Senator Linda Reynolds text messages with Bruce Lehrmann’s barrister Steve Whybrow during the rape trial.
The Liberal senator was defence minister when findings from the Brereton war crimes inquiry were handed down in 2020.
The inquiry examined allegations of war crimes committed by Australian Defence Force units during the war in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.
The report found evidence to implicate 25 current or former ADF personnel in the alleged unlawful killings of 39 individuals in Afghanistan.
Following the report former soldier Ben Roberts-Smith brought defamation proceedings against several media outlets but he lost his case last week, with a Federal Court judge finding he had committed war crimes as alleged by the outlets.
Ms Reynolds, in an interview published in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, said current senior officers within Defence needed to be more open with the public about any improvements made to the organisation’s culture after the Brereton report.
“There is still an attitude in some quarters that if you raise these issues, it is a slight against all veterans, that somehow what happens in war should stay in war, but we can’t sweep this under the rug,” she said.
“There can be no legal or moral excuses for war crimes.”
Ms Reynolds said leaders within Defence should better detail their responses to the issues raised in the report, which she said made her feel ill when she read it.
But the attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, said the government managed the settlement by the letter of the law, rebuffing Reynolds’s claims she was silenced through the mediation process.
Higgins, the former Liberal staffer, was employed by then defence industry minister Reynolds at the time she alleges she was raped by fellow staffer Bruce Lehrmann in the senator’s Parliament House office. Lehrmann was charged but vehemently denied the allegations and maintained his innocence, including in a Seven Network interview on Sunday where he claimed the assault “simply didn’t happen”.
In a lengthy statement on Wednesday, Reynolds claimed the matter “demands the attention of the National Anti-Corruption Commission”.
“If this isn’t done by others, I am prepared to personally bring it to their attention,” she said.
Reynolds claimed the payment to Higgins was finalised in an “unusually swift” manner, “raising serious questions about how this significant sum of public money was determined and allocated”. “I was initially granted legal assistance to defend the civil claim made by Ms Higgins against me (as well as Senator Cash and the Commonwealth) but, on 6 December 2022, I was advised that the Commonwealth has a discretion to control the conduct of my defence and that the Attorney-General had decided to exercise that discretion,” Reynolds’ statement read.
“The result of this was that the Attorney-General did not want me to attend the mediation or make any public comments about the mediation or the civil claim made by Ms Higgins.”
Reynolds went on to claim Dreyfus, the finance minister, Katy Gallagher, and the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, had a “potential conflict of interest” based on their previous public statements about the matter.
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