Christine Holgate was targeting the Australia Post chairman, Scott Morrison and the patriarchy
On the day the latest Guardian Essential poll confirmed that Scott Morrison’s approval rating had hit its lowest level for 12 months – with Australian women the primary source of the disaffection – Christine Holgate fronted a Senate committee clad in suffragette white.
“The simple truth is, I was bullied out of my job,” the former chief executive of Australia Post told her inquisitors on Tuesday in her percussive opening salvo.
“I was humiliated and driven to despair. I was thrown under the bus so the chairman of Australia Post could curry favour with his political masters. But I’m still here. And I’m stronger for surviving it.”
Readers will no doubt recall that Holgate was ritually sacrificed in full public view for sins against the pub test – in this case, the outlaying of $20,000 on Cartier watches in 2018 as a reward for four senior managers.
On Tuesday, Holgate had two primary targets: the Australia Post chairman, Lucio Di Bartolomeo, and Morrison. The patriarchy was also in the dock.
Was gender a factor in her brutish treatment? one of the senators wondered. “I think it would be fair to say I’ve never seen a media article comment about a male politician’s watch and yet I was depicted as a prostitute for making those comments, humiliated,” Holgate said. Gender was “partly” the issue, she thought.
But the underlying malady was “bullying and harassment and abuse of power” – words that have become a cultural anthem in the Age of Brittany.
Holgate made it clear she believed that Morrison was behind her departure. It was her evidence on Tuesday that Tony Nutt, a longtime Liberal party operative on the Australia Post board, had told her it was Morrison’s desire that she go.
This was hardly top secret information.
After Holgate’s politically inconvenient Cartiers had surfaced last October during a Senate estimates hearing, Morrison said in question time later that day that Holgate, the high-flying chief of the Blackmores vitamin company who had joined Australia Post three years previously, had been instructed to step aside during an investigation.
“If she doesn’t wish to do that, she can go,” Morrison had bellowed.
It was Holgate’s evidence that rather than backing her in – rather than politely telling the prime minister just where to shove his reflexive populism and his hard-wired habit of defaulting to damage control above all other relevant factors – senior colleagues at Post then treated her like unexploded ordinance. And sent in the bomb disposal unit.
Holgate says she was hustled out of a job she was good at – an experience so humiliating, so scarifying, that she felt suicidal. “I was lying on the bathroom floor at this time in my life,” Holgate volunteered at one point during her evidence.
Tuesday was about exiting the ensuite and taking control of her own narrative. “This is the day when the chairman of Australia Post and all the other men involved in what happened to me will be held to account.”
We need to be clear that Holgate and Di Bartolomeo (who followed her giving evidence) provided conflicting accounts as Tuesday’s Senate show trial crawled over every inch of who had said what to whom and when.
The chairman insisted that Holgate had departed voluntarily. Holgate’s account was she was forced out unlawfully.
Holgate thought the prime minister
wanted her out. Di Bartolomeo thought this didn’t amount to a direction from the government.
Holgate thought the chairman should go. The chairman thought he’d be staying.
Di Bartolomeo acknowledged that Holgate had been treated “abysmally” but he didn’t think Australia Post owed her an apology. The chairman said his view was Holgate was good at her job, which rather begged the question of why she no longer held it.
This particular conundrum brought us back, inevitably, to the watches and questions of judgment. The purchase of the watches “was an error of judgment made in good faith from an otherwise highly effective CEO”, the chairman said.
Given we’d arrived at errors of judgment, the primary judgment on trial on Tuesday was Morrison’s. The question Holgate posed implicitly during her carefully choreographed mic drop was: “Was it worth it?”
Was it worth it prime minister – bringing this corporate high flyer to my bathroom floor – just because I lacked a certain fluency in the unwritten rules of politics?
Did your punishment fit my crime? Was national humiliation a proportionate response for a chief executive drafted from the private sector to run a government business like a corporation, but not too much like a corporation, lest a prime minister be arbitrarily embarrassed?
Was it worth it, prime minister? Making an example of me just to avoid a few days of transient political discomfort before the outrage complex found its next mark?
Was it worth running the risk of me recovering from the setback and finding the requisite level of confidence to return fire just at the very moment when Australian women seem intent on charting the distance between the values you espouse and the grimly transactional conduct you routinely deliver? Was it worth it?
The answer to Holgate’s implicit question was simple. The answer was no.