Oops! News Corp campaign to destroy Higgins takes out Liberal senator

Spare a thought for the hardworking operatives of News Corp today.

It must smart something terrible — you put weeks of effort into a conspiracy theory-based campaign to destroy Brittany Higgins using illegally leaked text messages, only for all that labour to blow up the Liberals instead, with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton forced to suspend a Victorian senator from the party. Worse yet, a former Senate colleague of the man emerges to make similar accusations as those levelled by Lidia Thorpe.

Today, even The Australian has had to report that several other people had concerns about the behaviour of David Van, who denies all of the allegations made about him. The awkward silence that greeted Thorpe’s accusations of harassment and assault by Van has, within 24 hours, given way to the headline “Open secret of a groping senator”. Presumably the angry columns about how Van has been denied justice and due process can wait for a later edition.

Having started off with a historically small opposition bench thanks to Scott Morrison’s 2022 election disaster, Dutton has overseen its further diminution in a variety of ways: he lost the Aston byelection, Nationals MP Andrew Gee departed in a fury over Dutton’s hostility to the Voice, and now the opposition leader has been forced to turf a senator accused of repeat groping. Each is his own fault — especially the loss of Van, whose alleged behaviour has only been discussed because Dutton thought it’d be a good idea to peddle the discredited conspiracy theory about Higgins.

A common criticism of the Dutton-era Liberals is that, despite the smashing they took in May 2022, they have learnt nothing. The last week has fulfilled that description to the letter. Clearly nothing has been learnt from the failure of the Morrison government to respond appropriately to Higgins’ allegations: they smeared her partner, claimed a conspiracy with Labor, called her a “lying cow” and tried to dismiss the seriousness of her claims. That only demonstrated how badly out of touch Morrison was and how uninterested he was in responding to the toxicity of the Parliament House work environment as anything other than a political problem to be managed away and lied about.

This week has seen a replay of exactly that, in partnership with News Corp, complete with the same conspiracy theory being touted, only with a greater willingness to target Higgins herself. The immediate result is the loss of a senator — surely Van will quit to make way for a Liberal replacement to finish the remainder of his term — and further damage to the Liberal brand. The longer-term result in terms of how impressed female voters are that the Liberals are still trying to destroy Higgins remains to be seen.

At The Australian, a severe reverse ferret has been required. Stenographers Dennis Shanahan and Simon Benson are today, hilariously, lamenting the politicisation of sexual assault allegations and insisting all sides have been damaged. But at last count, there is only one party that’s ended the week with fewer senators than it began. The opposition would have been far better to have left The Australian to stew in its own sordid juices rather than following its lead.

The larger question is less one for Dutton — who may well not have been aware of the talk about Van, and who moved quickly upon learning of it — than for the parliamentary Liberal Party as a whole. Van strongly denies any misconduct, but if it really was an “open secret” about his behaviour among staffers and parliamentary colleagues, why was nothing done other than to move him away from a complainant, in light of all that has happened since early 2021?

If women, no matter their status, party or prominence, are still being made to feel unsafe in the nation’s Parliament without serious consequences for perpetrators, how much has changed?