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Frank
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For a government that talks a great deal about integrity, this settlement raises very serious integrity issues. The Prime Minister, the Attorney-General and the Finance Minister will understand that a scandal that started life as a ticking bomb to bring down the Morrison government may be morphing into a slow-release poison that damages not just federal Labor but the ACT Labor government, too.
Here’s why. First, it stinks to high heaven for the Attorney-General to bully Reynolds into not telling her side of this story, with her silence being bought by a promise to pay her legal bills.
Reynolds had a story to tell. In correspondence seen by The Australian, Reynolds indicated to the government and the department that she wanted to contest Higgins’s claims against her.
Indeed, many of Higgins’s claims in this civil claim had been strongly challenged by Reynolds, and others, in the course of the criminal trial. Freely available transcripts demonstrate significant conflict about the facts, which needed to be resolved.
Why on earth then did bureaucrats in the Department of Finance, in charge of taxpayer money, ignore the fact that those who have been accused of wrongdoing by Higgins have a different story to tell?
A one-day “mediation” makes a mockery of the Legal Services Directions that require the commonwealth to behave as a model litigant.
These directions state that: “A settlement on the basis of legal principle and practice requires the existence of at least a meaningful prospect of liability being established. In particular, settlement is not to be effected merely because of the cost of defending what is clearly a spurious claim.”
What legal principle or practice did the Department of Finance, and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus rely on to justify a multimillion-dollar settlement reached in one day that does not check the veracity of Higgins claims?
It is clear Labor applies its “believe-all-women” mantra only to women who make allegations against Coalition MPs, not to statements by Coalition MPs. Given the Attorney-General forbade Reynolds from telling her side, in return for paying her legal fees, was the department pressured into not checking the veracity of Higgins’s claims? The department knew from the criminal trial that Higgins’s version of relevant facts was dramatically different from the versions given by Reynolds, by Cash and by other witnesses such as Fiona Brown, Reynolds’s chief of staff.
Yet not only did the department take none of the normal steps to ascertain which of those competing versions were true, it didn’t bother getting witness statements from Reynolds, Cash, Brown or others to see if there were other respects in which Higgins’s version of events was contested. It raises the real prospect that this legal settlement is another chapter of the Higgins saga where politics has infected a legal process.
The likely contamination of a commonwealth legal process with partisan politics is deeply troubling. After all, in opposition, Dreyfus, Anthony Albanese and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher made statements last year before the criminal trial, supporting Higgins’s untested allegations of sexual assault.
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The rule of law depends on due process too. What due process was followed here? The Labor government gagged two former Coalition ministers who are alleged of wrongdoing by Higgins, threatening to withdraw funding of legal fees if they turned up to the mediation, and oversaw a settlement of millions to someone whose claims were not verified.
During the trial, an extract from an audio recording was played where Higgins’s boyfriend, David Sharaz, said they wanted the rape allegation exposed at the start of the parliamentary sitting week because he had a “friend” on the Labor side – now known to be Gallagher – who would “probe and continue it”. “So sitting week, story comes out, they have to answer questions in question time, it’s a mess for them,” Sharaz is heard saying during Higgins’s initial six-hour interview with The Project.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/question-of-integrity-latest-chapter-in-brittany-higgins-saga-needs-scrutiny/news-story/e45a5a58b06645b65c9408b72b9fa93c
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Trial of Brittany Higgins's alleged rapist begins (Read 35950 times)
