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 their career. The Minister encouraged the staff member to speak with police in order to assess the options available to them. At this meeting, the staff member indicated they would like to speak to the AFP, which the Minister supported and the office facilitated.

319 She dismissed this material as a "very official response to a very difficult political situation that the government was in" (T1866.45–6). In a similar way, according to Ms Wilkinson, she had been told by Mr Llewellyn at some point that the reason for the loss of data from Ms Higgins' mobile phone related to transfers from multiple mobiles. There is no contemporaneous record of this communication (and given its obvious importance, the lack of record is intuitively surprising) but assuming it was said, this information was inconsistent with what Ms Higgins had earlier said about the cause of her alleged loss of data – how this corroborated Ms Higgins' version of events (rather than undermined her credibility on a topic considered at the time by Ms Wilkinson to be important) was unexplained.

320 Thirdly, was her willingness on affirmation to double down on an allegation that Ms Brown and Senator Reynolds were active participants in a systemic cover-up of alleged criminal conduct when, upon any fair review of the available material, the basis for such a grave allegation is infirm (even taking the evidence of Ms Higgins as to what she "felt" or what was "weird", and the assertion senior staffers from the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) had met with Senator Reynolds in her office, at their highest). The willingness to maintain that such conduct occurred in the absence of any solid, verifiable material in her possession, demonstrates her willingness to engage in speculation (or, to use her words, to "read … between the lines" (T1781.38)). Indeed, the maintenance of this allegation seems odder in circumstances where, by the end of the trial, Ms Wilkinson was emphasising her reliance on the investigative work of others. In any event, for the purposes of assessing her evidence, this willingness to speculate causes me to approach her testimony with some caution.

321 Fourthly, and picking up on the last point, there is the evidence upon which rests Ms Wilkinson's final submissions that her job in relation to the publication was to "to read the pre-prepared script" and that "she acted not only reasonably in reading that pre-prepared script but perfectly, in that she read it word for word". As I will develop below when dealing with the reasonableness of her conduct in relation to publication, this picture is hard to reconcile with Ms Wilkinson getting up on the night of the Logies; accepting a prestigious award on behalf of The Project; and declaiming "this interview and this story is by far the most important work I have ever done". Moreover, the evidence given as to any degree of Lehrmann v Network Ten Pty Limited (Trial Judgment) [2024] FCA 369