Courtroom void tells us something about the man

Ben Roberts-Smith pictured beside at Bali resort the day before the judgment in his defamation trail was handed down. Picture: 9 News

Ben Roberts-Smith won his cherished Victoria Cross charging towards danger.

He lost the honour it bestowed while draped across a sun lounge by a pool in Bali.

It’s hard to imagine a greater fall from grace – harder still to know why he chose not to front up on the day of judgement.

Roberts-Smith had turned up to court every day of the trial, sharply dressed, shoes polished, ready to stare down his accusers.

Not on Thursday, when Judge Anthony Besanko sat down to deliver his verdict.

Nine newspapers didn’t win on every allegation but they proved Roberts-Smith had murdered unarmed prisoners.

The two Nine newspaper journalists, Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters, were there – doubtless ready to argue the toss if the decision had gone against them – but there, nonetheless.

They’d staked their reputations on a hugely consequential piece of journalism and had never taken a step backwards. Good on them. Their investigation was meticulous.

The void in Courtroom 1 where Roberts-Smith should have stood on Thursday tells us something about the man.

Ben Roberts-Smith arrives at the Federal Court of Australia in 2021. Picture: Getty

It speaks of contempt for a judicial system that – once he got a whiff it wasn’t working for him the way he’d planned – could be left at the door like last night’s room service.

The war hero brought this case on but wouldn’t see it through to the end.

If he had left it to prosecutors to build a criminal case against him – a course ironically now much more likely – they would have been required to prove their case beyond reasonable doubt, in a court with centuries-worth of built-in protections for defendants.

Instead his accusers had only to prove their charges of murder on the balance of probabilities.

Some of those who gave evidence of his crimes didn’t even have to testify about their own sins on the battlefield, let alone be cross-examined on them.

Roberts-Smith argued he had no choice. His reputation was in tatters after the newspaper stories were published, he’d lost $475,000 in speaking engagements and even invitations to Anzac Day ceremonies had stopped.

There will be many who will sympathise with the former soldier, simply because he was one of the tens of thousands of young men and women we have dispatched over long decades to do our dirty work in foreign wars, all the while knowing in our heart of hearts that it will never be clean, because wars never are.

Nine’s barrister Nicholas Owens conceded in the first days of the trial that the men Roberts-Smith killed were almost “certainly insurgents”, but argued that even “the most brutal, vile member of the Taliban” could not be killed outside of the rules of engagement.

Many Australians will be more inclined to the view of one soldier who testified against Roberts-Smith but was nevertheless spittingly angry that a man he respected was being hounded for “killing bad dudes we went over there to kill”.

If Roberts-Smith had been content to let it go at that he’d still have half the country behind him.

But he wasn’t. He wanted to make a point and he had the country’s richest media mogul offering him a blank cheque to do it. What did he have to lose?

As it happened, plenty.