Andrew L. Urban.
Decency deficiency is a parliamentary disease. Symptoms include abysmal behaviour by the Mean Girls and Bastard Boys towards Linda Reynolds and Fiona Brown and the refusal to apologise for it, while now grudgingly paying out $1.48 million to Brown after lengthy legal battles, in the continuing Brittany Higgins / Bruce Lehrmann saga.
In a tearful interview with Janet Albrechtsen and Stephen Rice of The Australian (20/8/2026) under the headline: Fiona Brown gets $1.48m payout but no apology for false cover-up claims, Fiona Brown said she felt “vindicated” but the settlement did not compensate for the destruction wrought on her life by the false claims that she mistreated Brittany Higgins and by the failure of her own Liberal Party colleagues to protect her in the aftermath of the scandal.
During her interview with The Australian, Brown broke down in tears several times recounting her attempts to deal with her trauma.
Speaking for the first time since she began her legal battle, Brown said she was “at peace” with the settlement, despite the disparity with the Higgins payout. The respected former public servant settled her dispute with the commonwealth late in July after a 16-month legal battle but the details can only now be revealed, after the lawsuit was formally discontinued. The $1.48m settlement stands in contrast to the commonwealth’s $2.44m settlement with Higgins, awarded without a costly lawsuit after a one day mediation that accepted the young woman’s unchallenged allegations she had been poorly treated by Brown and then-senator Reynolds.
Of the $2.4m, Higgins received $1.48m – the exact amount of Ms Brown’s total compensation – to cover lost earning capacity, following a claim she would be medically unfit for employment for 40 years. Yet Higgins is now working as the executive director of the Vida Fund.
Brown’s $1.48m settlement comprises: $450,000 in general damages for hurt, humiliation and distress, $490,000 for lost future earning capacity and employment opportunities, $40,000 for medical expenses and $500,000 for legal fees. Her lawyers worked much of the time without pay.
“I think it’s fair, but it certainly doesn’t replace what I could have earned, and what I lost,” Brown told The Australian. Brown has never received an apology from Higgins, Wilkinson or the Labor Party “mean girl” figures led by senator Katy Gallagher, but says she doesn’t want one that is meaningless.
a missing Higgins Million
More than $1m of that settlement is yet to be located by Higgins’ appointed trustee in bankruptcy, frustrating attempts by Reynolds, to recover some of the $1m in damages and costs she was awarded in a defamation case against her former staffer after WA Supreme Court judge Paul Tottle found that Ms Higgins was “dishonest” in parts of her account about a political cover-up. Higgins did not appeal that judgment.
Brown, who has been left with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, was estimated by a forensic accountant to have lost $2.7m in past and future earnings.
The lost time clearly weighs on her. “There is more road behind me than ahead of me,” she says. “I didn’t want to spend what remains of it fighting a case to my last breath.”
Brown became a central figure in the scandal that rocked politics after Higgins claimed she had been raped by fellow staffer Bruce Lehrmann, and that Brown and Reynolds failed to help her and tried to cover up the assault. When she applied for compensation, Higgins was never challenged over the allegations she made in private about her treatment by Brown and Reynolds – claims found by both Justice Tottle and Federal Court judge Michael Lee to have been false.
She struggled when asked how she felt towards Higgins now. “I don’t know if I’m ready to talk about it – it’s one of the last frontiers I haven’t crossed yet,” she said. “I haven’t quite got there.
“I don’t wish anyone ill, no matter the hurt they’ve caused me, I wish them well. I think everybody goes through life and they do things that hurt you. You can’t hang on to that. And everyone deserves a chance, a second chance and a third chance. That’s just life. And the only place I can find peace is to try to find understanding.”
Brown is damning of parliament’s failure to protect those who work within it, particularly political staffers.
“Inside the hothouse of parliament … it becomes something closer to a real-life Hunger Games — and ministerial staff are thrust into that arena with almost no rights of their own,” she said.
Brown rejects Senator Gallagher’s recent claim that everything she and Labor did at the time, was appropriate. “I don’t think it was appropriate at all,” she said. “I saw the parliament become a kangaroo court.”
Mean Girls & Bastard Boys
Instead of the public prosecution that Labor launched against her then boss, Reynolds and herself, Brown wondered why Senator Gallagher, now the Minister for Women, and other Labor shadow ministers didn’t go to the then prime minister, or to the presiding officer, or to the secretary of the department. “They would have been appropriate steps,” she said.
There has never been any suggestion from Senator Gallagher or any other minister that they encouraged Higgins to go to the police, instead of launching a public media and political trial. The commonwealth’s settlement with Brown also spared former prime minister Scott Morrison and his senior advisers the embarrassment of a trial over allegations they prevented Brown from responding to Higgins’ allegations and then downgraded her job.
In her Fair Work action against the commonwealth, Brown alleged Morrison had falsely claimed the pair had spoken following a hostile question time during which he was asked whether he had talked to Brown about Higgins. (Brown did not comment on Morrison’s wildly inappropriate and prejudicial parliamentary apology directed to all former parliamentary staff and others who experienced bullying, harassment, and sexual assault, specifically acknowledging the case of Brittany Higgins for “terrible things that happened in Parliament House”.)
In its defence to Brown’s claims, the commonwealth claimed that the prime minister’s engagement with her in this incident was “not in relation to or otherwise in connection with her employment”.
Brown described what she went through as like being caught in a sandstorm. “It comes at you in all different directions, you get disorientated,” she said. “And you get buried in the sand, and the sand gets into every part of you, it gets in your mouth, your ears, every piece of clothing, and years later you’re still shaking it out of your shoe.
“My husband and I had to leave the life we knew and move far away because I no longer felt safe, no longer knew what might happen next.”
Brown said she now had bigger issues to face. Her husband, Ninian, has been fighting an aggressive cancer and heart issues for the past 18 months. “That’s the fight that’s most important to me.”