At a crowded bar on Canberra’s Kingston Foreshore on a Friday night in March 2019, a group of young political staffers, public servants and defence contractors met for after-work drinks. For most of the people at the Dock Bar that evening, it was the kind of night that blurs quickly into many others like it; they drank beer, ate pizza, looked at their phones during lulls in the conversation.
Others danced with the ease of people confident CCTV footage of that night wouldn’t later be played to a packed Canberra courtroom in the trial of Bruce Lehrmann, the man accused of raping Brittany Higgins inside Parliament House in the early hours of the next morning.
