Former senator and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds is on a roll of serving up cold, hard dishes of revenge. Having won a vindicating defamation case against Brittany Higgins and her husband David Sharaz, both of whom are now subject to bankruptcy proceedings, Reynolds is going for their most powerful enablers.
In a move that threatens to reopen the bitter “mean girls” saga, Linda Reynolds is seeking a parliamentary inquiry into the Brittany Higgins scandal that would include an investigation into whether two of Labor’s most senior figures, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, misled parliament.
The third in the triumvirate of Mean Girls, Kristina Keneally, is already out of the picture, having been tossed out yet again by voters, with such thoroughness that not even Labor’s unflushable Quota Queen could bob back up out of the political s-bend.
To bring Good Oil readers up to speed, this all falls out from the Brittany Higgins/Bruce Lehrmann scandal, in which Higgins claimed she was raped in the then-senator’s office by Lehrmann, for whom both worked as staffers, after a night of heavy drinking. The scandal was rapidly weaponised by the then-Labor opposition, the legacy media and Higgins and Sharaz, as part of a concerted operation to ‘get’ the Morrison government.
Higgins concocted a now-demolished story that Reynolds victimised her after she made the initial allegations. Those claims resulted in Reynolds’ massive defamation win this year.
Anthony Albanese’s closest confidantes, Katy Gallagher and Penny Wong, were drip-fed false information by David Sharaz and Brittany Higgins as part of a larger plan to destroy the career of Liberal senator Linda Reynolds and take down the Morrison government, explosive court documents allege.
Mr Sharaz also organised meetings between Ms Higgins and Labor members of parliament to discuss her rape allegations, the documents say, including then opposition leader Mr Albanese and Tanya Plibersek, as well as former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd.
Gallagher and fellow “Mean Girls” Penny Wong and Kristina Keneally led the attack on Reynolds in question time. Sharaz and Higgins exchanged gloating messages that showed them scheming to ultimately damage the then-government. In a recorded meeting with journalists, Sharaz discussed the strategic timing for airing their interview with Higgins. Sharaz asked them to time the interview with either the beginning of parliamentary sitting, or senate estimates hearings.
[Linda Reynolds] has written to the Speaker of the House and the president of the Senate asking for a joint inquiry into parliament’s handling of the allegations, alleging that Labor senators and members were allowed to become “judge, jury and executioner” of coalition parliamentarians and their staff.
“The conflation and unchecked political weaponisation by Labor of Ms Higgins’ criminal and civil allegations under the cover of parliamentary privilege significantly contributed to the creation of the largest and longest political scandal in our nation’s history,” Ms Reynolds says in her letter to the presiding officers.
Key to the allegations of misleading parliament is Gallagher’s furious denial at a senate estimates hearing that she was tipped off about the rape allegations before they became public. After the Higgins and Sharaz texts surfaced, Gallagher was forced to admit that she was “provided with information in the days before the allegations were first reported”.
No doubt the ghost of Kimberley Kitching will be watching with great interest.
The “mean girls” tag was applied to senators Gallagher, Wong and Kristina Keneally by the late Labor senator Kimberley Kitching because of their belittling behaviour towards her. Kitching had become aware before the Higgins’ allegations became public that Labor was intending to weaponise a rape allegation and had protested against it.
When Kitching died of a heart attack in 2022, allegations that the Mean Girls’ bullying had driven her to death quickly surfaced. Anthony Albanese refused to call an investigation into the allegations.
Reynolds is also taking aim at the whole, shabby edifice of ‘dirt units’.
In her letter, the former senator also requests that a joint parliamentary inquiry or an independent review consider the appropriateness of taxpayer-funded parliamentary staff working in political “dirt units” to assist MPs and ministers “research and execute political attacks under parliamentary privilege”.
The inquiry would examine how parliamentary privilege “can be preserved and managed to encourage members and senators to align their parliamentary behaviour with the laws they make for all other workplaces” […]
“When Labor senators stood, turned their backs on me and left the Senate chamber as I started my valedictory speech, it confirmed my deepest suspicions and fears that neither the Labor government nor Labor’s parliamentary leaders would ever acknowledge, apologise or remediate the devastating consequences of their behaviour.
Remember when Albanese blatherskited about raising parliamentary standards, and promised to transform federal parliament into a family-friendly, respectful and transparent workplace?
Yeah, that one went the way of all his other promises.
