreed to.