"Shouldn’t you have thought about it as a human being?" Ten News reporter Tegan George asked the PM, adding, "What happens when men don’t have wife and children? Do they reach the same compassionate conclusions?"
“In my own experience, being a husband and a father is central to me, my human being,” he said.
“I hadn’t seen her account until last night. I had events and other things I was dealing with until late last night and I had the opportunity at that point to see. I had discussed it with Jenny. She had seen it, and we discussed it. That’s how we deal with these things.
“I think Australians know that I’m pretty honest about these matters and I seek to deal with them as humanly a way as possible and my family helps inform that, as I suspect it does most people.”
On Monday night, Higgins appeared on The Project to speak about the allegations, telling host Lisa Wilkinson she felt betrayed by the government as she tried to process the trauma of the alleged incident, including one where she was made to attend a meeting to discuss the incident in the room where the alleged rape took place.
“So it was the strange thing where it felt like everyone had all this information on my own assault and I didn’t have any and I desperately wanted to see it,” Higgins said.
“I asked at least half a dozen times to see that CCTV and [then chief of staff Fiona Brown] always said no.
"It hurt. It really hurt. It felt like a betrayal for them to withhold this one really small thing they needed for myself to process to move on or just to understand what had happened to me.”
The Prime Minister has since named his department's deputy secretary, Stephanie Foster, to lead a review of the complaints process for staff, while Celia Hammond, a Liberal backbencher, will lead a review of cultural problems around the treatment of women in parliament.
“We cannot ignore the importance of the issue of agency of women in these situations, they need the power in these situations to make the decisions that are best for them,” Morrison said. “And we clearly need to do better about that.”
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