What’s next for Rachelle Miller after her $650,000 settlement?

Columnist and author

Rachelle Miller was a veteran LNP staffer who,it emerged this week,reached a settlement of $650,000 with the federal government for the poor workplace treatment she alleges she received while in the employ of then-minister Alan Tudge – with whom she was in a consensual sexual relationship – and then former minister Michaelia Cash. Both deny her allegations.

Fitz: Rachelle,with the legal action you took now settled in your favour,do you feel vindicated?

RM: Yes. After all,if what Tudge and Cash is saying is true,and I’ve just made up all of this stuff,then why would the government pay $650,000 to settle? Why wouldn’t they just take it to court? They have all the resources there in the Attorney-General’s Department,funded by the taxpayer,to take this to court and prove that I’m a liar. They didn’t do that. Why were they so willing to settle? It must have been because they could see my case had a strong chance in the courts – the truth is compelling. Yes,it would have been nice to have had certain people held publicly accountable. But I do feel satisfied with the outcome.

I don’t want to be defined as ‘the lady in the red dress’:Rachelle Miller and Alan Tudge arrive for the Midwinter Ball at Parliament House in 2017.

I don’t want to be defined as ‘the lady in the red dress’:Rachelle Miller and Alan Tudge arrive for the Midwinter Ball at Parliament House in 2017.Alex Ellinghausen

Fitz: I think a lot of the public is confused with the timing of this,thinking it is the new Albanese government that settled. Can you clarify?

RM: The mediation was last March under the Morrison government,and we went into it expecting that it probably wouldn’t be successful and we would need to file in the Federal Court. However,within the first couple of hours we realised that the government wasn’t requesting a Non-Disclosure Agreement. And so then we were like,“Okay,well,we’re open to settling then”. We agreed to a settlement soon after. But then they needed to draft the Deed of Agreement and that process took us past the election,into July. So while the agreement was first made under the LNP government,the sign-off didn’t happen until the Labor government was in power.

Fitz: Both former ministers vociferously deny your allegations which have never been legally proven in any case;the settlement makes “no admissions”,and both former ministers have said they had no part in the negotiations for the settlement. And as you say,the government weren’t even asking for a non-disclosure agreement to shut you up. Bottom line:what were you and your lawyers thumping the tablewith in these negotiations? What was your leverage point?

Former Liberal staffer Rachelle Miller.

Former Liberal staffer Rachelle Miller.Alex Ellinghausen

‘Things won’t truly change until the people in that building see someone very powerful be held accountable ... If we don’t see accountability,nothing will change.’

Rachelle Miller

RM: The strength of my evidence. It took my lawyers six months to collate all of it and they were very,very confident in its soundness. I have documentation. I have text messages,I have a lot of things that make my case very strong. So we then collated a statement of claim outlining all of that evidence to the government that was 40 pages long,and the sheer volume of incidents was appalling. And I think that they realised,“Hang on a second – this is extremely serious”. I’ve spoken publicly about a very small subset of my experiences;there is actually a lot more to the story.

Fitz: I think many taxpayers are likely confused by the fact that we are footing the bill for the actions you allege of Tudge and Cash – who,I repeat,vigorously deny all your allegations – and yet those former ministers were not part of the process,let alone bearing any of the weight of the pay-out?

RM: Well,I mean,that’s what they say;I don’t know whether that’s true or not. All I know is that my legal team was liaising with the Commonwealth legal team. I don’t know who that legal team was then going and briefing,but I do know that we were taking on the Commonwealth for a failure to provide a safe workplace for me. As to the allegations of abuse that I have made – relating to the relationship with Alan Tudge – that didn’t come into it. That’s an entirely separate matter. What we were focused on was where laws were broken in my treatment in my workplace.

“The review that Scott Morrison called for was basically set up to give Alan Tudge an opportunity to say that he’d been vindicated.”

Rachelle Miller

Fitz:What drove you to first make the whole thing public by talking toFour Corners?

RM: The desire for change. When Louise Milligan got in touch with me and said,“Look,I just want to talk to you about experiences in parliament,” I was suffering really badly at that time – I was struggling in the job that I had gotten after leaving parliament because I was breaking down all the time and I didn’t really understand why I was such a mess. And I’d had a particularly bad day and I just said,“You know,Louise,here’s the story...” And I just went and told her the whole lot. I always said to her from the beginning,“I’ve lost my career. I’ve lost my health. I’m about to stop working completely,because I’m so unwell. What have I got to lose?”

Fitz: Some of your tweets in recent times have been raw and scarifying,where you talk about how if some of your posts about your experiences make the twitterati uncomfortable,“Then just reflect on it,times it by a million,and that’s how I feel every day! It’s had a really huge impact and it’s been hard to shed the shame and blame!” Hopefully this settlement does help to shed both?

RM: It does. It’s given me an opportunity to put my case to the government,and they thought it serious enough to settle. And I’ve done enough work with my psychiatrist to know it wasn’t my fault,that I should feel neither shame or blame,and this settlement helps confirm that. I was the one who was wronged.

Fitz:The Jenkins Review from November last year,found 33 per cent of people currently in parliamentary workplaces have personally experienced sexual harassment while there. Do you believe that because of your actions,other staffers in the parliament are now better protected than they were?

RM: I hope they are. I have heard that the parliament workplace support service that’s been put in place is already being utilised and really helpful. So that’s a positive. But I think really,things won’t truly change in that culture of power imbalance until the people in that building see someone very powerful be held accountable for their actions and actually face a punishment for that. If we don’t see accountability,nothing will change.

Fitz: We needn’t relive the trauma you’ve gone through but I’m told,by those who have witnessed it up close,that your strength in the face of it has been staggering. Where did you draw that strength from?

RM: I don’t really know. I suppose in a way,the strength came from enduring a lot of years of really awful behaviour,and I think I’ve always just been a really resilient person. And I think that goes right back to my childhood. My parents always gave me a lot of freedom to go and do the things I wanted to do and learn my lessons. And I think that,I’m also a very optimistic person. I’m very good with coping mechanisms under pressure.

Fitz: Looking back,are you glad that you first went public with your story?

RM: Oh,absolutely. I’m just getting to the point now where I’m starting to go,“Oh,actually,I think I’ve achieved something”. My father actually wrote me a text the other day and said,how proud he and Mum were of me and my strength and my resilience and my ability to be able to speak publicly and help lead a movement of change and it kind of hit me that,“Oh,okay ... maybe I’m doing something that’s good”.

Fitz: And yet you said in your open letter this week:“My experience in making a formal complaint was frankly horrendous and left me more traumatised than when I began it.”

RM: A lot of it was the tricks they played. You know,the calling of an independent inquiry into my allegations that was by no means independent or fair,or at all transparent. I mean,they couldn’t even guarantee me I’d receive a copy of the report! That is just appalling. The review that Scott Morrison called for was basically set up to give Alan Tudge an opportunity to say that he’d been vindicated. Even if I had participated there was no way that Vivienne Thom could have found anything other than what she found,which was that the findings were inconclusive,so you know,it was just the big setup.

Fitz: You told Patricia Kavelas on Radio National this week that you don’t want to be defined as “the lady in the red dress”,referring to the famous footage of you with Minister Tudge at the Midwinter’s Ball in Parliament House in 2017. Twenty years from now,how would you like to be defined?

RM: Hopefully,successful in something else. I don’t know what that is. But,look,I’d like to be known as a person who stood up and helped motivate a movement for change.

Fitz: What does the immediate future hold for you and does the payout at least give you some respite that you don’t have to work for a bit?

RM: Yes. I’ve actually gotten to the point where my doctors have said if you don’t stop and take time off to do what they call “hospital in home”,that they will actually admit me into hospital as it’s actually gotten quite serious. So I do actually need to just stop completely and rest and that’s what I will be doing – and this money does allow me to do that. I’m really grateful for that.

Fitz: All right,I suspect I speak on behalf of most:we wish you all strength and all rest.

Quote of the week

“The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon. The King and The Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow.” – Statement from Buckingham Palace,issued at 3.30am (AEST) on Friday.

“I’ll give them this bit of advice now they’re going down this nukes[nuclear] option ... don’t bring in a bit of uranium and pass it around.”– Anthony Albanese.

“From the allegations in the Brereton report to the fall of Kabul,we have a duty to face up to all that happened. Twenty-one years later,we can fairly ask:how did we reorder the world around us? If we answer that question with humility,then we will recognise the limits of military power alone. If we answer that question with honesty,then we will have demonstrated that ours is an open and accountable democracy. That is something worth fighting for.”– Keith Wolahan,Liberal Member for Menzies – a former commando and platoon leader in Afghanistan in his maiden speech to federal parliament.

“We don’t hold any grudges against the driver because he is going to go through hell.” – John Van de Putte,father of 15-year-old Lily van de Putte,who was killed along with four other teenagers in a car crash in Buxton this week.

“Governing should come first over politics,and if I’ve paid a political price for that,well,fair enough.”– Scott Morrison on his multiple ministries,looking for the high road.

“In my 28 years analysing elections,I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics[since the Supreme Court overturned Roe V Wade]:Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is,especially in light of the cycles of tragedy and eventual resignation of recent years. This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle.”– Tom Bonier,a Democrat political strategist,writing inThe New York Times.

“Well,I think my mum will,I’m not sure about my dad.”– Newly installed British Prime Minister Liz Truss,whose parents were hard-line anti-Thatcher activists,as was she when asked if she thought they would now vote for her in a general election.

“He’s an enemy of the state. You want to know the truth. The enemy of the state is him.”– Former US President Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on his successor President Joe Biden.

“Let me say that I am now one of those booster rockets that has fulfilled its function and I will now be gently re-entering the atmosphere and splashing down invisibly in some obscure and remote corner of the Pacific.”– Boris Johnson during his final speech as UK Prime Minister.

“No sport should accept repetitive head impacts before the age of 14. Let’s start there. Parents don’t hit their own child in the head,and we need to remove this cultural veil,in that it happening in sports is OK for the developing brain. It’s not.”– Neuroscientist Dr Chris Nowinski,a former American football player for Harvard,turned professional wrestler,warning Australian families about CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy),which is linked to repetitive head trauma.

“Like so many other young Australians,I used my savings from pocket money ... to buy their albums and singles for my record player,I listened to them on my transistor[radio] at the beach. A national treasure,an icon,a trailblazer,a shining star,a pioneering woman ... the feeling is:we’ll never find another you.”– Victorian Governor Linda Dessau farewelling singer Judith Durham at a state memorial service this week.

“What I’m not into is getting engaged in the to and fro of the political circus of this and that,and argue this and that,and responding to this criticism[or] to someone having a sledge at you. OK,they’re having a big crack at me,I’m just not engaging in[it].”– Scott Morrison on his multiple ministries.

“I thought that what best represents me and the Australian story is the Australian flag and a Vietnamese dress,which is my heritage. I’m somebody who has embraced both the Australian culture and the Vietnamese culture and that’s what I want to celebrate – the multicultural Australia that we have here. And that’s me,and that’s why I wore the dress.”– Independent MP Dai Le on why she wore a traditional Vietnamese áo dài made from fabric printed with the Australian flag to make her maiden speech this week.

“Like any father,they think in a lot of ways that I’m pretty hopeless,so they start talking about the things I can’t do – how bad I am at cooking and the gardening that doesn’t happen.”– Craig Foster on his children’s views after he was named Father of the Year.

“Don’t you come down to Tasmania and start dictating to people that they are going to join a union,because I can tell you that is going to go down quicker than a lead fart,mate.”– Senator Jacqui Lambie to a Channel 10 newsreader.

@Peter_Fitz

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald.

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