As reported on the ABC last week, Courtney Houssos, the finance minister for New South Wales, has accused a Liberal MP of misogyny for raising concerns about her husband’s involvement in a leading insurance lobby.
During a budget estimates session on Thursday morning, Damien Tudehope, a Liberal MP – and former finance minister for New South Wales – questioned the minister about potential conflicts of interest arising from her husband’s position at the Insurance Council of Australia.
From May of this year until its transfer to another minister in October, Houssos was in charge of the State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA). Tudehope pushed the minister and asked if she considered the Insurance Council’s stance on some issues in any of her policymaking decisions.
Tudehope said, “I assume that if you were to come back to me, it may also involve you having a conflict of interest about a submission by the Insurance Council of Australia. Do you agree with that?”
Houssos attacked the former finance minister saying, “Mr Tudehope, I’m going to call this out for what it is, a baseless sexist attack on working women.”
The minister also accused him of attacking her and her husband’s professional reputations. According to the ABC report, Houssos said that she and her husband “put in place measures to manage a potential or a perceived conflict, and he voluntarily stopped working with the New South Wales government once I was sworn in as a minister.”
Tudehope said that Houssos’ accusations of sexism were merely a “distraction”, which only revealed that the minister could not respond to “legitimate questions”.
Tudehope said he does not have “a sexist bone” in his body. Professor Geoffrey Watson SC, who teaches legal ethics at the University of Technology Sydney and serves as a director at the Centre of Public Integrity, said that “It was a mistake ever to appoint Ms Houssos into this position” in the first place, precisely because her marriage to George Houssos could not but raise questions, given his lobbyist job in the same field that his wife was chief policy officer.
However, Watson added that this matter had been resolved and that Tudehope’s polemical stance demoted the debate into a “petty political point scoring” while noting how the Liberal’s assumption that the minister could be somehow pressured by her husband is, by definition, sexist.
