Abuse of women a part of a degraded political culture

There's probably not a politician who does not pay lip service to the idea that sexual harassment and assault are crimes which should be punished, and that victims should be treated with decency, compassion and help. But appalling and sexually oppressive misbehaviour is but an evidence and an incident, if a not strictly necessary one of far wider cultural problems on both sides of politics.

The general culture, and the subculture of sexual oppression it embraces, is deeply entrenched. It was evident in two separate ways over the past week as parliament continued to wrestle with the case of a woman allegedly raped while virtually insensible on a couch in a minister's office. One can more or less take it as read that not a single politician would have wished such a fate upon her. But the spontaneous reaction to news that it had occurred was essentially partisan, if disguised by tender expressions of sympathy for the victim.

The culture was also on display in another context. If one Googles up "petition for consent to be included in sex ed earlier" one finds literally hundreds of accounts of sexual assaults on girls attending private single sex high schools by young men from the private single sex schools. The abuse culture comes from entitled boys from almost all the most expensive and privileged private schools - the germ of Australia's ruling class. It was not a culture as strong and pervasive when I attended such a school 60 years ago, but when one looks at the moral, ethical environment, and the approaches to respect for women in these men destined to be leaders in politics, law and finance, one can only despair of the future.

It's not only women who are disrespected and abused, sui generis though that may be. It's a pervasive culture of contempt for almost anyone outside the political class.

It involves the conscious demeaning and disregard for people unemployed and in the welfare system, as well as conscious cruelty in the way miserable benefits are administered and managed. It involves conscious cruelty, and outright racism, to some classes of refugees and immigrants. It involves a studied indifference to the mistreatment of elderly Australians, and resigned complacency about continuing, even increasing, disadvantage for many indigenous Australians. These are not accidents. They are policy - in many cases ideology. The odd backbencher actually embarrassed by it - and there are all too few - has learnt a few slogans or "cruel to be kind" rationalisations to distract from their fundamental lack of humanity, charity, and common decency.

There is an emerging robber baron culture by which ministers think that public money is there to dispose of as they will. Not by principles of equity, need, or open process, but secretively to party donors, party friends and relations, for purely political purposes. Ministers are increasingly directly taking over the distribution of public grants, and more blatantly distributing it by sheer discretion to cronies.

The culture also embraces chronic secrecy, lack of transparency, failures of proper documentation and refusal to answer questions, FOI requests, or other forms of account. That comes from contempt for process and the presumptions of any system of fairness or accountability.

I do not point this out to again call for strong and public anti-corruption mechanisms, necessary as these may be to correct some of the current trends. Rather it is to show that the government is laughing at ordinary citizens and holds them in complete contempt. It is plain that the phrases about giving a go to those who have a go means no more than that those who donate money to the governing party, or who are seen and heard when the government needs partisan assistance. They will be lavished with public money, tax concessions and special privileges. Those in similar circumstances but not playing that game are out of the game. So are more deserving causes. Indeed, a good deal of the tens of billions of dollars handed out to private sector cronies has been distributed without clear rules of accountability, without readily accessible public records of who got what, when and for what reason, and on what terms.

It is not new, of course, that some of those most given to abuse of their public trust, their duties of public stewardship, and legislated notions and assumptions about charity, honesty and respect for others are among those most given to pretending that they are guided by their religious values in what they do. The "Christianity" of many in the present government - from American sects deeply influenced by Trumpism - is not recognisable to most Christians, even if Matthew 23:14 seems to apply.

We live too in an age of dismemberment of the sense of community and citizens living in a society, of common cause, mutual respect, and mutual obligation. Community is becoming more atomised, many politicians thrive by setting groups against each other, with politics of blame and resentment, and of punishment and coercion, and with appeals, not to a sacrifice for a common good, but to selfishness and self-interest.

It would be nice to say that these were moral, social and cultural problems of one party only. They are not, even if the tendencies are most obvious in the present government. Every party, of course, is keen to point to and deplore significant problems of culture in the other.

Can anyone be surprised that in this general environment of contempt for the public, for the disadvantaged, and for general principles of public stewardship, that disrespect for women rages, and that cases of physical or sexual abuse of women are seen rather more through the lens of wondering whether this causes political damage to us, or them, than from any sincere and empathetic desire to help, to comfort, or to create the circumstances where such things cannot happen again?

The very number of different reviews commissioned by the prime minister after he finally became aware of the sexual assault are a measure of the embarrassment in which he unwittingly found himself - remember, he didn't "get it" until his wife explained. But he doesn't need reviews, even from party moral conservatives well out of touch with community opinion. He has had recent access to reports addressing the problem head-on, but generally rejected by Morrison himself as well as his cabinet. One gets sensitivity to abuse of women only when the media spotlight is on it.

We don't need more studies. We don't need more consultation. Or more evidence or bad examples. What we do need, in spades, is leadership. From people who can command respect. And who show us by example they "get it" and that they will not put up with the culture of the status quo. The problem is that such people are in short supply. Morrison is not in their number, and cannot be invented or re-invented to fit.

That's why the public should be cynical. The present government does not have the cred to change the culture. Indeed it has yet to show that is disavows it in practice. Or that some of the arch-practitioners, from the top down, would relent except when it suits them.

Parliamentarians and the public already know enough about the handling of the alleged sexual assault case in the office of the Minister for Defence to make fair judgments about how the political system treats victims. That's true whether the interrupted police investigation leads to prosecution, and if so, to conviction, or whether, as so often happens in sexual assault cases the matter falls into a heap, perhaps with an acquittal. There are more than enough facts, and corroborative facts, on the record to know that something happened.

That said, there are a number of as yet unexplained strands of the case, not yet apparently the subject of any of the new investigations established, or reports called for. They cry for explication and explanation. The need for explanation cannot be deferred on the ground that the central criminal allegation is now sub judice - it is not - or some notion that the AFP Commissioner, Reece Kershaw, has said something, whatever it was, germane to any of the issues.

We know, for example, that the ACT AFP assistant commissioner attended on the Defence Minister, soon after the alleged rape. It was not at this stage clear whether the alleged victim wanted the sexual offence squad to continue with their investigation. But some inquiries had begun, some evidence had been secured, and police were already wrestling with a department of parliamentary services official inclined to play funny buggers about police access to closed circuit television tapes.

It was, apparently, at this interview that the Minister for Defence realised, for the first time, that the victim had complained of sexual assault. Apparently she had known that something bad had happened, but had not been told what. Perhaps her incuriosity was strange, but there was an election going on. Although one might think that a minister would be hyper-alert for incidents capable of becoming an election distraction, just as might be folk in the PMO who were already aware of the allegation.

I think - it is not clear - that the victim's initial encounter with AFP officers was with police attached to Parliament House, rather than (women) detectives in the sexual offences unit. If so, these would have been told by Parliament House security of both the security breach and of the fact of a sleeping dishevelled girl having been found on a couch in the minister's own office, looking as if she had been sexually assaulted, and, on being woken, complaining of it. They were also in a position to secure evidence, and, had they been more alert, to prevent the cleaning of what security guards regarded as a crime scene. But such folk are not detectives; I expect actually members of the national AFP, rather than the ACT subset. The security breach - if it was (as I doubt) an actual breach of the law as opposed to the rules - would have been a matter for the national office, not the ACT AFP.

In these circumstances, one is entitled to wonder why the ACT assistant commissioner felt a need to intervene or call on the minister. Was it some version of that strange "heads up" rule by which the government is notified by the AFP whenever they trip over something that could embarrass the government? This is an internal AFP rule - of long standing - which underlines the reality that the AFP is but a political tool of government, not at arm's length from it, or from a department also inclined to have views on what the AFP should be doing. A commissioner with guts and integrity could drop the rule overnight; he is not the head of a government department, managing "subject to the minister."

But the practice is that the heads-up goes to the office of the Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. If the information is passed elsewhere for political advantage - say to tip off the media about raids on trade unions or terrorists, that abuse of power (and sometimes compromise of a case) is handled by people in Dutton's office, just like leaks about ASIO. It is true that Dutton was at the time of the alleged rape deeply pre-occupied with saving his marginal seat in Queensland. He has implied that he did not know then (in 2019) of either the security breach or the alleged rape. But he is always careful with words, and one has to parse closely anything he says. It would not surprise that he knew something then, but kept it from the prime minister.

Perhaps the ACT assistant commissioner had some knowledge of the facts. But it is not clear what his business was in sharing his insights with the Defence Minister. If he generally supervised the rape squad, his right to direct their investigation would have been quite limited and likely to get considerable blowback from professional detectives who do not like being told how to do their job. Indeed there have been all too many cases over the years when senior cops in administrative positions (as the ACT assistant commissioner is) have attempted to manage - sometimes close down - investigations potentially embarrassing to government. The wheat for oil case might be an example.

I am not suggesting such "management" or interference, but the public has a right to know what he was doing, why, and whether his actions compromised the investigation. No doubt it was in the better interests of the victim. Strange she was not invited, or even aware. Curiously, it was when the victim indicated last week her intention to revive her complaint that a formal heads-up, perhaps, was issued to Dutton. He chose not to tell Morrison.

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We have also been told that some Parliament House security staff became concerned when, after having, somewhat irregularly, allowed two of the minister's minders, one obviously inebriated, into the ministerial office, they saw only one depart and the other stay. We know that security staff entered the office, and found the woman asleep with her skirt rucked up. They became concerned that she may have been assaulted. We know that they checked on her several times during the night, and discussed calling an ambulance.

We know - though not in detail - that their concerns were rejected by more senior DPS officers, and that a Department of Finance official ordered the office cleaned, against the protests of the guards, who talked of "interference with a crime scene". (A number of security staff are retired cops). We know that an external report on their grievance was carried out by Vivienne Thom, a former inspector general of security, also well known for her report on sexual harassment by Justice Dyson Heydon, and then (but no longer) in the marketplace as a reliable person to conduct independent reviews.

It is said that Thom's report "did not sustain" the grievance. That can mean that she found the alleged facts disproved. It can also mean that she found that the evidence could not sustain a finding either way. We do not know.

Vivienne Thom is a person of integrity, and very unlikely to be swayed by a departmental interest, or any need it might have to sweep a problem under the carpet. But it is interesting to wonder just what her terms of reference were, and whether these extended to considering whether, as a fact, there was a woman in the office in circumstances suggesting that she may have been raped. If she knew that, and if it were in any way within her terms of reference, it would be amazing if her inquiries were as desultory (and primarily focused on the papers) as some reports suggested.

If people are alleging cover-up and it seems that there may have been something to cover up, it would be astonishing if, say, Thom did not want to interview the alleged victim, who was, after all, in the building. Yet we know that the victim did not even know that Thom was conducting an inquiry, or that others, interested in her welfare, were agitating on her behalf.

That is again a matter that the department of finance and the DPS should come clean about. It is not merely a matter for the Speaker and the senate president to reassure us without much in the way of explanation. Nor is it simply a matter for a parliamentary committee, let alone one meeting in camera. If it was the Department of Finance commissioning the report, it is a relevant matter that its reputation for organising reviews of integrity at genuine arm's length from ministers has been shattered. This is because it commissioned a law firm to judge the allegedly improper conduct of a minister who had once been a partner in the very same law firm. Only a report from a secretary of prime minister's department could command, prima facie, less respect.

It is, again, a loose end that needs to be tidied up, not least with a copy of the terms of reference of the inquiry, and of the report. Here's betting that the terms were drafted in such a way as to narrow, rather than widen the inquiry, and to conceal any crime, rather than provide any help or support for a victim. Perhaps the Department of Parliamentary Services has a culture problem too.