Christian Porter case is argued in the abstract. Let’s get back to reality

The Jane Doe/Christian Porter saga momentarily turned from tragedy to farce yesterday with a piece in The Australian about the “Jane I knew”.

From whom? Helen Dale-Darville-Demidenko, who knew the woman briefly before 1988, not after that, and gives no indication she attended the 1988 debating championships where the alleged events took place. Apart from that it was a searing revelation of hitherto untold etc etc.

The last half of it is pure ramble. Although its focus on the “hothouse” nature of the debating scene hints at a notion of someone coming apart mentally, so the attraction to the Oz‘s editors was presumably that it tilts towards the “possibly delusional” camp. Though not, one suspects, in the way that Dale imagined when she pitched the piece.