Photographer: Brendon Thorne / Bloomberg
Photographer: Brendon Thorne / Bloomberg
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Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said a member of staff involved in “disgusting and disgusting” behavior in parliament has been fired in the latest blow from his Conservative government, which has already been shattered by rape allegations.
Network Ten months in the evening aired allegations that a group of government staff members had shared images and videos of naughty acts for two years, including photos of one of them masturbating on the desk of a woman parliamentarian.
“The actions of these individuals show an astonishing lack of respect for the people who work in Parliament and for the ideals that Parliament should represent,” Morrison said in a statement. “It’s not good enough and it’s totally unacceptable,” he said, adding that a staff member at the prosecution center was fired.
Read more: The protests signal an accounting in the Australian fight against sexism
The last incident comes a week later Thousands of women rallied across Australia to protest sexual violence and Morrison’s handling of decades-old rape allegations and an alleged separate sexual assault in parliament in 2019. Support for the Morrison government has fallen to the 13-month low in the latest Newspoll published on March 15 now targets the main Labor opposition, from 48% to 52%.
Demonstrators at the March 4 Justice Rally in Melbourne on March 15.
Photographer: Carla Gottgens / Bloomberg
The government is on fire for refusing to launch an investigation into allegations that Attorney General Christian Porter raped a member of a school debate team in 1988 – allegations he denies.
There has also been growing criticism of how Morrison handled allegations that former government adviser Brittany Higgins was raped by a staff colleague in a minister’s office in 2019.
In response, Morrison ordered an independent inquiry into the House of Commons workplace culture by sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins.
Morrison said Tuesday that he was very worried that many women thought he had not heard their demands for change.
“These events have triggered, right in this building and indeed in the whole country, women who have endured this garbage and this cloud for the rest of their lives, as their mothers did, as their grandmothers did,” she said. Morrison.
Foreign Minister Marise Payne, the oldest woman in Morrison’s 22-man cabinet, where 16 are men, told a parliamentary committee Monday night that the latest allegations by Network Ten were “terrible.”
“The degrading nature of those actions, which were reported in the media, is beyond disappointing,” she said.
(Updates with Morrison comments in paragraphs 8, 9)