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The grift just never ends. Just a few years after she scarfed up nearly one-and-a-half-million taxpayer dollars because, she claimed, she would be unable to work for at least 40 years, Brittany Higgins has been appointed executive director of Vida Fund, a gender equity advocacy group (oddly, gender equality doesn’t extend to themselves: every single one of their team is a woman).
Her likely salary is hard to determine, given that the group doesn’t appear to have lodged any annual reports and many of its webpages listed in search engines simply do not exist (their donations page works just fine, oddly enough). All we can find is that the group was founded in early 2025 with $100,000 seed money.
It’s a dark little web these lefty NGOs weave, indeed.
At the same time, the other half of the ‘bankrupt’ couple, Higgins’ oleaginous husband David Sharaz, is working as ‘media manager’ for another dodgy lefty activist group, GetUp. Sharaz was last seen at Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club address, where he suspiciously waited just long enough to photograph GetUp’s silly banner stunt, before waddling off as fast as his legs could carry him.
All of which is no doubt of immense interest to former MP Linda Reynolds, who is still owed over a million dollars by the couple. Higgins and Sharaz declared bankruptcy last December. Australian law typically imposes severe restrictions on bankrupts for at least three years and one day. Their income is subject to assessment by a trustee, and may be garnished to make payments to creditors, if it exceeds a certain threshold.
Interestingly, the trustees appointed in this bankruptcy appear to be having trouble finding where all the taxpayers’ money went.
More than $1m of the $2.4m Brittany Higgins received in her compensation payout from the Albanese government is yet to be located by her appointed trustee in bankruptcy.
Ms Higgins was declared bankrupt in December last year after failing to pay any of the more than $1m damages and costs she owes to former Liberal minister Linda Reynolds, who won a defamation case against her former staffer.
The trustee has told Ms Reynolds it appears there is virtually nothing left in the Brittany Higgins Protective Trust, set up to protect the mammoth payout, with just $3000 remaining in the trust’s bank account as at February this year.
The trustee reports just $3,000 left in the account as of February this year. So, where did all the taxpayer-funded millions go?
After accounting for Ms Higgins’ own legal costs, her living expenses and her purchase of a now-sold house in France, a substantial amount of the taxpayer-funded $2.4m settlement remains yet to be located. The trustee found that large sums were transferred overseas and to related parties, including her husband David Sharaz and others who have not been identified.
Records for the transfers are incomplete or missing entirely, despite legal obligations to produce them.
Ms Reynolds told the Australian she was shocked that the trustee in bankruptcy had found that complete records for the large amounts transferred had not been produced, despite a legal obligation to do so […]
“After months of investigations by the bankruptcy trustee, his report to me raises many more questions than it provides answers,” Ms Reynolds said.
Reynolds is already facing the loss of her own home to cover the legal costs Higgins refuses to pay. Now she is told she may have to stump up another $100,000 just to chase the missing funds. Reynolds was blunt: the couple had money available at the time of the judgment but chose not to pay.
Now, the money has apparently just vanished.
The spending that has been traced tells its own story. Between April 2023 and December 2024, at least $470,000 went on living expenses, travel and a lavish wedding at the Valley Estate on the Gold Coast. The bride wore a $30,000 Paolo Sebastian gown. In September 2023 the trust paid $620,000, described as a “loan” to Higgins, for a house in rural France. The couple had already holidayed in the Maldives, Geneva, London and Paris. The house was later sold for around $600,000, but full records of that sale were never provided to the trustee.
Requests by the trustee for the full records of the house sale were not met.
From July, a number of withdrawals were made from the account, including $500,000 to Carmel Galati, Ms Higgins’ lawyer in the Reynolds defamation case.
Another $350,000 went to accounts linked to Higgins, Sharaz and associated entities. At one point the loan to Higgins from the trust ballooned to nearly $2 million. Reynolds noted the “lavish lifestyle they enjoy” sits oddly with their claim of being broke.
The Albanese government handed over $2.4 million of public money with indecent haste after a one-day mediation from which Reynolds was excluded. To someone whom a court later ruled made “objectively false statements”. Nearly half of it has now disappeared into a fog of overseas transfers, ‘loans’ to the couple and incomplete records.
The protective trust appears to have protected very little except two thoroughly discredited liars’ lifestyle.
