Coalition minister says harassment should be reported after Julia Banks alleges ‘astoundingly brazen’ act
A senior federal government minister has said any inappropriate behaviour should be reported after former Liberal MP Julia Banks alleged she was inappropriately touched by a male Coalition MP.
In an extract from her upcoming book published by Nine newspapers on Saturday, Banks alleged she was inappropriately touched at Parliament House.
Banks says the unnamed MP put his hand “just above my knee and edged slowly and deliberately to my inner thigh and then further up my leg” in an “astoundingly brazen” act.
“The only saving grace was that this time I was wearing suit pants, not a skirt and bare legs,” she writes of the incident in Power Play: Breaking Through Bias, Barriers and Boys’ Clubs.
The federal finance minister, Simon Birmingham, said the first he had heard of that incident was when he read the published extract over the weekend.
“Obviously such behaviour is inappropriate,” he told the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday.
Birmingham said if there were any issues “they ought to be appropriately reported by any individuals” and that was why the government was seeking to set up “improved reporting and investigatory arrangements right across the parliament to support staff, members of parliament or anybody else”.
But the minister indicated the new procedure was unlikely to cover incidents that allegedly occurred in previous parliaments, saying “it becomes a point as to where do you draw the line in those regards”. He suggested it would apply “from this parliament forward”.
“Certainly it will provide for now and into the future a model that actually enables people to have confidence that their complaints can be heard and investigated with independence and confidentiality if they wish,” Birmingham said.
A spokesperson for Scott Morrison said the prime minister was “not aware of any allegations of sexual harassment Ms Banks faced” and “any such behaviour is completely inappropriate”.
In the book extract, Banks claims Morrison offered to send her to New York as a United Nationals delegate, or to negotiate with the opposition for a parliamentary pair so she could have leave, after she decided following the 2018 leadership spill to stand down at the next election.
Banks claims that Morrison’s tone in one phone call in 2018 was “bullying, short and swift and coldly calculating”, and she alleges Victorian Liberal party forces and the prime minister both wanted her “silenced”.
But Morrison’s spokesperson said the prime minister “absolutely rejects claims about the nature of those conversations”.
“The prime minister was disappointed in Ms Banks’ decision to quit the parliamentary party and had several conversations with her to understand what she was going through to see what support could be offered before she made her decision,” the spokesperson said.
“That included support for personal leave so she could take the time to recover from the upset many people suffered during that period. Several of Ms Banks’ colleagues had similar conversations.”
Banks was the MP for the Victorian seat of Chisholm from 2016 to 2019.
She was elected as a Liberal but in late 2018 she quit the party to sit on the crossbench and ultimately ran as an independent against the health minister, Greg Hunt, in the seat of Flinders at the 2019 election.
Banks also says in her book that she was subject to slurs about her age and appearance from both sides of politics and was questioned about her age and who would look after her children when she was seeking preselection in 2015.
She says she was subjected to “brutal and overt conscious bias” while an MP “as opposed to the more polite, unconscious variety I’d experienced in my corporate career”.
Stephanie Foster, a deputy secretary in the prime minister’s department, recommended that parliamentary staff be given access to a new independent complaints mechanism to deal with incidents of alleged sexual assault and harassment along with serious bullying.
In the report published last month, Foster also suggested that a serious incident team should be developed to deal with incidences of sexual assault such as that alleged by the former Coalition staffer Brittany Higgins.
Labor responded to the review by saying the complaints mechanism needed a broader remit so it can retrospectively investigate serious incidents.