THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Bruce Lehrman was not guilty but the Federal government was?

Bruce Lehrman was not guilty but the Federal government was?

The litigation stemming from the accusation of rape levelled at Bruce Lehrman by Brittany Higgins is still very much ongoing but I think a major anomaly in the matter needs to be highlighted

Allegations of rape do not normally go to trial unless the police foresee a substantial probability of a conviction resulting. The police did not see sufficient grounds to proceed in the case of the Higgins allegations. But as a result of political pressure, an attempt was made to prosecute Lehrman. So the evidence for the allegation was weak from the beginning. The prosecution failed without a verdict being rendered so Lehrman continued to benefit from an assumption of innocence.

In the absence of a guilty verdict in the matter, one would have thought that all possibilty of a damages claim would be lost. There is nothing that you could sue Bruce Lehrman for. So how could Higgins get a payout for her allegations? How could she get a payout for something that did not happen?

She did get a payout and she did so by suing the government. Apparently, the government could be guilty even if the respondent in the rape claim was not.

That is a very strange set of circumstances. How could the government be guilty when the alleged rape at the centre of the matter had not been proven to take place?

But the government was simply a much softer touch. They did not ask for evidence of anything. An accusation alone was enough for them to throw taxpayer money at Ms Higgins without further enquiry.

And note that the payout was broken down so that only a small amount was for legal expenses. Most of the payment was for losses and damages alleged suffered by Higgins, something for which we have her word only.

So the payout was clearly an abuse of justice. If a mere accusation is enough to inspire a government payout, why do we have courts at all?

The Albanese government paid Brittany Higgins more than $2.4m compensation in a settlement that relied entirely upon the former Liberal staffer’s version of events, despite contrary versions from key witnesses who were excluded from a single-day mediation of her claim.

Lawyers described both the amount and the speed of the settlement – finalised just days after Bruce Lehrmann’s rape trial was abandoned in the ACT Supreme Court – as “extraordinary” and “unprecedented”.

The deed of settlement between Ms Higgins and the commonwealth was released on Thursday in the defamation trial brought by Bruce Lehrmann against Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson over Ms Higgins’ allegation on The Project that she was raped by him in Parliament House in 2019, after her lawyers successfully asked that personal medical information be excluded.

Justice Michael Lee, presiding over the trial, had earlier stated there was “a disparity between the evidence (Ms Higgins) gave in these proceedings and the truth of the matter”, which made the settlement deed “substantially relevant”.

The document shows that the commonwealth did not admit it had breached its duty of care to Ms Higgins when it paid her the multimillion-dollar settlement, contrary to claims she made to the court earlier this week.

The document reveals that the federal government ensured it was released from any future claims by Ms Higgins but left former Liberal ministers Linda Reynolds and Michaelia Cash open to further legal action by the former staffer, a carve-out clause that was not fully communicated to either of the two senators.

Ms Higgins testified on Tuesday that “the commonwealth admitted that they breached their duty of care and that they didn’t go through proper processes, so that’s actually why they settled with me”.

However, the deed of settlement – dated December 13, 2022 – expressly states that the parties have agreed to resolve all claims between them “without any admissions of liability”.

The one-day mediation took place 10 days after ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold announced he would not be proceeding with a retrial of rape charges against Mr Lehrmann due to Ms Higgins’ fragile mental health.

The deed shows that the total amount paid to Ms Higgins was $2.445m, not $2.3m as the former staffer stated in the Federal Court on Tuesday.

Ms Higgins received $1.48m for loss of earning capacity for 40 years; $400,000 for hurt, distress and humiliation; $220,000 for medical expenses; $100,000 for “past and future domestic assistance”; and $245,000 for legal costs.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/brittany-higgins-bombshell-24m-payout-based-entirely-on-her-own-evidence/news-story/d8859eccb1e350da7e6f9117590497de

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Bruce Lehrman was not guilty but the Federal government was?

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