After last week’s article in The Spectator magazine regarding the ‘civilianisation’ of military justice, Sydney barrister Louise Clegg found herself in a series of conversations with former servicemen. These were practical, unsentimental men, but on the question of Ben Roberts-Smith, she found they were remarkably clear-eyed but felt betrayed. What struck her was not a reflexive defence of Roberts-Smith. Quite the opposite. More than one assumed some level of alleged wrongdoing had likely occurred. That wasn’t the point of the agitation. The sense of betrayal lies elsewhere, and it is unambiguous and uniform. It is directed at the way this entire process has unfolded: the sense that what is now playing out in the courts and the media was set in motion by the Defence establishment itself. A four-year inquiry initiated within Defence, vast in scope, publicly ventilated, followed by years more of investigation by the Office of the Special Investigator and now prosecution, with all the accoutrements of a high-profile case: the new and inevitable media leaks, a very public arrest, the sense of a narrative taking shape long before a jury is empanelled. This is the logical endpoint of the civilianisation of military justice, and it isn’t pretty.
