Larissa Waters: “Women do not lie”

WHEN Greens Senator Larissa Waters insists that “women do not lie about being raped” she is, of course, not telling the truth. And for the most cynical of reasons.

She made the comment after senior Liberal MP Peter Dutton described the alleged rape of a Liberal staffer as a case of ‘she said, he said’.

In response, Waters tweeted:

The Queensland senator’s statement is demonstrably false, even if typed with caps lock. Some women do in fact lie about being raped.

A Victorian study of 850 reported rapes between 2000 and 2003 found that 2.1 percent of them were untrue, with complainants charged or threatened with charges for filing false police reports.

In 2019 a Canberra woman was jailed for three years for faking a crime scene and falsely accusing her former partner of rape. The former partner spent four months in prison before the charges were dropped.

But Waters does not really believe that women never lie about being raped, or else she would have already resigned from the Greens in disgust.

After all, it was the Australian Greens who, just this month, nominated Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize. Assange was accused of rape in 2010 – a charge he has denied and which Swedish police have subsequently decided not to pursue.

Moreover, if women never lie about being raped, how does Waters explain her leader’s enthusiasm for Joe Biden?

That Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer, has accused the now US President of sexually assaulting her in 1993 did not stop Adam Bandt cheering his election victory.

“Congratulations Joe Biden, Kamala Harris & all who worked so hard,” he tweeted in November.

Would this not make the leader of the Greens, by Waters’ own definition, a rape apologist?

And if women never lie about being raped, how do we explain the Greens’ failure to advocate on behalf of Kathy Sherriff who alleges she was raped in 1986 by former Labor leader Bill Shorten – a claim Mr Shorten has strenuously denied and for which police have said there is no case to answer?

It seems as though Larissa Waters believes women do not lie about being raped — so long as those women benefit her side of politics, which is surely a trivialisation of rape and of the women she purports to represent.

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