Six weeks after former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins publicly alleged she had been raped inside Parliament and four weeks after historic rape allegations against Attorney-General Christian Porter emerged, a tearful Prime Minister Scott Morrison vowed to “get this house in order”.
What was it, after so much had been said and written and demanded about the treatment of women, that finally moved the PM?
Parliament House has been rocked by recent events.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Someone masturbated four years ago inside the office of the government’s former chief whip.
Nathan Winn, the man fired this week for wanking on his boss's desk, is not accused of using his position to pressure women for sex. He hasn’t raped or sexually assaulted anyone. There is no suggestion from anyone who worked with him that he is a misogynist or that he made Parliament a more difficult place for women.
He is a gay man who, due to the nature of the parliamentary duties he held off and on for more than a decade, worked long hours in the building and was well known among Liberal MPs. He was good at his job and generally well-liked.
No one is suggesting it is OK to masturbate on your boss's desk or to have oral sex at work. Winn’s parliamentary sexcapades – which he filmed inside the office of Liberal MP Nola Marino – were outrageous and disrespectful of the Parliament and would be a sackable offence in any workplace.
His decision to share those images with a man he mistook for a friend was career ending.
The same man claims to have compromising videos and pictures of a further three current and former Liberal staffers, all gay men.
It is a serious issue for the men involved. But let’s not mistake it for something it isn’t.
Higgins’ experience, both in her alleged rape and the response from her former political bosses, triggered a seismic reckoning about how women are treated inside and outside Parliament. Morrison in an interview with A Current Affair’s Tracy Grimshaw on Thursday night described it as a “wake-up call” that had started “a very deep and confronting conversation”.
Nathan Winn (left) and Gavin Cuddy.
The story that engulfed federal politics this week is a distraction from this conversation. It is being misleadingly framed, carries more than a whiff of homophobia and since its initial broadcast, has been distorted by the deep hatreds that shape Liberal Party politics.
“I think this was genuinely about someone who works seven days a week, 17 or 18 hours a day and spends way too much time on Scruff and Grindr,” said a Liberal MP who knows Winn well but was unable to speak on the record. “He deserved to be sacked but this wasn’t about misogyny.”
Instead, this was a hit job on the Morrison government by a person who has never worked in politics or in Parliament but, since the same-sex marriage debate leading up to the 2017 plebiscite, has expressed a deep animosity towards some Liberal Party politicians and their policies.
The man behind this tawdry episode goes by the name “Tom the Whistleblower” but isn’t a whistleblower in the true sense of the word. His real name is Gavin Cuddy and he is a retail manager, currently out of work, who lives in the ACT.
Cuddy met Winn about five years ago. They “hooked up” once or twice, became friends and over the years, shared images of their sexual encounters. Cuddy told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald that their friendship cooled after the man’s new partner began spreading “hate” about him. He continued to send Winn explicit pictures six months after the staffer stopped reciprocating.
Cuddy is a prolific Twitter poster who is highly critical of Morrison and his government. He denied his decision to expose Winn’s sexual activities was politically motivated. “This story was about culture, it wasn’t about politics,” Cuddy said.
He admits to having a “hatred” for his local Liberal Senator Zed Seselja, “because he is ultra-conservative and is everything I stand against personally” but denies loathing the entire party. In a telephone interview and exchange of text messages, he compared himself with Higgins and expressed disgust at men having sex “inside the most important building in the country”, despite admitting he’d done so himself.
He graphically described some of the sexual acts he says took place inside Parliament House. He said he had no moral objections to the behaviour; only where it happened. “At what stage do they stop?,” he said. “Had I not done it, it would have got bigger and bigger and more frequent. It was like they were gloating at what they were getting away with.”
When asked why he was willing to ruin the career of a man he once considered a friend, he became defensive.
“Did I ruin a career? Or did the actions of the staffer wreck his own career,” Cuddy said. “It was definitely the latter. I don’t need to justify my reasons for coming forward. I will say I have not been paid.”
Associates of Cuddy say he is an avid collector and sharer of explicit material. He claims to have had sex inside Parliament’s meditation room with Liberal staffers. This room, steeped in urban myth and sordid history, is notorious as a place where people kneel but rarely pray.
Cuddy is also an unlikely champion of women’s rights. In December last year, under a now-suspended Twitter handle @ubitchinatme, he said in the course of a heated political debate: “Stop carrying on like a furry pitted, anti-vaxing lesbian on heat.”
He claimed on Thursday he provided the government and opposition with pictures and videos of the current and former Liberal staffers. Labor Senator Kristina Keneally confirmed a person from her office had spoken to the man but said he hadn’t provided any documents, videos or photos. A spokesman for Special Minister for State Simon Birmingham said Mr Cuddy provided information to them and a government investigation was ongoing.
This entire episode – the outing of gay Liberal men for consensual sex inside Parliament – is part revenge porn and part political activism. In normal times it would never have been broadcast or reported by a mainstream media outlet, including this masthead. But these are not normal times. Not for the Parliament. Not for the media covering it.
When Cuddy first approached the ABC last November with an unsolicited, encrypted protonmail promising images of a LNP staff member having oral sex in the whip’s office, the 4 Corners team deemed the message too scurrilous to warrant a response.
He next approached the Ten Network’s Peter Van Onselen on February 18, four days after journalist Sam Maiden broke the Higgins story.
In his reports on the Ten Network and in The Australian newspaper, Van Onselen emphasised the fact that the desk on which the Liberal staffer ejaculated belonged to a female MP. This detail, which shaped the immediate reaction of both sides of politics, was the only evidence presented to link the episode with the treatment of women.
Since then, one man’s performative relief has been portrayed as a perverted expression of male power. It has also been suggested that the masturbation was a form of protest against Marino’s opposition to same-sex marriage. Another, perhaps more likely, is there was a kinky appeal about sex in the boss's office.
Whatever the explanation, Morrison was genuinely appalled at the latest example of indecent behaviour inside Parliament House. He also saw an opportunity. Where Morrison was evasive in his response to Higgins and defensive in his response to Porter, he was unequivocal in expressing his disgust at the “shameful behaviour” of men at work.
Winn, who was employed as a principal parliamentary adviser in the current chief whip’s office, was dismissed within hours of the report going to air.
“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,” the PM said on Tuesday.
While this sentiment encapsulates the issues which galvanised the March4Justice movement, it applies less readily to gay men having sex in Parliament. Until this week Nola Marino was unaware that anything so salacious had taken place in her office.
Morrison’s eagerness to denounce the staff member contrasts with his reluctance to engage with the implications of either the Higgins or Porter issues. It also pales with what happened on Wednesday night when Peta Credlin, a chief of staff to former prime minister Tony Abbott and Sky News broadcaster, seized upon the scandal to settle old scores and position herself as a champion of Liberal women.
Credlin is an enigmatic figure in Liberal politics. Beloved by rank and file conservatives but largely unsupported by the party’s factional bosses, Credlin is a star candidate without a seat. But for the past eight years she has drawn strength from an inexhaustible source; her hatred of Malcolm Turnbull, the man who deposed her old boss.
Peta Credlin and former prime minster Tony Abbott.
It was Credlin who first hired Winn to work in the chief whip’s office. She also claims she was responsible for his subsequent removal in 2012 for perceived disloyalty. Winn’s direct boss at the time, Warren Entsch, remembers Credlin having nothing to do with the decision. Either way, it is true Credlin wanted him gone and that he returned to Canberra once Turnbull replaced Abbott. For her purposes on Sky News, this was all she needed.
“The man sacked by the Morrison government this week for his disgusting acts on his MP’s desk and its distribution on a little chat group – how do you even think about doing that sort of crap at work? – that bloke I demanded to be sacked years earlier for disloyalty, for lying, for leaking against his boss.
“I sacked him and I said he would never be back while I worked in that building. Turnbull rolled Abbott, I was gone and he was back.”
Credlin went on to warn a former minister rumoured to have welcomed male prostitutes into Parliament that she knew who he was. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are unaware of any basis for these rumours, which relate to a factional ally of Turnbull. A current MP is also facing an empty threat of exposure over footage that doesn’t exist.
Peta Credlin said on Sky News that she had sacked the Coalition staffer featured in a video performing a lewd act on the desk of a federal MP. Credit:Sky News
Credlin claimed to have seen evidence of staffers from both sides of politics engaging in “gay orgies” while their respective ministers were in question time. This is understood to relate to material found on another former Liberal staffer’s computer.
There is a pattern of behaviour here but it is not behaviour that disempowers women; it is behaviour which marginalises gay men.
Where does this leave Credlin’s campaign? A Victorian Liberal MP believes Credlin is genuine in her desire to advance the interests of women. The most dramatic example of this is the role she played in convincing Tony Abbott to announce what, at the time, was a radically generous paid maternity scheme.
Whether Credlin lifts up women around her is another matter.
As Abbott’s chief of staff, Credlin was for a time the most powerful woman in the Liberal Party and arguably, the most powerful in the nation. She was uniquely placed to change the culture of how women are treated within her party.
Journalist Niki Savva is the closest thing we have to a biographer of Peta Credlin. In her 2016 book Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin destroyed their own government, she chronicles what former staff members of Credlin describe as her management style towards men and women.
“Many felt vulnerable, and the extreme shifts in behaviour created a constant sense of unease,” former policy adviser Shane Evans told Savva. “The unpredictability was all consuming at times because the shouting – often accompanied by scatter gun and hysterical demands – was driven by how she was feeling, rather than what was needed to get the job done.”
Fiona Telford, an experienced press secretary, said she admired Credlin tremendously when she first went to work for her in Helen Coonan’s office in 2007. That quickly changed. She told Savva about being called a “f---ing useless bitch” by Credlin and the cumulative impact of constant criticism and denigration on her self-esteem and eventually, mental health.
Credlin told her viewers she wants to drive cultural change within the Parliament.
In this sordid week, some things reverted to type.
Chip Le Grand is The Age’s chief reporter. He writes about crime, sport and national affairs, with a particular focus on Melbourne.
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2021-03-26 18:30:00Z
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