SISTERS ARE ARE SISTERS DOING IT IT FOR FOR DOING THEMSELVES THEMSELVES
Words by Zara Richards
In 2015, former Liberal staffer Chelsey Potter claims she was sexually assaulted by a colleague on a cold night in Canberra. In 2019, she went public with her story. Two years later, Canberra is in turmoil as the boy’s club bubble bursts, exposing the disturbing culture that manifested behind the four walls of Parliament House. Tired of waiting for change, Chelsey is using her experience from the inside of Australian Politics to dismantle the rife inequality, one step at a time. If you met Chelsey, you wouldn’t know she survived a decade long stint inside the Liberal Party. She’s cool, collected and deviates from any political stereotype you may have given her. Despite this, the 32-year-old describes herself as a public policy geek, someone whose love affair with politics began when she was just a teenage girl. Unlike many others, there wasn’t a long lineage of political junkies in Chelsey’s family guiding her down the garden path of politics. Both her parents were creatives working in the music industry. Instead, Chelsey was simply a young girl home sick from school, who just so happened to turn on Question Time. “I just really loved it and I knew nothing,” she said, “I didn’t know there were two houses of parliament, I didn’t know anything about politics at all.”
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Hooked, Chelsey fell hard and fast for the theatrics of public debate, joining South Australia’s Liberal party two days after her sixteenth birthday. “It didn’t make me the coolest kid in school somehow,” she laughed. To Chelsey, the world of politics became addictive and her future was beaming bright, being elected to state council straight out of high school before working as a staffer for now Federal Minister for Finance, Simon Birmingham. But the cracks in the glittery façade of the Liberal Party had already started to show. At just sixteen, she was questioned about her virginity by a senior advisor whilst attending her first Liberal dinner. Not wanting a room full of adults to overhear, she brushed it off. This wasn’t the only instance where the hyper-masculine culture whittled Chelsey’s smarts down to just her physical appearance. She describes feeling like an ornament amongst the men in her party, a shiny prize on the arm of her Liberal ex-husband. “For a young woman like me, my experience, it was a bizarre sexualisation from such a young age,” she explained. “If as many men were as keen to mentor me as they were keen to sleep with me