Today I resigned my position as a Minister in the Morrison Cabinet.
I thank the Prime Minister and my Cabinet colleagues for the strong support they have shown me throughout my period in Cabinet.
On 26 February 2021, I was the subject of an allegation in an article published by the ABC that was not true. That article depicted events that never happened and which the ABC, in settlement of a defamation case, acknowledged was an allegation that could not ‘…be substantiated to the applicable legal standard – criminal or civil.’
As I tried my best to say at a media conference shortly after the allegation was reported, the initial article and subsequent media reporting has created a new standard under which literally any Australian can be the subject of an accusation widely published and, without due process or fairness, be tried and judged in a trial by media.
After my experience it now seems to be a part of modern public life that if you are a politician, particularly a conservative politician, a mere allegation is considered enough to warrant an accusation being widely published, regardless of its inability to be proven to a civil or criminal standard.
From the moment the ABC article was published, I entered what appears to me now to be an inescapable media frenzy where the evidence, or in this case lack of it, appeared to be irrelevant. Instead, all that appeared to matter was the presence of an accusation.
To my disbelief, even in some mainstream media the onus of proof was completely reversed. The Sydney Morning Herald summed up the new reversed standard of proof in its declaration just days after the ABC article was published that: ‘It’s up to the Government to convince Australians that the Attorney General is innocent.’
It is almost impossible – for anyone – to prove that something did not happen, let alone to positively disprove what are at times completely bizarre allegations about something claimed in an unsigned document about a night 33 years ago, where the person withdrew the complaint and is now sadly deceased.
From that point, when the reporting on both social media generally, and in parts of the mainstream media, shifted from a presumption of innocence to one of guilt, an impossible standard was set for any person to meet - politician or not.
The most frightening indicator that the public broadcaster was central to this shift to a presumption of guilt in a trial by media is the fact that the ABC – seemingly with great care and effort – has reported only those parts of the information that it has in its possession which feeds into its narrative of guilt.
I have recently been provided from a source outside the ABC with a copy of the only signed document that the person who made and subsequently withdrew the complaint ever made.
Many parts of that 88-page document are such that any reasonable person would conclude that they show an allegation that lacks credibility; was based on repressed memory (which has been completely rejected by courts as unreliable and dangerous); which relied on diaries said to be drafted in 1990/91 but which were actually words composed in 2019; and, was written by someone who was, sadly, very unwell.
This material, which remains unreported, clearly does not feed the ABC’s predetermined narrative of guilt by accusation. And presumably because this document detracts so substantively from the credibility of the allegations there has been careful and deliberate avoidance in reporting it or publishing the parts of it that run counter to the chosen narrative.
Having set in motion its trial by accusation, the ABC unleashed the Twitter version of an angry mob. In this online mob environment the mere accusation – reported by Australia’s national broadcaster – was determined adequate to assign guilt, with no regard to evidence or, indeed, lack of evidence. All that seemed to matter was the fact that the accusation had been made and the identity of the person accused.
The target of the Twitter mob then extended to anyone who contradicted the narrative of guilt by accusation.
So fierce and vengeful is the response of the Twitter mob to anyone who dares say anything contrary to the narrative of guilt that those people then come to be deemed to commit a form of social crime for defending the subject of the unproven allegation and the mob turns on them. This happened to my two female lawyers, amongst many others.
The journalists who said anything in support of what were once accepted principles of due process, rule
