The offer was rebuffed in a letter by Mr Leyonhjelm's solicitors which contained a purported "offer" that was "expressed in a form which appears to have been gratuitously offensive", Justice White said. The letter, sent in September 2018, said Mr Leyonhjelm was "adamant" he would not accept any offer which involved him paying Senator Hanson-Young any sum but was willing to settle on the basis she discontinued her claim and paid his legal costs up to the value of her crowd-funded "fighting fund", which the letter described as having been "garnered on false pretences". Justice White said the offer to cap costs was described in "grandiloquent terms" by Mr Leyonhjelm's lawyers as a "cumshaw" and "lagniappe", meaning a gratuity. Justice White said it was not "immediately apparent" why Mr Leyonhjelm's lawyers had chosen to express themselves in this way. "It was one thing for the respondent to make the belittling statements concerning the applicant

to which I referred in the primary judgment [ruling in Senator Hanson-Young's favour]: it was another for his solicitors, bound by the professional conduct rules, to engage in conduct of that character," Justice White said.

He said this conduct did not have any bearing on the costs claim. Loading Justice White said the purported offer by Mr Leyonhjelm "sought complete capitulation" by Senator Hanson-Young and his offer to cap costs could not be regarded as "part of a genuine attempt to compromise". It was also not clear that the offer to cap costs would have any benefit because it was unclear how much was in the fighting fund, or the size of his own legal bill. Justice White found Mr Leyonhjelm's failure to make a settlement offer was unreasonable on a number of bases, including that the former senator admitted during the trial that he had conveyed a range of defamatory imputations alleged by Senator Hanson-Young and abandoned several of his pleaded defences.