The former Australian government MP Julia Banks stated that she has been inappropriately touched by a current cabinet minister at Parliament House in 2017.
Ms Banks, who made the allegation in a memoir, stated that the male MP moved his hand up her leg during a parliamentary vote session before moving away. In her memoir, Mrs Banks did jot identify the man in question.
The Prime Minister’s office declared that had no previous awareness to the matter and stated that this kind of behaviour was ‘completely unacceptable’.
She stated that the incident occurred when she and other MPs were waiting around for a night-time parliament vote when the minister came and sat next to her and put his hand ‘just above my knee and edged slowly and deliberately to my inner thigh and then further up my leg.’ She declared, “For a minister to do this in the prime minister’s wing, which was full of Coalition [government] MPs, he had to be astoundingly brazen. I found it unbelievable.”
The allegations made by Mrs Banks has raised the question on how women are treated in Mr Morrison’s conservative government and wider Australian politics. Other allegations related to rape have sparked a #MeToo movement across the country earlier this year.
The former MP left the Liberal party in 2018 when the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull list his position in a leadership coup which made Scott Morrison prime minister. In her exit speech at that time, she condemned the bullying and intimidation she had experienced in parliament. She stated that the parliament was decades behind in its attitudes towards women.
