Justice Michael Lee

Federal Court judge

“I consider Mr Lehrmann's account to be an elaborate fancy.

Mr Lehrmann said he was going to show Ms Higgins whisky — not Qing Dynasty ceramics. Although I strongly suspect that additional joint drinking did take place in the Ministerial Suite, it is unnecessary for me to make a positive finding.

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’…

It is not lost on me that doing manual marking up on paper … is perhaps the only work that would not require Mr Lehrmann to log into a computer and leave some form of retrievable electronic record.”