It is no new thing that men with power very readily assume that the ordinary rules of conduct do not apply to them. Such seems to have been the belief of the recently departed CEO of David Jones, whose career has been devoted, he said in a recent Age interview, to knowing what women want.
Sometimes the power is slight — like Troy Buswell's, who led the WA Liberal Party in opposition, but had to stand down in tears after sniffing a staffer's chair in his Parliament office. Sometimes, too, the lessons are not learnt. Buswell had to give up his political power a couple of years later when his affair with a Greens MP became public.
One was sexualised bullying, the other a consensual dalliance. One was a misuse of power over his employees, the other a breach of his wife's trust and of a political leader's sense of what the public will no longer wear. Still, there are similarities: in both instances, the women involved copped one hell of a belting from the media.
Let us, then, feel for the young woman who blew the whistle on Mark McInnes (pictured) to the David Jones Board.
Sexual harassment has always been hard to talk about. The first reported decision on harassment was on a young woman's complaint that the head of her department had made constant sexual advances. He denied it, and she fought a court case over it. In the end it was decided on a technicality, which brought her no joy, even if it did lead to a change in the law to distinguish between sex discrimination (which required proof of detrimental treatment based on sex) and harassment by sexual conduct (which should be accepted as detrimental per se).
About ten years ago I lost my firm a very big client. The CEO of a very well-known business asked me for advice on how to respond to a complaint against him by one of his staff. He told me she'd complained that he had fondled and kissed her in a hotel lift on the way to a meeting. He showed every sign of outrage about it: she was mad, how could anyone believe such a thing? She had made an immediate complaint to a third party, a female friend, and had taken sick leave.
I told him the facts could easily be disproved: we could call for the security camera film.