Wangaratta Magistrates’ Court is an art deco building on Faithfull Street. Tinted windows let golden light onto carpets of a grubby caramel colour — black spots with lighter yellow flowers. Faithfull Street is largely cafes and bars, edged by the tree-lined Ovens River that runs languid around the picturesque cathedral town. It’s here that the possibly self-defeating and certainly bizarre defamation case between former Indi MP Sophie Mirabella and the Benalla Ensign concluded yesterday, in Mirabella’s favour.
Benalla is a town 50 kilometres south west of Wangaratta. The paper had already printed an apology and retraction regarding the April 2016 story at the heart of the matter. The story claimed Mirabella had physically pushed her (ultimately victorious) opponent in the seat of Indi, Cathy McGowan — who belatedly agreed it hadn’t happened — at the opening of a new wing of the Cooinda retirement home.
The uncontested fact that Mirabella hadn’t pushed McGowan made the prospect of a court case slightly surreal; there were no big arguments, just poring over the meanest tweets that came in the story’s wake, trying to tease out from witnesses just how upset the story made Sophie, with particular emphasis on the effect it had on her as a mother.
The apology — in October 2016 — ended up backfiring horribly when Mirabella sued anyway. The Ensign couldn’t go back to arguing it was true and so were stuck trying to argue it was substantially true, but on the day Crikey attended court the paper’s lawyers seemed to have largely ditched that.
They mainly argued that it hadn’t been the Ensign article that had cost her the 2016 election so much as Mirabella’s claim that the area missed out on $10 million for the Wangaratta hospital thanks to her loss of the 2013 election; and that her subsequent emotional turmoil was due to coverage of that gaffe as much as anything else. It was a nigh on impossible task for the defence, and one can only imagine what happened to their stress levels as witness after witness reiterated incredulously that the Ensign hadn’t contacted Mirabella or her office before the story was printed.
Mirabella attended court even after her testimony was complete, wearing the puffy mask of a mourner the day after a funeral. Her husband Greg gave evidence that other children were approaching his kids at school saying “your mum’s a bitch because she punches people”.
“She’s become a Netflix addict,” he added.
Of course, considering the retraction, and the fact Mirabella is now out of politics, gainfully employed by mining magnate Gina Rinehart, what possible reason could there be to dredge this up now?
Was the primary target of this Cathy McGowan all along? Mirabella, her husband and her office manager Karen Rourke all made a point of mentioning McGowan’s refusal to say she wasn’t pushed when the pair debated on Paul Murray Live, days after the story broke.
Crikey detailed yesterday the Entrapment-style contortions McGowan had to go through, attempting to leap from the square millimetre into which her silence had painted her. And one can’t imagine she did much to convince the jury that she had nothing to gain from allowing a story she knew to be false to gain traction. A local journo passed me a note during her testimony: “Cathy getting crucified”.
The prosecution played footage of the bad-tempered, heckle-filled PM Live debate, which shows McGowan looming over Mirabella after handing her the mic, and QC Georgina Schoff drawing something of a long bow:
Schoff: You got right into her personal space, didn’t you?
McGowan: Well, I asked her can she please talk to me because we were talking about the trains.
S: And I want to suggest to you that you knew very well that those in the audience who were watching that would be thinking is ‘Mrs Mirabella going to push Ms McGowan?’
M: Well, I can’t speak for the audience.
S: No, but that is what you hoped they would think, isn’t it?
M: Absolutely not.
And then, after just enough of a pause that it landed like a punchline: “I was thinking about trains”.
The most inarguably true thing she said during her testimony was that Cooinda reflected badly on everyone. Certainly, any updating of the records has to now include the revelations that Mirabella had been a far from ideal colleague to aged-care minister Ken Wyatt, having secretly recorded him, placed her hands upon him to prevent him moving and attempted to “check in” on the evidence he would provide to the case.
“… possibly self-defeating ..” The court reports I saw certainly confirmed my already low opinion of Mirabella, regardless of the outcome.
Those kids were wrong. She was a bitch well before she didn’t push McGowan!
I think it would be fair to say that Sophie Panopoulos-Mirabella has distinguished herself as a particularly unlovely person over a long period, as a government backbencher (studiously ignored for promotion by John Howard), a Shadow Minister, and then a Minister. Her loss to McGowan was one of the brighter spots in the 2013 election.
This excerpt from Wikipedia captures the essence of her interpersonal skills quite nicely: Parliamentary style
According to Fenella Souter in the Sydney Morning Herald, Mirabella is known for her “caustic, confrontational manner”.[2] Her behaviour led her to be ejected from parliament at least twice. In 2007, David Hawker expelled her for shouting at him after being warned twice to resume her seat. She defied parliamentary orders under Standing Order No. 94A and thus was removed from the House of Representatives for misconduct.[27] In 2010, Peter Slipper expelled Mirabella from parliament for 24 hours on the eve of the vote on the carbon tax, when she “refused to accept a ruling barring her from tabling an anti-carbon tax petition”.[28]
On a number of occasions her comments both inside and outside parliament attracted controversy. In 2008, Mirabella stated in parliament to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who has no children, “You won’t need his (ex-PM Kevin Rudd’s) taxpayer-funded nanny, will you?”[29] Mirabella again created controversy on 2 March 2011, when she compared Gillard to Muammar Gaddafi, claiming both were delusional.[30] Abbott refused to condemn Mirabella, instead terming the comparison colourful and not language he would use.[31] In 2012, she denounced fellow Liberal NSW Senator Bill Heffernan by telling him to “Oh, why don’t you go and pop your Alzheimer’s pills”. This was in response to Heffernan branding a fellow Liberal senator a “fuckwit”.[32]
Prior to the 2013 federal election, retiring independent MP Tony Windsor nominated Mirabella for “the nasty prize” when asked who was the person he would miss least in politics on the ABC Insiders program. “She is the nastiest — I reckon if you put it to a vote to all politicians, she’d come up No.1”.[33]
There was a pretty caustic profile published in The Age back when Sophie was still an MP, which heavily implied she basically used Colin Howard QC as her sugar daddy to set her up for life with money and political contacts and continued to ride that gravy train even after she married another man and maybe past the point where Howard had the mental fitness to consent to continue giving her money. I never did hear what happened to the Howard family’s challenge to his will, but Sophie never sued The Age for defamation…
She seems to have been greatly disliked even by most MPs on her own side let alone the Opposition, which is no surprise given she is someone nasty enough to boycott the Stolen Generations apology and deny the Stolen Generations even existed.
Even in this case, she didn’t push McGowan but it came out both that she restrained Wyatt from appearing in the photo with McGowan and also tried to get him to change his evidence to be more favourable to her.
It would be an injustice if she gets more than a token award.
“It would be an injustice if she gets more than a token award.” Yes indeed. Makes me quite nostalgic for the days when courts ordered damages payments in peppercorns or farthings. Maybe a token $1 in this case?
maybe she should just be ignored and quietly dissolve into the sludge from which she came.
I wish, but this is someone who got put straight onto the gravy train in a high paying position by the government; losing while a Coalition government is in office was the best thing that could have happened to her.
Arky, exactly. Her boycott of the stolen generations apology and denial that it ever happened perfectly summarises what an ugly person she is.
If only the court could take into account the fact that she works for a capitalist toad like Gina Rinehart in their calculation of damages…
Sophie should seek employment as a public relations advisor to Michaelia Cash.
Peas in a pod
Cheers Bill, a pairing made in heaven.
Who could forget her stunning show of compassion when she leapt to help Simon Sheik from GetUp when he collapsed next to her on the Q&A panel.
Heaven?… HEAVEN!!? shorly shome mishtake?
I think we have been tolled.
No one covered themselves in glory in this. Our defamation laws should not award damages to politicians, merely apologies on the front page if reports prove to be incorrect. If politicians had to defend their statements as being substantially true, that would be a breakthrough, and infinitely more important for the survival of democracy.
+1
Yeah, good point. Also I can’t help but feel like *no one cares* about whether or not a politician pushed someone in an election 5 years ago. A clear and well-positioned apology would do so much more than dragging it through court.
If anything suing for defamation merely reconfirms the public persona and reputation and Sophie Mirabella has crafted for herself.
I’m sorry to say that McGowan’s testimony does not impress.
But then she was a gNat for many a long year.