FROM SCIENCE REPORTER B. LAYTANT FYBBER IN CANBERRA

UNDER-SIEGE FINANCE MINISTER Katy Gallagher, who appears to be contradicting hard video and text message evidence which suggests she misled Federal Parliament about when and what she knew of the Brittany Higgins rape allegations, is possibly a casualty of the quantum phenomenon known as retro-causality.

Many observers say the politician is only digging a deeper and deeper hole for herself every time she essentially denies that her words in Federal Parliament are completely contradicted by text messages from Brittany’s Higgins’ partner to the alleged rape victim.

“Well, the text messages clearly imply that Gallagher was not only aware of Ms Higgins and her the allegations before Ms Higgins went public with them, but was also involved in some plan to ask questions about it in Parliament,” said former spin doctor Cyril Arabesque, who famously claims he coined the phrase “… well may we say ‘God Save the Queen’, because nothing will save the Governor-General”, spoken by Gough Whitlam during the dismissal crisis of 1975. “So any denial whatsoever is magnified a hundred times by the force of the documentary evidence. The use of the allegations of rape to score political points might sound pretty grubby and wretched to the average human being, but among politicians its par for the course. No, it’s the documents that drive the knife in here. Hard to get around them.”

Or is it? Enter Retro-causality, a recent discovery of quantum experiments, highly disputed in many circles, which says that the future can, and indeed does, affect the past.

“It’s so counter-intuitive that physicists around the globe are still pretty skeptical, but the experiments indicate that it does happen,” says Dr Tangle Weave of the University of Mt Druitt in Western Sydney. “So, yes, it’s conceivable that the present kerfuffle, about who knew what and when re the Higgins affair, and what they did about it, or planned to do about it, has actually changed the past. Ergo, the text messages and the words to Parliament that Ms Gallagher now appears to deny may indeed not be what occurred in the past Miss Gallagher experienced. Though none of us would ever know this because all these present theatrics has changed everything. It’s hard to swallow, I know. A bit like Katy’s explanation.”

When asked for a comment on this retro-causality theory, a Government spokesperson replied: “Explain all that to me again? Jesus, that’s brilliant! can ou send it to me in a text? Wait a minute, no, don’t do that.”

Mr Arabesque was more circumspect: “Rewriting the past? Isn’t that what politicians always do?”