A few weeks after I’d been posted to The
Sydney Morning Herald’s Canberra bureau a very senior Government bureaucrat rang me up to tell me he
was thinking about suing me for something I’d written. I’d only been working
for the paper for a few years. I was a junior reporter and I hadn’t twigged
that, if he was really going to sue, our lawyers would have already heard from
his lawyers.

Somewhat naively I agreed to have lunch
with the guy, hoping I could talk him out of it. We went somewhere expensive
and he let me know he found me attractive. I felt pretty uncomfortable at the
time. I was keen to cultivate him as a contact – I wanted to earn my stripes.
On the other hand, it was clear he wanted to sleep with me. I went back to the
Bureau and talked to my fellow female reporters about it. They all said
versions of the same thing. “Oh God. Not again. This place is Sleaze-On
city. You think that’s bad – you should talk to Uncle Filthy in the
Labor/Liberal/Name Your Party.” We had a drink or four and I forgot about
it. It would not be the last time I got propositioned by someone I interviewed.

Do I think what Mr Pants Man did was
ethical or appropriate? Absolutely not. Do I think it was sexual harassment?
No. It would have been sexual harassment if the Bureau Chief or the Sydney political
editor had propositioned me. It would have been a form of harassment if Mr PM
had pressured me to have sex with him or had kept phoning me after the lunch.
He didn’t. Never heard from him again.

Journalists who report on politics are more
likely as a group than other journalists to be subject to this kind of
attention. Anyone who’s worked in a press gallery knows that you end up working
late and sometimes socialising with politicians and their staffers to get
stories. What’s more, some of the staffers (and some of the pollies) are
ex-journos, so there are lots of social cross-overs.

But does that mean that every time a pollie
or a journo propositions the other it’s sexual harassment? No – they both have
power over each other. Politicians can refuse to grant interviews but
journalists can go back and write hostile stories. In law, sexual harassment –
if you are not directly supervised by, or employed by, someone – does not
include someone propositioning you in a bar. And in common sense terms – if
someone who isn’t your boss or direct co-worker expresses interest in you and
moves on, that’s not harassment either.

Sexual harassment laws are essential to
women working as equals in the workplace. As a feminist, I am passionate about
this. But, speaking also as someone with a legal background who’s worked in the
Equal Opportunity field, I think we also need to be very careful about dubbing
behaviour which is unprofessional or immoral (depending on your point of view)
as sexual harassment. To do so waters down the concept and potentially
trivialises something feminists have fought very hard for.

The oft-cited fact that John Brogden had
“a wife and child at home” when he was propositioning women is not
relevant to sexual harassment. Feminists are not God’s Police. The marriage and
child thing is a matter between Brogden and his wife.

If I put the hard word on any of my
students or colleagues I supervise I deserve to be booted out of my job because
I am potentially exploiting my authority. If I get drunk in a bar and
proposition someone who I have no direct authority over I may well be making a
total goose of myself. Let’s correct that – I would almost certainly be making
a total goose of myself. And my much-loved partner may decide he’s had it with
me. But that is between us.

Read on here.