Former Australian government MP Julia Banks says she was inappropriately touched by a current cabinet minister at Parliament House in 2017.
Banks, who made the allegation in a memoir, said the male MP moved his hand up her leg during a parliamentary vote session before moving away.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office said in a statement they weren’t previously aware of the allegation.
Behaviour of such kind was “completely inappropriate”, they said.
In an excerpt from her memoir, Banks did not identify the man, who she said was still in cabinet.
She said she and other government MPs had been waiting around for a night-time parliament vote, when the minister came and sat next to her and put his hand “just above my knee and edged slowly and deliberately to my inner thigh and then further up my leg”.
“For a minister to do this in the prime minister’s wing, which was full of Coalition [government] MPs, he had to be astoundingly brazen. I found it unbelievable.”
Banks’ allegations have again highlighted the treatment of women in Morrison’s conservative government and wider Australian politics.
Separate allegations of rape – in Parliament House and against a senior government minister – prompted a wave of #MeToo protests across the country earlier this year.
Banks has previously spoken out about sexism and misogyny in Australian politics.
The former MP sensationally quit the Liberal party in 2018, after then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was deposed in a leadership coup which installed Scott Mo
