As athletes around the world deny Donald Trump's "locker room banter" exists, Peta Credlin has confirmed the sexist commentary is alive and well in Australia's corridors of power.
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"I've heard a lot of it and there were many times I would call it out," she said on The Bolt Report.
The former chief of staff to former prime minister Tony Abbott has spoken about her time in Canberra and how she used to reprimand "gutless wonders" who would make similar comments to those US presidential candidate Donald Trump was recorded making during an Access Hollywood segment in 2005.
"I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait," he said at the time. "And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything... Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
Since Trump's non-apology for his actions, sports stars have since disputed lewd remarks like the ones uttered by the presidential candidate and entertainment reporter Billy Bush are commonplace in actual locker rooms.
As did Today co-host Lisa Wilkinson, on behalf of her husband, former Wallabies star and Fairfax columnist Peter FitzSimons.
Credlin, a lawyer with years of experience in the Howard government who once worked for Malcolm Turnbull before becoming one of Abbott's most trusted lieutenants in late 2009 until his ousting in 2015, criticised Trump's comments during the interview on Sky News.
"They were bloody disgusting. They were wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels. They were wrong. But they don't surprise me and that's the sad part is that after 16 years in politics of so called bloody 'locker room humour' which is just an excuse to abuse women, it doesn't surprise me.
"Niki Savva (The Australian journalist and wife of Turnbull's advancer Vincent Woolcock) once wrote in a column that I ran out of room bursting into tears, now I'm not the sort of woman, look at the way I carry on, I am not the sort of woman who would burst into tears and run out of a room. But that stuff went on in Canberra and I would call it out and the gutless wonders would look at their feet and they wonder why half the electorate, we are half the electorate, looks at politics with great derision, that sort of locker room, or as Nigel Farage calls it 'alpha male behaviour', is not on, it's reprehensible and it's wrong."
She failed to specify the comments she heard while working in parliament. Calls to her representative by Fairfax Media went unanswered on Tuesday.
Since the end of her career in politics, she has become an advocate for women in positions of power but, on Monday, failed to endorse Democrat, and the possible first female president, Hillary Clinton.
"All it does in the current climate of the US debate is give a very bad, very compromised candidate in Hillary Clinton, some cover," she said.
Credlin was a feared and revered figure in Parliament House and on the hustings.
She was often an imposing presence in the advisers' box in the House of Representatives or spotted pulling recalcitrant MPs into line, like Liberal MP Stuart Robert, who she was captured on camera angrily pointing her finger at before walking off after an argument during the 2013 election campaign.
"We had a fight, it was a good blue, be under no doubts I gave as good as I got," the former Human Services minister has since said of the blow up.
Days after the last Liberal leadership spill Credlin was named by The Australian Women's Weekly as Australia's most powerful woman.
"You will want to have women like me in politics. You will want to have women like me sitting in seats of authority and power," she said at the magazine's corresponding event while ruling out a possible foray into federal politics.
