Bit of a guilty conscience there Mister. Maybe something troubling you about your past actions?
When confronted by this inconsistency, his attempt to explain it away by suggesting the attraction he felt for Ms Higgins was ‘just like [the attraction] I can find [in] anybody else in this [court]room, irrespective of gender’ was as disconcerting as it was unconvincing.If the reason Mr Lehrmann needed to return to Parliament House was to collect his keys, he could have texted his girlfriend to have her meet him at the door or called her. Mr Lehrmann asks me to accept the proposition that it was ‘a process to get in’ to his shared flat and that to avoid this complication, he preferred to: (a) go out of his way to go back to work in the early hours; (b) lie to Parliament House security; (c) sign the necessary register; (d) be issued with a pass; (e) go through a metal detector; (f) be escorted by a security guard to his office; (g) obtain his keys from his office; (h) book another Uber; (i) go back through a Parliamentary exit; (j) meet the ride-share car; and then (k) ride home.
Even if he was in the doghouse because he had stayed out late, I think it is safe to conclude that the process of getting into a flat he shared with his girlfriend would have been a significantly less elaborate exercise.
Intuitively, given what had been happening, one would think it likely the drinking continued given what we know about Mr Lehrmann encouraging Ms Higgins to imbibe and the rationale given by him for them both to come back to the Suite. After all, Mr Lehrmann said he was going to show Ms Higgins whisky – not Qing Dynasty ceramics.
As I have already noted, put in stark terms, it is fanciful a somewhat lubricated male staffer accompanied by a woman he found attractive, who he had just been ‘pashing’ in a nightclub despite having a girlfriend, would then be interested, after coming to a private place very late, to just say ‘cheerio’, and then soberly proceed to note up briefs for a Question Time that was not to occur for one and a half weeks, a fortiori when the staffer had already resigned; had no outstanding tasks; was not ordinarily involved in work concerning the Defence portfolio; and hitherto had demonstrated no outward signs of being a workaholic.
