6PR with Gary Adshead
Topics: Katy Gallagher, Brittany Higgins, National Anti-Corruption Commission
9 June 2023
E&OE.
Gary Adshead
Okay, well the moment the former Liberal Government staffer Brittany Higgins claimed that she was raped on a minister’s couch inside Parliament House in Canberra, a political time bomb went off. And when she said publicly during that now tainted interview in 2021 with Channel 10’s Lisa Wilkinson that she felt unsupported by her Liberal bosses after the alleged rape, then allegations of a political conspiracy were sure to follow. The whole salacious saga has ended in a complete train wreck, and I have to say I am hardly shocked by that. The case against the accused rapist Bruce Lehrmann was dropped before he could be afforded natural justice. A subsequent inquiry into the case has left the prosecutor’s reputation hanging by a thread. Brittany Higgins’ mental health is said to be a mess. And now Lisa Wilkinson’s credibility and standing as a journalist is looking rather shaky. But the saga is far from over. And now a series of recordings and text messages involving Higgins, her boyfriend David Shraaz, Wilkinson and the Channel 10 producer have turned the allegations of a conspiracy back towards the federal Labor Party. There are calls this morning for Federal Finance and Women’s Minister Katy Gallagher to resign amid claims she misled Parliament about her knowledge of the rape and involvement in using it to hurt the Morrison Government. Both the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Deputy Richard Marles have defended Minister Gallagher during interviews this morning. Take a listen:
Anthony Albanese
What is being suggested here by Peter Dutton, you had allegations by a Liberal staffer that another Liberal staffer had had a sexual assault in a Liberal Minister’s office, and somehow Katy Gallagher has some responsibility for what was going on here. Like this is bizarre.
Richard Marles
Katy has made her position very clear earlier in the week and she’s made clear that she’s very comfortable with the statements that she’s made. And that’s the end of the matter in terms of Katy’s position. I mean, Katy is a person of enormous integrity.
Gary Adshead
So that finishes there with Richard Marles, the Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister. WA Liberal Senator and Shadow Attorney-General Michaelia Cash is certainly pursuing this and she joins me on the line now. Thanks very much for your time, Senator.
Senator Cash
Great to be with you.
Gary Adshead
Okay, now this has become a “who-knew-what-and-when” issue for the Albanese Government. Why does that matter in what started as a rape allegation?
Senator Cash
Because what we now see is this was the, literally, political weaponization and exploitation by the Australian Labor Party and potentially journalists like Lisa Wilkinson, of a) a rape allegation and b) the person who made the rape allegation. But not only that, Gary, the emergence now of key text messages raises important questions about the actions of Senator Gallagher in relation to this matter, statements she has previously made to the Australian Senate. She needs to come clean, as does the Prime Minister, with the Australian people and clearly answer the questions: what did Senator Gallagher know and when did she know it? And has she misled the Australian Senate.
Gary Adshead
Right. So I’ll play that exchange. So this is an exchange between Brittany Higgins’ former boss, Defence Minister at the time Linda Reynolds, Labor’s Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher during a committee hearing in Parliament in June 2021. And that date is crucial to this suggestion that Gallagher has misled parliament. So here’s that exchange:
Senator Reynolds
I was told by one of your Senators two weeks before about what you were intending to do with a story in my office. Two weeks before.
Senator Wong
I had no knowledge of this.
Senator Gallagher
No one had any knowledge. How dare you. It’s all about protecting yourself.
Gary Adshead
So that’s Katy Gallagher saying to the Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, it’s all about protecting yourself. Okay. How can you be certain that the comment about having no knowledge relates to the rape, Senator?
Senator Cash
Well, again, Katy Gallagher is the one who needs to answer those questions and she has not done that. We now have a timeline of events that show that despite Senator Gallagher saying in Estimates on the 4th of June 2021 that, “No one had any knowledge. How dare you”, and they were discussing the rape allegations, it would appear, based on the text messages, that she did. And in fact, according to the text messages, she was provided with a copy of the Project interview on the 11th of February 2021, before the Project interview went to air. The key here, Gary, is this, for a government that came to power, promising a new era of integrity and transparency, the responses given to these serious issues by now both the Prime Minister, the Attorney-General, and Senator Gallagher are totally deficient. They just need to be up front with the Australian people and tell the Australian people: what did Senator Gallagher know and when did she know it? But more than that, I think the Project and Channel 10 should actually release the full five hour recording. We’re getting snippets of it now, through the media. Why don’t they just release the full five hour recording so all Australians can listen to it and make their own judgments?
Gary Adshead
I would suggest that they wouldn’t want to do that because there might be some more embarrassing extracts from it. On that. I’ll jump a little bit ahead here to what I was planning to do because you’ve just said it. But out of these recordings, and we’ll probably have to come to sort of how they’ve made it into the public arena in a second, but out of these recordings, I mean, there’s ludicrous conversations going on because they’re all sort of sitting there clinking glasses of wine and having a meal while discussing how they’re going to do this interview with Brittany, and Brittany sitting there agreeing to what she should be asked and what she should say, and so on. So it’s all a little bit, it’s very uncomfortable. But there is this moment now that’s just surfaced which has brought on a sort of a side show of allegations, if you like, and this is Lisa Wilkinson when they’re talking about Jacinta Price, who is of course an Indigenous member of parliament now, and they’re discussing her in terms of where the Liberals are at, your people are at, in terms of getting Indigenous representation into parliament. So have a listen to it, and particularly the last line by Lisa Wilkinson about her cleaner.
Senator Cash
Correct, exactly.
Lisa Wilkinson
Has preselected over 20 new and wonderfully diverse and strong female candidates like, and what’s her name Nam, Nam-pin-jumba? She’s an Indigenous woman. As soon as I looked at it I thought, Oh, your joking.
Angus Llewellyn
I know brown people.
David Sharaz
It’s like, I’m not racist. I have a black friend.
Lisa Wilkinson
And our cleaner’s black!
Gary Adshead
“My cleaner’s black” or “our cleaner’s black” is what Lisa Wilkinson said there, and I don’t know if you know, but who said “we know brown people”? Is that Sharaz?
Senator Cash
It’s either Sharaz or it is Llewellyn, it would be one of the two. But it doesn’t matter, there were three involved in that conversation. It is a complete, total and utter disgrace, in particular when it comes to someone like Lisa Wilkinson, for her entire career she has loved to take the moral high ground and lecture the rest of us on what we should all be doing. Well quite frankly, she has now been exposed for her total, complete and utter hypocrisy. And quite frankly, in relation to Senator, and it’s pronounced, Nampijinpa Price, for everybody’s information, she did more in her first five minutes being elected to the Australian Senate than Lisa Wilkinson has done in her entire career when it comes to highlighting the plight of disadvantaged Indigenous people. So I’m with Jacinta Price here: if Lisa Wilkinson has any spine whatsoever, and the Project, they should front the media today and give an apology to Senator Nampijinpa Price, and quite frankly, all Australians for a) the comments but b) the total hypocrisy.
Gary Adshead
You know, people always have unfortunate comments made during private conversations, but this has now become part of a very big political story.
Senator Cash
Correct, and Gary these were not unfortunate comments. There was the clinking of glasses, there was the drinking of wine, there was the joking and laughing about a senator’s name that then actually, you know, snowballed in to. That is why, quite frankly, Channel 10 and The Project should release the full five hours so we can all understand exactly what went on. Because also I thought Lisa Wilkinson was meant to be a journalist and report the facts. This is advocacy, nothing more, and nothing less. She has crossed over a line and that is now reflected in the comments that are coming out in this interview.
Gary Adshead
And certainly the way, and for people that find this difficult to follow, that’s a recording before the actual sit down interview with The Project. So you’ve got Lisa Wilkinson, essentially coaching Brittany Higgins on what sort of things to talk about and what to say. Okay, now let’s just get back to the serious business though of this suggestion by Peter Dutton that elements of this now need to be looked at by the new National Anti-Corruption Commission. Now this payment, you’d have understanding, you were Attorney-General in the previous government, this payment that was made to Brittany Higgins quite quickly when Labor took power, what do we know about what it was for, that payment?
Senator Cash
Well, we actually don’t, and that’s the issue. So what Peter Dutton has said is a) the Prime Minister is not being upfront, you know, nothing to see here, totally blown out of the water by the text messages. Okay, so what the text messages now indicate is there appears to have been collusion involving senior members of the Labor Party, and what that demands is a proper investigation into the process leading up to and the actual settlement itself. In other words, was an appropriate process followed? Because Australians should actually be able to know an appropriate process was followed. There does now need to be an inquiry into that. All Mr Albanese needs to do is front the Australian people and answer the question. But if he doesn’t, if he does not do that, well then quite frankly it should be referred to the new National Anti-Corruption Commission, bearing in mind it doesn’t formally commence, of course, until the 1st of July.
Gary Adshead
Okay, because I mean it’s a lot to take in here, but in a nutshell, and I’m saying this, you can agree or not agree, but you would expect that someone who had been through an ordeal of a rape inside Parliament House would be entitled, because she was employed there, to some form of compensation, but no one’s been convicted of that. That has not been, well it hasn’t really even been tested by the court because the matter was just dropped. So if it’s around $3 million, reportedly, apparently Brittany Higgins says it’s less than that, but if it’s in the millions of dollars, then you would beg the question: well is it because she felt she wasn’t being supported enough by her managers in that case, and that’s why she’s been compensated?
Senator Cash
And I think you saw that there was in The Daily Telegraph this morning, comments in relation to the support she actually did get throughout the process. But let’s put that aside. What we now have is a Prime Minister saying, an Attorney-General saying, a Minister for Finance saying, there is nothing to see here. But the problem is Gary, every day now when we wake up, there is more and more evidence on the front page of newspapers across Australia, which clearly contradicts the “nothing-to-see-here” attitudes. Australians have a right to know, was a proper process followed? The mediation itself was but a matter of hours. The Attorney-General needs to front the Australian people and actually say how within a matter of hours, a settlement of this nature could have been reached. That’s all we want to know at this point in time, the proper process leading up to and the actual settlement itself, because everything that has now been rolled out, everything that is now coming out by way of text messages and evidence, shows or appears to show, there has been collusion involving senior members of the Australian Labor Party. They have deliberately chosen to both politically exploit and weaponize a) an allegation of rape but b) the person who made the allegation of rape. And there are very serious questions, which must now be answered.
Gary Adshead
Sometimes when you weaponize something, it blows up in your face. It looks like it’s all blowing up to me. Michaelia Cash, Liberal Senator who is Shadow Attorney-General, thanks for joining us.
Senator Cash
Thank you, Gary.
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