By Matthew Knott
Facilities at one of the nation’s most secretive and important military stations are in a disturbing state of disrepair and need urgent upgrades, a bipartisan parliamentary committee has warned.
Concerns about Western Australia’s Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt are central to a report that also warns Defence veterans are at greater risk of suicide as a result of the focus on alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.
The MPs asked the Defence Department to detail the “specific circumstances which led to the deterioration of this mission-critical asset over the last five or more years”.
In August, members of parliament’s joint standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade inspected the WA facility and said they were alarmed by what they saw.
The joint Australia-United States facility provides low-frequency radio transmission to Australian and allied navy ships and submarines, and its jetty serves as a crucial refuelling point for navy ships operating off the WA and Northern Territory coast.
Committee members said in a report tabled in parliament on Thursday that they were “seriously disturbed to observe that Defence had allowed the pier supporting diesel refuelling of the Harold E. Holt Naval Communication Station to get into such a state of disrepair”.
“The old adage ‘prevention is better than cure’ seems to have been ignored, with essential ongoing or moderate maintenance activities being deferred to a larger future capital upgrade that has not occurred,” the committee members wrote.
The MPs asked the Defence Department to report back about progress on “urgent works” required to enable diesel refuelling from the communication station’s jetty.
They also asked the department to detail the “specific circumstances which led to the deterioration of this mission-critical asset over the last five or more years and an explanation of failures in the capability assurance mechanism”.
Gordon Flake, the chief executive of the Perth USAsia Centre think tank, said the facility, located 15 kilometres north of Exmouth on the North West Cape, served a vital role as the only place between Perth and Darwin where navy ships could refuel.
He said such facilities had been allowed to “atrophy” after the end of the Cold War but had again become significant because of rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific.
In a separate section of the report, Labor MP and defence subcommittee chair Julian Hill warned that Australia could suffer a wave of veteran suicides similar to that after the Vietnam War unless the nation moved past a focus on wrongdoing by Australian troops in Afghanistan.
“The subcommittee concluded that, frankly speaking, it is time to draw a line in the sand and
rebalance our national conversation about this period,” Hill wrote in the forward to the report.
“Most Australians who served in Afghanistan did so with distinction.”
Hill wrote that the Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) “has a proud history, has accepted responsibility, sought to learn from past cultural failings and transformed”.
“As a society, Australia risks repeating another Vietnam and callously increasing veteran suicide if we lose perspective and balance,” he wrote.
The Brereton report, delivered in November 2020, found “credible” evidence of allegations that 25 Australian soldiers had murdered 39 Afghan civilians, and pointed to a disturbing “warrior culture” that had developed within elements of the SAS.
The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times won a landmark defamation case brought by decorated former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith in June after the court found they had proven to the civil standard that he was a war criminal, murderer and bully.
Roberts-Smith is appealing the decision.
While Australians rightly expected public institutions to confront wrongdoing and for individuals to be held to account, Hill said: “The events of concern occurred well over a decade ago.
“The rightful acceptance of institutional and collective responsibility for cultural failings, and the process of holding individuals to account, must not be allowed to tar the reputations of the majority of those who served then and who serve today.”
The tabling of the report came a day after royal commissioner Nick Kaldas told the National Press Club the defence establishment was not doing enough to tackle a crisis of veteran suicide, accusing top brass of “going through the motions” rather than trying to create meaningful change.
The committee also said it was firmly of the view that the Defence Force “must be seen as a force of last resort to aid the civilian community in natural disasters” and to be called upon only when state and territory emergency services were genuinely overwhelmed.
With half of all Defence members being called upon to provide disaster relief over recent years, the report found there was “a real risk now that the ADF’s war-fighting capabilities will soon be degraded”.
“Put plainly again, if the civilian community are over-reliant on the ADF to provide responses to now-predictable annual natural disasters in Australia and our near region, this provides an easy opportunity to take hostile cyber, kinetic or hybrid actions coercing governments to make impossible choices,” the report said.
“These words and these conclusions should not be taken lightly by Australians or any parliamentarian.”
The government’s defence strategic review, released in April, recommended that defence personnel be used only as a “force of last resort” to ensure members of the military were not distracted from their responsibility to defend the nation.
If you are a current or former ADF member, or a relative, and need counselling or support, contact the Defence All-Hours Support Line on 1800 628 036 or Open Arms on 1800 011 046.
Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.