Cancel is without antonym. It is decisive, brutal, and irreversible. Like a ticket punched and chad obliterated, it’s not something people forget. Howard was Lazarus with a triple bypass and proved politicians could come back. But surviving Australia’s most vicious media vortices of recent times is not something I would wish on anyone.

Being indifferent to the gender wars, it was ironic to find myself a global target of gender derision. An estimated 450 million people read or viewed these stories in less than two weeks. If you ever want to understand the driver of media mania; the short answer is money. Laming stories in the first half of April 2021 generated over $210 million in advertising and banner revenue. That builds a decent war chest for the odd defamation action, but it’s a shame the few don’t stick to the truth and direct that money to journalist wages instead of court costs. 

It was the final sitting on Thursday, March 25, 2021. The entire building was itching to get back to their little slices of paradise around the country. A Current Affair clips had been promoting ‘some Laming episode’ all afternoon; I vaguely remember a blur of sobbing women pleading with Scott Morrison to ‘do something about this man’.

Remember the context; our side – the conservative side – had been battered by Brittany, was reeling from cow comments, and had endured the leaking of lewd office snaps. A scapegoat was needed.

Morrison had his own ‘women problems’, he had ministers with women problems, women ministers with problems involving women, and now – outrageously – an MP facing accusations from women.

I alerted Morrison’s office at around 1pm and tapped out a firm statement that these political critics had a dubious history.

The frenzy centred around Morrison’s secretary Yaron Finkelstein.

‘You telling me you aren’t going to apologise?’ he carped.

‘Happy to,’ I responded, ‘but only for how people might have felt. There is nothing wrong with anything I posted and I stand by everything 100 per cent. Soonest said, quickest mended,’ I reminded him.

But Finkelstein wanted more. He wielded a large manilla folder of complaints from my critics over the years. ‘There is so much out there about you,’ he warned. ‘And you know how it is, one speaks up, then more do, and the harder you deny things, the more come out of the woodwork.’

Days later, a colleague would recount these exact words as the excuse a Victorian colleague gave for bucketing me on Sunday’s Insiders with David Speers.

The upshot of my Morrison meeting was explaining away one Facebook post that had paralysed his office. The photo had three ALP figures in the distance walking away from shot. Apparently, they felt stalked and harassed ‘from the bushes.’

‘That’s my wife in the foreground of my photo Scott, and my kids are right there on those swings but cropped out…’ I said.

‘Well okay, that’s a bit premature Yaron,’ he had replied, and in a sentence I had nuked Finkelstein’s best shot, so I naively trotted off thinking I had the boss’s support. 

Less than 24 hours later, and apparently for no reason other than the airing of a TV segment, Morrison called me ‘disgraceful’ and sealed my fate.

In the end, you can’t be a member of Parliament and refuse to apologise to a person claiming you had caused them emotional harm. It turns out that one woman was being allegedly harassed by a profile she wrongly presumed was me.

Two days later on April 1, Police threw out the landscape photo accusation from two years previously, just 20 minutes after I provided my statement which actually accorded pretty closely to hers. She added me as a friend after the visit, but that part was overlooked.

Fast forward a year, and every single entity asked to apologise has obliged. Pretty much every editor presented with the facts have removed or revisited articles.

Like a sailor on the sea, I will never complain about the media because we all have a job to do. It isn’t a complicated thing. Just tell the truth and if you don’t; apologise. It is not rocket science.

The gender panic of 2021 was not Australia’s proudest moment. For a while there, a female complaining about a male came with a mandatory minimum sentence and no trial. Feeling so mildly uncomfortable about an incident (that you never mentioned anything at the time) was suddenly worthy of ABC coverage – showcasing any female willing to play the card. It wasn’t helped by a poor choice of Australian of the Year and literally hundreds of #MeToo proponents, too many of which were simply boosting their socials.

That time happily is behind us.

I am relieved also to have reached agreement with Nine Media this week, an achievement to chalk up to the crack Sydney team of Rebekah Giles, Barry Dean, and Sue Chrysanthou.

I have learned that every cloud has a silver lining, and where there is smoke, there are often just fairy tales. I was able to afford the best legal team to systematically unpick the biggest political fiction in recent years. To be honest it deserves its own Walkley category.

Although feeling unscathed now, there is no way to capture the shame inflicted upon those around me who don’t live and breathe politics. The last 18 months broke my devoted electorate staff, wearied my friends and supporters, and will haunt the rest of my daughters’ childhood. Their great school and our Redland community shielded us from the worst of it, and it’s nice to repay them now with a hardest-earned mineral of all; the truth.

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