Joe Hildebrand: The Bruce Lehrmann-Brittany Higgins firestorm burns all it touches

There is virtually nobody in media or politics or the law who is untouched by the Brittany Higgins/Bruce Lehrmann story, writes Joe Hildebrand.

The Bruce Lehrmann saga has kept getting bigger.

A century ago an earthquake struck Tokyo. The ground underfoot was shaken then broken.

But it turned out that was only the beginning. People across the city at the time were cooking their midday meals on open flames in a metropolis made of paper and wood.

And so that first tremor turned into a firestorm that not only consumed everything around it, but sucked in evermore fodder to become a self-fuelling inferno of almost limitless carnage.

The more it destroyed, the bigger it became, until there was nothing left to destroy.

In the world of media, politics and public life the Brittany Higgins/Bruce Lehrmann story is that kind of monster.

It started with the moral and political disturbance of Higgins’ rape allegation — which Lehrmann has always denied — unsettling Canberra and then it spread like that proverbial wildfire until it engulfed political, media and legal institutions across the country.

It resulted in the downfall of the last federal government and the current one being referred to the national corruption watchdog.

Bruce Lehrmann leaving the Federal Court. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Nikki Short

It also resulted in the two biggest news organisations in the country, ABC and News Corp, being sued for defamation and settling, followed by two of the three major commercial TV networks being sucked into the quicksand.

First went Ten, then went Seven. Nine seemed untainted until some ill-advised pontification resulted in a wholesale redredging of its own rich history of chequebook journalism and dragged that network into the quagmire too. That would be the hat-trick then.

As for our august judicial institutions, it included an aborted criminal trial in the ACT, then an inquiry into that trial, then an inquiry into that inquiry and then two defamation actions launched in the Federal Court in both Sydney and Perth.

A journalist friend of mine likened it to a virus: “This story is like ebola: For every person who comes into contact with it, six more people die.”

There is virtually nobody in media or politics or the law who is untouched by this story.

Even those as yet mercifully spared will know or know of someone caught up in the ever-expanding maelstrom.

Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations were the subject of an aborted trial. Picture: Colin Murty

And so amid the millions of dollars, the millions of hours and the innumerable body count of lives ruined, we face the ultimate question of a crisis: What happened?

This goes far beyond the alleged events at Parliament House in the early hours of Saturday March 23, 2019, as traumatic and contested as they are. The exponential damage has hurtled and multiplied for more than five years from that date.

Like the question of the universe itself, it seems ever expanding with no known endpoint.

But before we get too metaphysical we need to come to terms with the merely mortal.

While the Higgins/Lehrmann phenomenon may now seem like an unstoppable juggernaut, we must remember that there were many moments in which any number of individual human beings could have stemmed this haemorrhaging tide.

This is not to single out any one person for criticism, nor would I want to.

But at the very earliest stages of this story emerging the ever-blurry line between fact-finding and evangelism seemed to disappear entirely in some quarters and with it was swept away any act of sensibility or courage that might have limited the ruinous wasteland this tale is today.

And so perhaps, as we wait with bated breath of Justice Michael Lee’s deliverance, we should remember the madness that led us here.

Justice Michael Lee will hand down his verdict in the defamatuion casew on Monday. Picture: Aaron Francis

We live in an age in which it is more tempting than ever to get swept up in the latest causes. The instant rewards of online likes and praise are now infamously addictive, like a sociopolitical poker machine.

Thus to think independently and challenge any new blanket orthodoxy is not just a lonely and often fruitless pursuit, but carries the real prospect of mass condemnation and vicious abuse.

Critically, this is so regardless of the evidence or facts. Many may remember — much as they might want to forget — the crazybrave few of us who dared to suggest during Covid that lockdowns were excessive or that schools should not be closed.

This was vindicated beyond doubt by the first — and only — comprehensive independent post-Covid inquiry led by Professor Peter Shergold AC, yet anyone who dared raise such concerns at the time was shouted down as a cold-blooded granny-killer.

The Higgins/Lehrmann story broke its banks against not just the Covid backdrop of hysterical hive-mindedness but also a new mass-directive fuelled by social media: #believeallwomen.

Of course this absurdly simplistic mantra is a complete abrogation of the most basic tenet of journalism, let alone the justice system, which is that any claim has to be tested.

But as the story played out in public — a bizarre fusion of traditional and social media; advocacy and activism; politics and justice — it was hard not to sense that at some of the highest levels of politics and the media it was the mantra that was embraced and the principle that was junked.

And of course anyone who dared question or challenge the concept of #believeallwomen was shouted down as a woman-hater.

Clearly it is now impossible to say and irresponsible to guess what the true facts behind this story really are. It is almost as though they have been lost below layers of silt. Perhaps Justice Lee will excavate some today.

But just imagine how many ruined lives, public resources and shattered reputations might have been saved if more people had properly questioned the wave they were swept up in. A tsunami that has now left them washed up on this sorrowful desolate beach.

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Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: The Bruce Lehrmann-Brittany Higgins firestorm burns all it touches