Ministers demoted over rape scandal

By Correspondent
Two Australian ministers have been demoted from top cabinet posts Monday as the ruling Conservative Party tried to draw a line under dual rape scandals that have convulsed national politics.

Linda Reynolds was removed as defence minister and Christian Porter as attorney-general, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison bowed to weeks of mounting public pressure.

Porter — the government’s top legal officer and a former state prosecutor — is accused of raping a 16-year-old fellow student in 1988, an allegation he denies.

The woman died last June, reportedly by suicide. Reynolds was accused of mishandling an investigation into the alleged rape of a young staffer in her parliamentary office, and referring to the woman as a ‘lying cow.’

Both ministers have been on leave for weeks, with Morrison previously insisting they would return to their jobs.

On 15 February 2021, Liberal Party junior staffer Brittany Higgins alleged to two media outlets – news.com.au and The Project — that she had been raped late at night on 22 March 2019 in then-Defence Industry Minister Senator Linda Reynolds’ office in the ministerial wing of Parliament House by a male colleague, who was not named, after security guards let the pair into the building.

Higgins said she became heavily intoxicated at a work party and left with her colleague in a taxi, believing they would both be dropped at their respective homes; instead she was taken to Parliament House and raped while slipping in and out of consciousness. She was found half-naked, inebriated and disoriented in the early hours of the morning in the minister’s office.

Reynolds, Higgins’ boss at the time, sacked the alleged assailant on 26 March 2019, four days after the alleged rape, for a “security breach”, not the alleged criminal behaviour. Higgins accused Reynolds of not supporting her due to the politically sensitive nature of the incident in an election year.

 Higgins went to the police after the rape, but dropped the complaint in April 2019, fearful the report would result in termination of her employment. Higgins transferred to work for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business Minister Michaelia Cash for a year before resigning a month before going public with her allegations.