You can listen to the Front on your smart speaker every morning to hear the latest episode. Just say play the news from the Australian. From the Australian Keyes, what's on the Front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Monday, August five. There's a giant shakeup coming for aviation as the federal government vows to crack down on anti competitive behavior and make it easier for new airlines to use Australia's biggest airport, Sydney.
One of the nation's most senior Indigenous leaders is accusing Anthony Albanesi of breaking an election promise after the PM said he won't establish a Macarata Commission for Treaty and Truth Telling. ULARU Dialogue co chair Pat Anderson says Albanese's position is confusing and a breach of his vow to enact the ULARU statement in full. Former Morrison government minister Linda Reynolds will enter the witness box in Perth this week in her defamation case against former employee Brittany Higgins
and her husband David Schiraz. Reynolds says Higgins and Schiraz deliberately plotted to make her the villain in higgins account of being raped in Parliament House today. Who can possibly win such a personal and expensive legal battle. On July four, twenty twenty three, Brittaney Higgins fired up her Instagram and published this story.
This is from a current Australian senator who continues to harass me through.
The media and in the Parliament.
My former boss, who publicly apologized for mishandling my rape allegation, who has had to apologize publicly after defending me in the workplace, who had a whole bunch of questionable conduct during my rape trial, who was suing my fiance for a tweet.
This has been going on for years now. It is time to stop. We're using a voice actor to bring you Higgins's words, the meaning of which are totally denied by that boss, Senator Linda Reynolds. Included in that Instagram story were two headlines from that day's news reporting that Senator Reynolds, Higgins's former ministerial boss, was objecting to a two point four million dollar compensation payout Higgins had received
from the Commonwealth. On twenty July twenty twenty three, Higgins quoted a story from The Australian that said Senator Reynolds was suggesting an amendment to the Act's Crimes Act to deter individuals from using the media or parliament to refer to an alleged criminal offense that ought properly to be the subject of the criminal justice process. Here's what Higgins said on Twitter.
Imagine being the person earnestly attempting to change the Crime Act to make it illegal for alleged sexual assault survivors to talk about their lived experience, as opposed to, you know, reforming the justice system to actually prosecuting perpetrators. This proposal completely undermines all the crucial work done by the Let Her Speak campaign and the March for Justice movement. Instead of solving the problem, there are people who would prefer to just silence victims.
Now, Reynolds is suing Higgins and her husband David Cheraz for defamation. On Monday, Reynolds will enter the witness box that the truth is about to be told. It's voluntarily time for the truth.
She sees this very much as her chance to set the record straight in her eyes.
Paul Garvey is a senior journalist with The Australian who was in court on Friday when Reynold's lawyer opened the case.
She feels like she's been marginalized silence through this process that hasn't had her side told properly and certainly listening to the opening remarks of her lawyer, Mutton Bennett, it was clear that this was almost as much about finally giving her her say as it was about pursuing the defamation matter in itself.
Reynolds is also alleging that David Scharraz, now Higgins's husband, defamed her on twenty seven January twenty twenty two by tweeting.
This, there is a very real chance Linda Reynolds will be called to court this year to answer questions on her involvement in Brittany Higgins. Feeling pressured by her office not to continue with a complaint to police, she uploads this to her official website.
Charraz included a screenshot of Reynolds's website, which described the senator as a passionate champion for gender equality and female empowerment. Reynolds says that tweet defined her by implying she was a hypocrite.
The content of those posts barely cracked dimension through the opening. The opening was devoted to a large chunk that was devoted to discussing the Commonwealth settlement that was paid to Britney Higgins. Now, Linda Reynolds was frozen out of that process and that's been a big bone of contention for her throughout this whole saga.
So a quick recap. Britney Higgins has previously said in an interview with The Project, in a criminal trial and in a civil trial, that she felt ignored, ostracized, and discouraged from going to police after telling her bosses she'd been raped on a sofa in Reynolds's office. The federal courts found, on the balance of probabilities, Higgins was raped on that sofa by fellow staffer Bruce Lammon. He's appealing
that finding. Reynolds and her former chief of staff Fiona Brown have always denied discouraging Higgins and have insisted actually they encouraged her to go to police.
What we heard from Martin Bennett, reynolds lawyer, was a lot about the efforts that Reynolds and her immediate team went to to try to support Higgins, to try to make sure that she had options open to her, but that she remained the master of her own destiny. Around whether or not she went to police, So not exploring whether or not Higgins was actually raped, but whether or not Linda Reynolds deliberately and callously neglected and made Higgins suffer through this process.
Linda Reynolds case seems to allege a really quite significant level of premeditation and planning by Brittany Higgins and David Shiraz in the way that they were going to portray Linda Reynolds in the Project interview and obviously subsequently in these social media posts. That's an interesting take on this case. It's a new one we haven't necessarily heard before, isn't it, Paul?
It is.
I mean, typically when we're talking about defamation cases, we're looking at the publication and the impact that it has had on an individual's reputation. Here, we're going much more granular and forensic in a way to look at the base motivations and the deliberate tactics that Reynolds and Bennett's say were employed by Higgins and Scharraz.
Here, Reynolds has plenty of material to work with the epic defamation trial where Bruce lemm ensued Network ten and presenter Lisa Wilkinson yielded all tens notes, emails, and recordings, including a five hour conversation between Higgins, Charaz, Wilkinson, and producer Angus Llewellyn in which Sharaz cracked jokes about Reynolds and Higgins said things like this again, we've used a
voice actor. And Higgins is talking about her belief she'd be more likely to win a civil trial where her allegation against Bruce Lherman were tested.
I would love to have a court case on like civil if he wants to go after me on a civil basis, I think on the balance of probabilities, I think I could win. I think if the owners of proof is beyond reasonable doubt, I think that would be different. I don't think i'd win that.
That's really at the crux of this argument from Reynolds, that there was a deliberate plan to drag her into this.
That transcript you see the parties discussing in that the exact timing of things, trying to line it up with a sitting week, discussing which friendly journalists to drop it to, which friendly laybor MP's to brief on the saga, to ensure that this went as far and as wide as possible, and what Bennett and Reynolds would say is this effort to make sure it wasn't just about a young woman allegedly getting raped it in her workplace, that it was about a political cover up of that incident too, which
I think Bennett and Reynolds are both arguing that Higgins and Chiraz knew that it needed to have that broader aspect to it, that extra dimension to make it a bigger, spicier, more dramatic story.
Linda Reynolds had to deal upfront with her own attack on Brittany Higgins, a moment when she called Higgins a lying cow and then had to apologize and settle a defamation action brought by Higgins.
For those who missed it early on in the saga, I think it was us that the Australian who broke this story about Nda Reynolds using that phrase lying cow to describe Higgins when she was watching the project interview. So Bennett, basically his argument is that it wasn't suggesting that Higgins was lying about whether or not she was raped, it was lying about Reynolds's efforts to support or protect her in the aftermath.
So Reynolds is saying she did call Higgins a lying cow, but only because she object so passionately to the claim Reynolds had ignored or tried to minimize her rape.
So Bennett explained it that the comments lying was, he said, utterly appropriate given what Higgins was saying Reynolds had done in her handling of that saga. He said the cow line was unfortunate, but was basically a byproduct of the anger that Reynolds had at that time hearing the allegations were made about her, and then the portrayal of her as someone who was quite sort of brutal towards this
vulnerable young woman. So it's all part of what seems to be an element of this case, which is giving Linda Reynolds a voice after all these years.
Coming up after years of pre troll wrangling and a hugely expensive court hearing. Who can possibly walk away from this a winner? Something that won't bankrupt anyone is a subscription to The Australian. It's a dollar a week for the first four weeks to get the nation's best journalism twenty four to seven. Check us out at the Australian dot com dot a U. This week, Linda Reynolds will give evidence and next week she'll call witnesses, including former
PM Scott Morrison. I don't know if it's just that I spent a lot of time covering the Bruce Lamon defamation trial, and I know that that costs millions and millions of dollars for both sides. But I can only think this must be costing Linda Reynolds a.
Fortune, absolutely, and it's something that has left a lot of people quite baffle confused around this whole saga, and that both Reynolds and Higgins don't have a whole bunch of assets to throw at this. Right the Lerman Tile Network ten, it's a corporate behemoth. Linda Reynolds is funding this out of her own pocket. Her lawyer has already said that she has had to re mortgage her house to fund this. Now. I don't think Linda Reynolds would mind me saying this, but she's not a young woman, right,
She's at the very end of her career. She's retiring at the next election. She is not a prime example of someone who should be driving themselves into hock to fund a legal action. But it shows that for her, she sees this very much as her legacy, her reputation on the line here, but the cost of that is
significant financially. If she wins, she can get some money from Miss Higgins in theory, but that will then involve delving into the trust that Miss Higgins has set up, whether that's achievable or not, whether there'll be anything left
by the time it comes to that as well. And then from miss Higgins's side, she was, as far as the federal court determined, at least she was actually raped that day, and she would be left in the position where she suddenly has to write a check to the boss of the office in which she was raped, which, if you put yourself in her shoes, that's quite an uncomfortable thing to say the least. So it's really lose
lose for all concerned. It seems apparent from the outside that that's always going to be the end result here. The pleadings of judges who have handled this case to date to both parties saying, look, please find a way to say all this. Don't take this trial. It won't work out for you. We can all see the end result. It doesn't look pretty for other party. Yet here we are and it's going all the way.
Of course, now Britney Higgins and David Schaaz are the defendants in this matter, which means they have to come up with some defenses to the alleged defamation. We see publishers use the defense of truth and also attempts to show that their journalism was reasonable. I can only imagine in this case, and reading your report of Martin Bennett's opening, that Britney higgins defense is going to be truth, that this was true. What do you think her defense is going to be?
Yeah, from what we've seen so far, it's very much about her trying to establish that Reynolds did isolate her, that there was this, as she calls it, harassment of her through that process. We will hear from miss Higgins later in the trial. I think she started down to give about three days of evidence. I think Martin Bennett, for Reynolds, has already shown a little bit as to
how he's going to approach that. A lot of what Higgins has said over the journey has been about I felt that I was neglected, I felt that I wasn't supported. He gave a line during the proceedings a couple of times on Friday, saying that feelings are not facts that just because you feel something doesn't make it true. He will be very much focused on where's the documentary evidence,
how do you show this? And that's why I think there was a lot of time spent on Friday going over the text messages and the photographs of Brittney Higgins during her time in Perth. So, just to go back a step, when Higgins negotiated that settlement with the Commonwealth, that two point four four five million dollars that she received, part of her claim was that she was sent to Perth where she worked alone in a hotel room seven days a week for six weeks, and that that caused
her a deterioration in her mental health. So Bennett on Friday spent hours going through text messages that she was sending to her then boyfriend.
It's actually a really nice place and surprisingly spacious, hahuh. Just helping them out with all the campaign launches coming up, fundraising events.
It's been pretty fun actually.
She talked about how much fun she was having working on the campaign, how she was out and about door knocking, how she was at campaign events and launches and dinners and breakfasts.
My day has been awesome spent pool side. It's been really nice liking the WA office. I can't wait for the ANZAC Day festivities.
And then this procession of photos showing her during that door knocking standing with the Prime Minister being a smiley, knotty head in the background of press events and the like.
I will be in the back of the PM's announcement today. This is my fifteen minutes of fame.
So really sort of signaling that if miss Higgins wants to make that claim that she will need to actually back that up with hard evidence. That seems to be Bennett's aproach at this point in time, and something that he will no doubt thoroughly explore when Higgins does on the stand later this month.
Paul Gravey is a senior journalist with The Australian. We'll have live coverage of that trial exclusively for our subscribers at the Australian dot Com dot a You