Only a fucking idiot would weigh in on the Bruce Lehrmann rape trial right now while it is still running, even though the jury appears only hours away from being so well hung it’s going to be dismissed.

The idiot tag would be even more appropriate for someone who spent three years as a court reporter back when The Courier-Mail was almost a reasonable newspaper.

Such a person would indeed have to be a total moronic fucking idiot and rocks in what’s left of his head to have his two bob’s worth knowing fuck all about what the 29 witnesses had to say over three-and-a-half weeks, knows fuck less about how Brittany Higgins went in the witness box or how well the prosecution performed and how the defence team responded.

There’s also the very slim chance of getting into trouble with the judge if she was, say, unaware of how few people read my shit.

But you know what, dear Buggers. Fuck it.

I suspect there’s a very good chance that more than one juror has come to the conclusion that sexual intercourse – consensual or otherwise – did not occur in Parliament House on that night back in March 2019. And if that’s the case, bravo to the defence for sowing those seeds of doubt.

My ever-increasing gut feeling is that if all 12 of those jurors had come to the view that sex took place, Bruce Lehrmann would have been led away to start his prison term well before now.

While I have never been on a jury due to a working lifetime as a journalist, I can’t imagine any alternative to slotting someone who claims sex never took place and backing the evidence of a woman who, by all reports, gave a fairly consistent recounting of what she said took place, even though her credibility might have been tarnished by some evidence of events after that night that were shown to be wrong.

Of course, we could be dealing with the most generous and caring of juries, whose members have decided that Lehrmann was lying through his teeth in police interviews in saying no sex took place because he had a girlfriend – I’ll pause here to let the laughter die down out there in Bugland – but have forgiven him for that and the jury now can’t decide if the sex was consensual or not.

And have sufficient jurors accepted the notion that Higgins, large parts of the evening in an alcohol-induced fog, cooked the whole thing up for a book deal?

My hunch. These two didn’t go back to Parliament House to drink whisky and check the latest Hansard uploads for accuracy. Luhrmann didn’t stay in his own office penning speech notes for his minister. Higgins might have been in an entirely different but nevertheless adjacent area where she found the air-conditioning so poor that she had to take off all her clothes before falling asleep on a couch in a drunken stupor.

Lehrmann, having stuck some post-it notes on his minister’s desk, then just assumed his work colleague and great platonic friend had left the building so he did too, and that’s the only reason he didn’t bother checking on her, drunk has she probably clearly was. Once again, I’ll pause briefly to allow the laughter out here in Bugland to die down.

And I might just suggest here that if Lehrmann was as uncaring and so totally lacking in empathy and so self-centred to have done that, we should all expect to see his name pop up at some Liberal preselection battle in the not-too-distant future.

Nevertheless, by the looks if it, we’re off to a retrial. So what’s the good news?

Higgins has proved she’s a tough and determined woman so she’ll be okay to go through the whole ordeal again. And, who knows, maybe again after that.

Hopefully, there will be a change of prosecutor, someone who can better grill Linda Reynolds and Michaelia Cash, two of the worse ministers this country has ever suffered from. I’m still chuckling over Cash’s evidence that she didn’t think there would have been any political pain for the Morrison government on election eve if the alleged sexual assault had emerged then.

Anyone got Cash’s upcoming stand-up dates, venues and times?

And Reynolds will get another chance to explain why, even though she thought nothing naugthy really happened, she suggested Higgins could take her claims to the federal police.

And as stated at the outset of this rant, I have no idea as to whether evidence of that couch cleaning that apparently was ordered ahead of schedule was heard at trial but it certainly should be aired at a retrial if that’s at all legally possible. Readily admit I know fuck-all about retrial rules but I suspect both sides get to strengthen their lines of attack.

And as stated at the outlet, it would be very unfair and unreasonable of me knowing fuck all really about the total sum of evidence presented to be critical of the members of the jury, other than to say I thought the defence summing up was pathetic, including the argument there was no DNA – well, der! – and that Higgins made it all up knowing there was a lucrative book deal down the track.

So, for a number of totally uninformed reasons, I’ll stick with my totally uninformed view that something far from right or reasonable happened on that night and whatever it was, we all know for a fact that then prime minister Scott Morrison knew about it within days because he said he didn’t hear about it until two years later.

Talk about something that definitely has been proven beyond reasonable doubt!

Don Gordon-Brown

PS: I have my alternate dinkus ready in case the jury actually returns in a wee while with a guilty or not-guilty verdict.