Brittany Higgins posed with four other women after the PM’s apology to alleged sexual assault victims in Parliament House - here’s why this photo is so important.
Their names are important too: former Liberal staffers Chelsey Potter, Josie Coles, Rachelle Miller and sexual consent advocate Chanel Contos.
It was a reminder that the human toll of asking people to tell their stories to drive change is a heavy burden that is often disregarded and forgotten. Of course, the four Australian women who sat in the chamber are not the only women that have raised these issues and there was immediate criticism that the group was too “white” and too middle class.
For reasons that are difficult to fathom, it seems the Prime Minister and the Parliament originally wanted to deliver the apology to an empty chamber in the public gallery. The Prime Minister wanted to acknowledge Brittany Higgins by name, noting that her “experience and, more importantly, courage, is the reason why we are all here today, and I want to thank her for that.”
“Over many decades, an ecosystem, a culture, was perpetuated where bullying, abuse, harassment, and in some cases even violence, became normalised,’’ he said.Parliament can’t be a place of cruelty, he said.
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