In February, a former government staff member filed a police complaint alleging she was raped by a colleague nearly two years ago. Since then, four other women have come forward with similar claims. The country’s top law official identified himself as the subject of a rape allegation dating back three decades, which he has strenuously denied. Thousands of women took to the streets in protest across Australian cities last Monday. This week, local news outlets reported that a prayer room in Parliament House had been used for sexual encounters.
“These events have triggered, right across this building and indeed right across the country, women who have put up with this rubbish and this crap for their entire lives, as their mothers did, as their grandmothers did,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra. “We must get this house in order.”
During a question-and-answer session, however, Morrison hit back at a reporter who asked whether his job would be in jeopardy if he were the boss of a business facing similar complaints. Seeming to go off script, the prime minister responded by divulging details of a supposed case involving harassment of a woman in a bathroom by someone in the reporter’s news organization.
“And that matter is being pursued by your own HR department,” Morrison said, adding that “all of us who sit in glass houses” should not “start getting into that.”
The reporter, Andrew Clennell, said he was not aware of any such investigation at his employer, Sky News Australia.
“Why is the prime minister telling me to be careful? Is he threatening me?” Clennell said in a live broadcast following the news conference. “I think the PM has got a bit of explaining to do.”
Sky News Australia is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. In a statement Tuesday, the media company said the prime minister was wrong to claim an investigation was underway into a complaint of the type he described.
News Corp. said that following the reports of sexually inappropriate behavior at Parliament House, it gave staff the opportunity to speak in confidence and learned of a verbal exchange between two employees in Canberra last year. The exchange was not of a sexual nature, it did not take place in a bathroom and neither person made a complaint.
“The prime minister appears to have joined these two matters and conflated them into an episode of harassment in a toilet that is under current investigation,” said News Corp. Australasia Executive Chairman Michael Miller. “This is simply untrue.”
Sparring so publicly with a News Corp. reporter was all the more extraordinary because Murdoch has long been seen as a supporter of Morrison. The prime minister’s predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, has suspected the media mogul of helping unseat him in one of the many internal coups that have…
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