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Scott Morrison made global news this week for all the wrong reasons.
The Prime Minister was holding a press conference with his Minister for Families and Social Services, Anne Ruston, on Tuesday. They were discussing government plans to wind back COVID-19 support — which will see around 2.5 million Australian social security recipients, plus the 1.1 million children they support, receiving $50 less a week to live on.
But the press conference was quickly overtaken by questions about the previous night's Four Corners program on the culture of Canberra, and specifically about the behaviour of two senior Cabinet ministers, Alan Tudge and Attorney-General Christian Porter.
A journalist asked Ruston "as a woman in the Government your reflections on the culture inside has it gotten better, worse, or no change since the bonk ban era?" (a reference to the rule inserted in the ministerial code of conduct in 2018 by Malcolm Turnbull banning sexual relationships between ministers and their staff).
"Well Phil," Ruston began, "the only thing that I can…"
But she was interrupted by the Prime Minister in high dudgeon.
"Sorry, how this ban is referred to I think is quite dismissive of the seriousness of the issue, Phil, and I would ask media to stop referring to it in that way."
While it was the interruption that had the bad optics, it should have been the spectacular shortcomings of the Prime Minister's position that actually drew the ire.
It's terrible, apparently, to refer to a "bonk ban". But it's apparently not terrible to have been engaging in the activity that provoked it in the first place, particularly if it happened before the current prime minister came into the job.
Would he be taking any disciplinary action against the ministers?
Well, no because "they have engaged in no conduct as they have served in my Cabinet that is in breach of the code".
Asked if he thought this passed the pub test, Morrison said he thought "Australians understand more about human frailty than perhaps you are giving them credit".
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A story with many threads
There were many threads to the Four Corners story but let's just pull out a few from this exchange.
The first one is the Prime Minister's return to one of his favourite approaches to political problems that affect him, and his ministers: to dismiss them as having already been dealt with.
A classic example would be the sordid tale of Angus Taylor's office, and the leak to a newspaper of a letter designed to politically damage the Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney, Clover Moore. Despite more revelations about this — and that Taylor's staff had been alerted to the fact that information in the letter was wrong before it was released — it was still sent out. But Taylor dismissed the whole thing this week on the basis that he had "apologised" and it was therefore not a story.
And now we have the Prime Minister dismissing the whole issue of the standards of behaviour of his ministers, because it occurred before he was prime minister. The only problem being that there are now two complaints linked to that behaviour being investigated by the Department of Finance.
And this brings us to another thread of this story, which wasn't ultimately about the fact Tudge was revealed to have had a consensual affair with one of his staffers (even though there was the splendid hypocrisy of this occurring while he was publicly espousing family values), but about the fact the staffer believes her political career was eventually stymied as she was frozen out of the Government after the affair ended. Tudge apologised for the affair in a statement on Monday night.
Two different outcomes
It is this aspect of women and politics that is at issue here: that there are no ramifications for the blokes involved. But there are for the women.
It is another aspect of a culture where blokes still rule. "Slut shaming" and other bullying is used against women across the political spectrum to damage their advancement and their reputations. We have seen plenty of recent examples, from the politically–motivated shaming of former Labor MP Emma Hussar to the bullying of former Liberal MP Julia Banks.
Former Labor minister Kate Ellis tweeted during the week that "women MPs are commonly subject to completely false rumours about their alleged sexual exploits".
"This is done to undermine them and damage their career progression. Male MPs who actually are regularly getting their pants off do so with rarely any career consequences".
Tudge's staffer, Rachelle Miller, has put in formal complaints of bullying against not just Tudge, but the minister to whose office she was moved after the affair ended, Michaelia Cash.
Cash, of course, is famous for threatening to name young women in the office of then Labor Leader Bill Shorten "about which rumours in this place abound" in retaliation for ongoing questions about her staff and their role in tipping off the media to raids on the Australian Workers' Union.
An underlying problem we see again and again
Another thread of this story goes to the behaviour of the now Attorney-General Christian Porter, who was reported to have been drunk and kissing and cuddling a young staffer in a public place: behaviour captured in a subsequently deleted photo on a journalist's phone and which prompted the then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to warn Porter of the risks of being compromised by such behaviour.
Four Corners executive producer Sally Neighbour tweeted during the week a question for Porter:
"Why are you now complaining about not being contacted when in fact Four Corners sent you five emails over two weeks setting out the allegations in explicit detail and asked you 21 specific questions, only one of which you answered on the record?
Reporter Louise Milligan tweeted questions to Tudge including: "Why did you pressure the journalist to delete the photograph of Mr Porter and the young female staffer", and that "Given that there are people who are happy to verify all of these points, including people who would be subpoenaed by a court of law, what does that say about the truth of the public comments made by the Commonwealth Attorney-General since our story went to air".
Porter says he is taking legal advice on the story.
But the dismissal of its details points, once again, to the underlying problem we seem to see over and over again with this government: its unfamiliarity with the more general idea enshrined in the ministerial code of conduct that "Serving the Australian people as Ministers and Assistant Ministers is an honour and comes with expectations to act at all times to the highest possible standards of probity".
Instead, we have repeated cases of dubiously distributed grants, a lack of accountability about programs like Robodebt that go disastrously wrong with devastating impacts on individual Australians, and a refusal to set up a national integrity system which would hold politicians publicly to account.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.