New watchdog won’t stop bad behaviour in parliament

The extensive fallout from the rape of then Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins in a ministerial office continues to reverberate through both the legal and political systems, long after that fateful night in Parliament House in 2019.

Higgins alleged she was raped by a colleague, Bruce Lehrmann, in the suite of then-minister Linda Reynolds. A civil case found on the balance of probabilities the rape happened, although Lehrmann denied it.

As Reynolds’ defamation case against Higgins dragged on this week in the Western Australian Supreme Court, the Albanese government on Wednesday introduced legislation for a new watchdog on behaviour in parliamentary workplaces. These include not just parliament house in Canberra but electorate offices around the country.

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Commission will oversee “behaviour codes” for parliamentarians and their staff, which cover fostering respectful and inclusive workplaces and prohibit bullying, harassment, sexual harassment and assault, and discrimination. Draft codes were agreed last year by each house, but they will need to be finally adopted.

The primary function of the commission, that will have a chair and other commissioners, will be to investigate allegations of code breaches.

Complaints to the commission could be made in several ways (depending on the circumstances) - including via a parliamentarian, a presiding officer, or a party leader. The commission won’t investigate anonymous claims.

Crucially, it won’t be able to investigate allegations of bad behaviour that engage parliamentary privilege. It would only investigate allegations of conduct that don’t form part of proceedings in parliament.

If the commission finds misconduct by a parliamentarian, and the breach is serious, it will be referred to the privileges committee of the relevant chamber. The privileges committee would have to decide whether to recommend that the relevant house issue a sanction. These could include fines, discharge from a parliamentary committee, even suspension from the parliament, or any other sanctions the committee determined.

Where a parliamentarian was involved, a panel of three commissioners would make the decision on whether he or she had engaged in misconduct.

For more minor breaches, the panel could impose a reprimand and/or require the MP to undertake training.

The commission is one of a number of initiatives to flow from the inquiry by the then Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins in the wake of the Higgins allegation. Jenkins in her 2021 Set the Standard report found more than three-quarters of those working in Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces “have experienced, witnessed or heard about bullying, sexual harassment and/or actual or attempted sexual assault” in those workplaces.

The watchdog would itself be watched by a parliamentary joint committee.

The opposition has been part of the process of developing the commission and so is expected to support the legislation, although it probably doesn’t think it is necessary. After revelations in 2023 of Senator David Van’s bad behaviour towards women, Peter Dutton quickly booted him from the Liberal Party room.

The most important role of the commission may be as a general deterrent, rather than in the actual investigations it conducts.

The “teals” will support the legislation – but they think it addresses only part of the problem.

For the half dozen teals, who took Liberal seats in 2022, better behaviour in politics, especially towards women, has been a major issue, and on Wednesday four of them – Kylea Tink, Sophie Scamps, Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall – held a joint news conference to press their concerns.

Their focus was particularly on bad behaviour inside the chambers, which they have not just observed but personally experienced.

Scamps, who says she pre-warns visiting school children not to follow the example of what they are about to see in the house, pointed the finger at the party leaders.

“Not only do we need a ‘Stop it at the Start’ campaign, we need a ‘stop it at the top’ campaign. It’s the leaders that need to be role modelling the correct behaviour, and it starts with respect,” she said.

Steggall condemned the “heckling, bullying, shouting, intimidation, to stop members representing their community, to express the views and concerns of their communities in our democratic process in the chamber”.

The member for Warringah referred back to last week, when she condemned Dutton over Palestinian refugees amid a barrage of shouting from the opposition ranks. An angry Steggall called Dutton a “racist” (after she later repeated this outside the chamber, he threatened legal action).

“The mob mentality is committed by its leadership. And so my call is to Peter Dutton. He is the first to turn around in those situations and yell at and heckle, and the MPs under him, the Coalition MPs, take their cues from his leadership”, Steggall told the news conference. She also accused Anthony Albanese of condoning Labor MPs heckling crossbenchers they didn’t agree with.

Allegra Spender said she had never seen the behaviour she’d witnessed in the chamber in “any other workplace in my life”.

The teals are right in condemning how politicians behave, especially in the parliament but also in their wider public discourse. It’s hard to assess whether this has become worse – it probably has varied over time. But the coarsening of the public debate generally in the social media age probably encourages MPs into more routinely verbally-abusive behaviour.

Many members of the public are shocked when they see question time from the visitors’ gallery. The extraordinary thing is the MPs know the public hate this, but they apparently don’t care. Especially, but not only, those in opposition behave in a way that would appal them if it were their children doing it.

In that 60-90 minutes at question time in the house, they are fuelled by inhibition-killing adrenaline. They are not embarrassed when called out, or indeed thrown out, by Milton Dick, who has proved to be a fair-minded speaker but has an often near-impossible job.

The culprits won’t listen to lectures from the teals (they’ll just tell them to toughen up) but they should realise one of the reason teals won votes is that communities were sending messages that included a wish to see politics done in a different, less feral manner.

Meanwhile, Wednesday’s Sky News leaders’ debate between Northern Territory Chief Minister Eva Lawler and opposition leader Lia Finocchiaro, ahead of Saturday’s NT election, highlighted the grey area between “respectful” and “disrespectful” language:

Lawler challenged her opponent: “Lia are you tough enough to push back on your big donors? I think that you are a lightweight and I don’t think you’re tough enough to stand up to be Chief Minster”. Finocchiaro made the sarcastic retort: “Thank you, Eva, so kind, she’s a real treat”.

In politics, a mild exchange. In a “normal” workplace? Probably not so much.