The Victorian Animal Justice party MP, Georgie Purcell, has alleged she was sexually harassed in the state’s parliament.
During a parliamentary debate on a proposal to restrict non-disclosure agreements in workplaces, Purcell alleged the harassment occurred while she was working as a political staffer and as an upper house MP.
Purcell, who was elected to Victoria’s parliament in 2022, did not say who was behind the alleged harassment.
“I have been sexually harassed in parliament on multiple occasions … [since] my very first year as a staffer, when I was just 26 years old,” she said in the upper house on Thursday afternoon.
“I will never forget in those early months when someone came into my office for a discussion and I bent over to get something from the fridge and he remarked to me, in my member of parliament’s office, ‘If you do that again, I won’t be responsible for what happens next’.”
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Purcell said this was “just one in a litany of examples that have occurred while working in this building”.
“For me, in my experience with someone else in this place, it was the late-night messages, the harassing phone calls, the harassing texts, the bombardment of digital contact, the knocks on our doors when we cannot see who is on the other side,” she alleged in parliament.
Purcell said she had reported the harassment while she was an MP – only for the news to quickly spread through parliament.
“The immediate questions were: ‘What did she expect? Look how she dresses. Look at the tattoos. Look at her past. You can’t sexually harass the stripper’,” she said in parliament. “I heard the whispers when I walked past in the hallway.
“I have heard all of the rumours. I know the slut shaming far too well. Members of this place are not beyond it, and we need to reflect on that today as well as we move forward and do this important piece of legislation.”
The specific timeframe of the allegations and the outcome of the report was not specified.
Purcell raised the allegations while the legislative council debate a bill to curb the use of non-disclosure agreements in sexual harassment cases, which the government says will prevent victim-survivors from being silenced.
She said it was vital that sexual harassment survivors could speak without stigma.
“I hope that this piece of legislation is only just the beginning to making Australian workplaces better for young women and girls as they grow up and start their professional careers,” she said.
The legislation, which passed on Thursday, will ban NDAs in workplace sexual harassment cases unless expressly requested by the employee.
While it is an Australian first, similar legislative changes have been made in Ireland, Canada and some US states and are under consideration in the UK.
The Victorian government committed to restricting their use in 2022, as a direct response to a ministerial taskforce investigating workplace sexual harassment, which made 26 recommendations.
