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In a move straight out of the Scotty From Marketing playbook, it seems yet another high-powered female will be falling on her sword to protects the boys club at the centre of countless political scandals.
First it Bridget McKenzie who took the wrap for spending millions of tax-payer dollars on buying votes by pushing through ineligible sports grants applications in marginal electorates.
Then there was the former chief executive of Australia Post, Christine Holgate, who was forced into resigning after Scotty feigned outrage at the revelations that she gifted expensive watches to senior staff who negotiated a lucrative deal with three big banks.
Holgate’s actions have since been cleared as corporate fluffing, which is the type of stuff that you would want a high-functioning corporate operator to do, if they were running giant government enterprise.
Some would argue that Senator McKenzie’s actions, while blatantly corrupt and likely a result of her following orders from the Prime Minister, aren’t as bad as raping someone fifty metres from the Prime Minister’s desk.
It is for this reason that the government needs to follow the precedent set with the career assassinations of McKenzie and Holgate.
This means someone is going to stand down for the mounting pile of rape and sexual assault allegations levelled towards Liberal Party staffers and Ministers within the Federal Cabinet.
And that someone will be a woman.
And that woman will be Senator Linda Reynolds.
In a rapid decoy from Attorney General Christian Porter’s shocking press conference yesterday, The Australian newspaper has today reported that Reynolds referred to a former staffer and alleged victim of a workplace rape as a “lying cow” in front of members of her current staff on 15 February.
The newspaper reported that this wild example of Handmaid’s Tale-like internalised misogyny was made in the open part of the office, and that staff later expressed concern about it.
Despite still being on medical leave triggered by a stressful week of answering questions about protecting alleged rapists, Linda Reynolds has since addressed the ‘lying cow’ comments.
In an uncharacteristic twist for the Liberal Party, the Senator has not denied that she said those words in reference to a traumatised young woman who alleges to have been raped on a couch in their shared workplace.
She will now likely resign, and the Prime Minister will reshuffle his cabinet, and we will all forget about this scary culture of sexual abuse and victim-blaming in a couple of weeks.
