Bruce Lehrmann’s evidence ‘unsatisfactory’ but he is not a ‘compulsive liar’: legal team

By joanna panagopoulos
Reporter
12:13PM January 5, 2024

Bruce Lehrmann’s legal team have admitted their client’s evidence in his defamation trial against Network Ten was “unsatisfactory” but say it does not mean he raped or had any sexual relations with Brittany Higgins, nor that he is a “compulsive liar”.

Mr Lehrmann is suing Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson over her interview with former political staffer Brittany Higgins on The Project in 2021, which detailed accu­sations that Mr Lehrmann raped Ms Higgins in March, 2019, in Parliament House. The program did not name him as the ­alleged attacker.

Mr Lehrmann has consistently denied raping Ms Higgins.

The defamation hearing came to a close just before Christmas, and on Friday, written submissions summarising each parties’ case were made public.

Mr Lehrmann’s team of experienced barristers including Steven Whybrow SC and Matthew Richardson SC accepted his evidence was “in a number of respects unsatisfactory”, but said to call him a “compulsive liar”, as Network Ten set out to do, “significantly and unfairly overstated” the problems with his evidence.

“Mr Lehrmann was a witness in our submission whose evidence on the core matters about what actually occurred within APH remained unshaken and consistent … In our submission Mr Lehrmann’s evidence that he neither raped nor engaged in any sexual activity with Ms Higgins should be accepted,” they said.

His lawyers claimed he had “no reason to retain minute details of this night and it is unrealistic to expect anyone to do so, almost two years later” and said most attacks on his evidence by Network Ten were “in relation to … peripheral issues”.

For example, they argued: “Whether Mr Lehrmann made a comment that he found the objectively attractive Ms Higgins attractive can provide no rational support for the proposition that he may have violently raped her – in their workplace – 3 weeks later.”

His lawyers’ said some evidence, such as the phone calls he made in early April, 2019, was “undoubtably unsatisfactory”.

“He appeared to be trying to work out where Dr (Matthew) Collins was going in his questions and not get caught out on matters that he knew could be objectively established. Each of these were with respect peripheral issues. His evidence in these respects was dissembling guarded, inconsistent, and lacking credibility,” the submissions said.

“But this does not in and of itself justify a submission that he was a compulsive liar nor that other evidence, such as what happened on his return to APH should automatically be rejected or doubted.”

Mr Lehrmann’s team argued that his evidence about why he returned to Parliament House on the night on March 23, 2019, particularly that he was going to work on Question Time Briefs about submarine contracts “might appear implausible”.

But it does not make it “untrue or fantastic or that of a fantasist” and could have happened since he spoke with Navy officers that night and had a job that required him to maintain Question Time Briefs.

Mr Lehrmann also told his then boss Fiona Brown he had returned to Parliament House with Ms Higgins to drink whiskey, and his team argued he likely “lied to deflect Ms Brown from the fact he had spent time working”.

“If the court finds this was a lie, it does not follow it is a lie told to deflect from the fact he had sexually assaulted Ms Higgins,” the written submissions said.

Mr Lehrmann also took aim at the credit of Ms Higgins, Network Ten producer Angus Llewellyn and journalist Ms Wilkinson.

They described Ms Higgins as “fundamentally dishonest” and “lied repeatedly, in multiple forums and despite having legal moral or ethical obligations to tell the truth”.

Mr Llewellyn was said to be “an unimpressive witness who made non-responsive speeches and struggled to give answers to questions” and said “the court should not accept his evidence”.

Ms Wilkinson had “such an unreasonable state of mind concerning the program that the court would have reservations about placing much reliance on her evidence”.

“Also critical on the question of credit was the belief Ms Wilkinson had developed that Ms Brown and Senator Reynolds were part of a wicked systematic cover-up … There was simply no evidence before her to justify such an extreme belief, and it speaks poorly of Ms Wilkinson’s objectivity and insight that she took that view.”

More to come, including from the defendants.

JC

Jan 5, 2024 8:42 AM

There has to be a porn genre about gay sex and gold braids.

Well, it might have been done already.
Epstein and his scout Jizz-Lane were often seen in faux military outfits featuring lots of gold braid and bling medals.

The useful idiot callers to talkback about alarmism have a new catch-phrase: CO2 traps heat. There it is folks: CO2 traps heat and the more CO2 humans spew out the more heat is trapped. The rebuttal to this is simple: colloquially heat is thermal energy and thermal energy is the kinetic energy of vibrating and colliding atoms in a substance. So when CO2 (and other GHGs) in the atmosphere absorb IR they become unstable, vibrate and transfer through collision that IR/thermal energy to N2 and O2 which constitute 98% of the atmosphere and which in turn re-emit the IR energy/heat to space. Nothing is trapped except the mindset of the useful idiots.

Of course there is more to it than that, excitation and re-emission, isotropy, but just explaining the first paragraph above is well beyond talk-back. So, we need a rebuttal phrase to this effective but nonsensical phrase: CO2 traps heat.

I’m pretty sure the houso ranga is not the most popular bloke on the team bus

A great analysis of Warner over at The Roar site.
Summary –
David Warner: the most complicated legacy in Australian cricket history
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already made your own judgement on how he’ll be remembered. He’s either the pocket rocket opener who burst into our lives so memorably in that far-off T20 match against South Africa some 15 years ago and has seldom stopped dazzling us since; or the unrepentant cheat who single-handedly sent Australian cricket into disarray against that same nation, and whose presence in the team until now is only due to his knowledge of the ample skeletons that still reside in that closet.

OldOzzie

Thanks for the book info. I just read non-fiction and haven’t read a novel in decades. I’m currently reading, The Beginning of Infinity and I will soon start on Musk’s bio, given to me for Christmas. I can’t read a para of fiction without getting bored and jumping to the last pages to get to the end. 🙂

Its members do not all wear distinguishable uniforms, and they certainly do not adhere to the law of armed conflict.

So Hamas has forfeited any rights to be treated as Prisoners of War, under the Geneva Convention?

Petros
Jan 5, 2024 1:05 PM

Peter Ziehan is usually wrong so Australia should be fine. The Chinese want to do business, and take back Taiwan.

Ziehan is a bigmouth dickhead. However, if he’s right about the Chinese economy taking a huge dump this year, we’re gonsky too, economy wise at least. Our balance of payments would be rooted and we could see the Aussie Dollar in the 40s if this happens. We’re hugely dependent on China for our exports, and this holds up the exchange rate helping consumers buy imported goods.

The comment is spot on .. LOL!
https://ibb.co/7WRRgxr

Mary Poppins and Sundowners actress Glynis Johns dies aged 100

By adella beaini
Journalist
News Corp Australia Network
Updated 11:19AM January 5, 2024, First published at 9:18AM January 5, 2024
2 Comments

British actress Glynis Johns, who famously played Mrs Banks in the 1964 film Mary Poppins, has died aged 100.

Her manager Mitch Clem said she died of natural causes and was living at an assisted living home in West Hollywood, California, at the time of her death.

Johns also played the Australian Outback pub manager Mrs Firth in the 1960s movie The Sundowners, about a 1920s rural family that also starred Robert Mitchum, Deborah Kerr and Peter Ustinov.

Also enjoyed The Cadfael Chronicles is a series of historical murder mysteries written by the linguist-scholar Edith Pargeter

May I suggest the “Crowner John” series by Bernard Knight set in the reign of Richard 3. John de Wolfe is appointed Crowner, ie Coroner, in Devon to make sure penalties due the king are not siphoned of by the sheriff courts. Knight is a former coroner himself

Also enjoyed The Cadfael Chronicles is a series of historical murder mysteries written by the linguist-scholar Edith Pargeter

Don’t read much fiction these days – not since the “Flashman” tales – but Bernard Cornwell’s “The Winter King” series made good reading.

We’re hugely dependent on China for our exports, and this holds up the exchange rate helping consumers buy imported goods.

All those kids who are anti-mining will be the first to complain when they can’t afford a new iphone every year.

Mole

Enuff as I’m still getting over it.

JC,
Your analysis and interest in my comment is duely noted and I consider myself humbled by your divine words of wisdom.

I like others here are inspired by your presence and bow down to your superior intellect on all subjects raised here.

Thank you, Rooster.

This is as near a perfect response that I’ve ever seen.

Vivek Ramaswamy fires back at reporter over “white supremacy” question

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPnz8ewxhWA

Good doco on Operation Market Garden, and “A Bridge Too Far.” The historian being interviewed is one R.G. Poulussen – his book “Lost At Nijmegen” is required reading.

Don’t read much fiction these days – not since the “Flashman” tales – but Bernard Cornwell’s “The Winter King” series made good reading.

If you want to read fiction .. get serious! .. The Bernie Gunter series by Philip Kerr (all 15) .. strangely enuf .. Kerr’s last “Bernie” offering (Philip Kerr died 2018) .. METROPOLIS ..is, actually, set earlier at the very beginning of his plod career before even the BERLIN NOIR trilogy ……
and/or Sven Hassel’s panzer tankers lot (14) …….. starting with Legion of the Damned if your into chronological order ….. tho the 1st half dozen are pretty much inter-changeable ….. “Wheels of Terror” being the most popular …..

How the El Nino threat toppled our cattle market (Paywallian today)
When the Bureau of Meteorology issued warnings of an El Nino event in 2023, spooked livestock producers flooded markets with their animals, resulting in prices cratering.

To be fair, when I first heard the El Nino prediction, my recollection is that BOM qualified it by saying that later in the season there would be good rainfall. I recall thinking that “they are having it both ways”! As months went by with very little rain (at least for us) I thought – damn, they didn’t even get that right.

I can’t account for what others heard – or thought they heard. The station manager of the largest cattle owner in our district – he would have several thousand head of Angus – was getting seriously concerned that they were overstocked. They sold some stock – but held on to most, probably due to the calculations of the absent owner who is a pretty wily grazier and pays good attention to conditions.

In our case, we had reasonable coverage right up to the recent downfalls. This was consistent throughout the area where there was small to moderate livestock coverage. But we were all aware of falling prices in sale yards across the state. Sheep, in particular, were selling for ridiculously cheap prices.

I may be imagining it, but it seems to me that, since Covid, Aussies have a huge tendency towards panic at anything from health predictions, house prices, to rainfall predictions. We have all forgotten the nature of natural cycles.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12925323/Lakemba-Ramadan-festival-complaints-smelly-food.html

Is the fightback beginning?

Matt Canavan:

A silent night was broken in Nigeria on Christmas Eve when Muslim terrorists raided Christian villages and murdered at least 140 people. Some reports suggest over 200 people were killed.

Grace Goodwin was preparing a Christmas meal for her family when her husband rushed into the kitchen and told her and the children to run into the bush to escape approaching gunmen. After they returned in the morning their village was deserted and houses had been burned. In harrowing tales, victims bled for hours from gunshot wounds before help arrived. One man had his hand chopped off by a machete.

The abhorrent violence was reminiscent of the October 7 attacks near Gaza last year but unlike that atrocity, there has almost been zero international coverage of the barbarity perpetuated by radical Muslim groups in Nigeria.

It is not an isolated oversight, however. Christians are the most persecuted of all religious believers yet there is almost no media reporting of their suffering. A Reuters report on the Nigerian Christmas Eve massacres astoundingly claimed that climate change was a reason for the attacks even though the attacks were launched by Muslim herdsmen on Christmas Eve, and they followed an earlier attack last year on worshippers in the St Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Nigeria.

The violence in Nigeria is clearly anti-Christian not anti-coal, and it is not just in Nigeria. Indeed, according to the human rights organisation Open Doors, Nigeria is only the sixth most dangerous country to be a Christian. In North Korea, the Government regularly raids house-churches and arrests those praying.

China has been using increasingly sophisticated digital surveillance technology and a social credit score system to persecute Christians.

Last year the Azerbaijan military forcibly removed over 100,000 Armenian Christians from their homes as part of an ongoing war.

According to Open Doors, one in seven Christians across the world faces some form of persecution.

Why are authoritarian governments so threatened by the celebration of the birth of a baby in a stable more than 2000 years ago? King Herod was so threatened that he ordered the murdering of young innocents just days after the first Christmas in an unsuccessful attempt to murder the new King who challenged his throne.

The paranoia of Herod continues for modern day rulers because Christianity offers a message of hope and faith that weakens the fear used by totalitarian regimes to control their populations.

Because of the threat Christians pose to dictators we will unfortunately never eradicate their persecution. However, more can be done to highlight their plight and expose those governments that engage in it. The world has rightly and widely condemned the terrorism of Hamas last year. There should be an equal condemnation of the regular and vicious attacks on Christians too.

And, in our own country we can do more to protect religious freedom including that of Christians. While there is not the physical violence directed at Christians in Australia, there is a creeping bigotry emerging that is forcing Christians to unjustly hide their faith.

In recent years, Christians have lost their jobs for simply expressing their faith. Christian schools have come under attack for teaching their faith. And even Christian bishops have faced legal action for simply preaching in accordance with their doctrines.

These increasing threats to religious freedom are why both the Liberal-National Party and the Labor Party support new religious freedom laws. Just before the new year, the Government released a framework for these new laws. The Government plans to release draft laws by June.

With an election due in the first half of next year, it is hard to see how these laws could be in place before then. There will most likely be a Parliamentary Committee inquiry into the laws. Any finalised law probably could not be considered by the parliament until next year.

That would put the consideration of these laws just months out from an election, exactly what derailed the laws in the last Liberal-National government. There are many powerful voices that do not wish to see Christians and other religious people receive protection for their faith.

If the Government is serious about delivering on its election commitment to enact new religious freedom laws it should accelerate its timeline. Given the years of work that has preceded this point, there should be no reason that we cannot have in place new religious freedom protections by Christmas this year.

I don’t care if they’re “Jewish” or not, these are truly evil people.

Pritzker family under fire as members are key players in Harvard, Epstein scandals

” Apparently some conservatives here don’t respect intellectual property rights.”

Apparently some people don’t understand the concept behind patents and copyright – which is that the government will enforce your right to profit from your intellectual efforts for a limited time, and in exchange they become public and no longer protected after that time.

The idea that, say, Walt Disney’s heirs and successors can continue to profit long after the original creators death is anathema to the intent of such laws as described above – you gained the advantage of government enforced protection but don’t want to pay the known price for it.

I realise that this hardly applies to your complaint, but thought I’d mention it because abuse of copyright to increase private profit, and to the detriment of the common good, also appears to be increasing. To be fair, this also needs to be addressed, yet hardly anyone seems to mention it.

Since we are on the topic, who owns the copyright on AI generated content and why? A prickly question…

At the time of the troubles I met a fellow on my travels who was an emergency department doctor in Belfast. He had lots of gory stories to relate and said it was a matter of course that at 3 AM they would receive someone who had been kneecapped (shot in both knees) or even “6 packed” (knees, elbows and ankles). It was considered a routine occurrence and the ED docs and surgeons knew to expect one every few days. The victims would never talk about who did it.

An anonymous person either from one side or the other would call someone and tell them to be at a certain place at 2 AM. The victim knew they were going to be “punished” or killed and that if he or she didn’t turn up their family would bear the brunt of retribution. I can’t imagine what it must have been like.

It’s not surprising that Hamarse and the IRA have a close relationship.

Northern Ireland, Belfast in particular, is the most horrible place I have ever visited,

I’ll cross it off the bucket list, then.

anything white and blue is now highly suspect

as predicted!

watched a few of these videos, seems like boys between 6 and ten and eleven are most likely to react like this

To be fair, when I first heard the El Nino prediction, my recollection is that BOM qualified it by saying that later in the season there would be good rainfall.

Well, by now we were supposed to be barren, waterless and on fire.

In reality, I could be mowing the lawn every third day and just be keeping up with it.

No, the SOI is not the only driver of our weather, which BOM did point out at the time, but something’s gone awry in their predictive modelling as well as their warning system, which will now be subject to a review by order of the responsible minister after two disasters in QLD.

Firstly, are they actually Jewish? Do they believe in God AND follow or at least pay lip service to some Jewish tenets, commandments, practices etc for the express reason of their Jewish faith? If it’s a No for either, then as far as I’m concerned, they ain’t Jewish.

OCO, it’s an ethnicity as well as a religion.

Not being religious didn’t help assimilated Jews in Nazi Germany.

In fact, the race laws applied to ethnic Jews whose families had long since converted to Christianity.

I’d use Catholic in relation to ?amas supporters with caution.
IRA membership is a deliberate separation of one’s self from the church (excommunication) and I doubt any of them step inside a church outside of weddings and funerals.
Incidentally I just abused some Irish scum on twitter for repeating the rubbish meme that Israelis all need to return to Europe and leave the middle east to middle easterners.
It’s pig ignorance or deliberate lying.

Breaking news so sketchy but North Korea has bombed South Korea…

Artillery drill in disputed waters, Lys.

At least I hope that’s all you’re referring to.

Ah okay perhaps I’m wrong as it is an island in disputed waters… apologies!!!

You can read more here Roger:

https://twitter.com/sentdefender/status/1743122695464558713

We really need Trump back.

We really need Trump back.

Yeah. Now what catastrophe are the demorats going to manufacture to cheat Trump again:

1 The old stand-by, the chunk virus
2 Arrest Trump and he expires in jail after eating bread rolls full of glass
3 Start mass arresting Trump supporters and when some of the poor bastards resist declare Marshall Law and suspend the elections.

“The libertarian in me despises longstanding patent and copyright protection. “

Ditto.

“If you want to see how bad the problem is have a look at “preemptive patent applications” in relation to health and disease.”

There are also patents on genes, which is ridiculous unless shown to be completely synthetic and previously unknown in nature.

Any thoughts on the AI stuff?

It’s not far off where you could do something that might be called “derivative” – something along the lines of “W. Shakespeare vs. Dire Straights – Romeo & Juliette”.
Far fetched and clearly impossible example, but I’m sure we can all see the point – if you create content (or direct an AI to make content), and I then direct an AI to make a variant (a plot twist/reversal etc), at what point do I owe you royalties? Can you even sue me, or do you need to sue the AI, or who owns the infrastructure the AI runs on, or who created the AI? Does it depend on how specific the instructions to the AI were? How can either of us prove it?

And, of course, who owns any IP so created anyway? Me, because the “context” of the creation came from me, or the AI because it did most the the work of fleshing it out? Who “owns” an AI created by another AI? Who owns the content that second level AI creates?

You might be inclined to think that such issues can refer back to things like CAD/CNC machining, or to computer code tools like compiler compilers, but the real issue is how much “effort” you put in – the design for a piece of furniture designed on CAD and manufactured with CNC is clearly the designers, but what if you tell an AI to create the design with a paragraph or two describing what you want? Clearly this is very little effort on your part (“design a chair in Edwardian style…”) compared to drawing it even with CAD assistance. When AI becomes powerful enough to create a TV show, movie or music in very short order from basic descriptions (much as still images can already be done that way now), it truly becomes difficult to decide who owns what IP and why.

I have no doubt we will be seeing these sort of cases soon enough, and so I think it is therefore worth thinking about now.