If you stuff up in the corporate world, you don’t last long.
Rio’s chairman fell on his sword this week over the demolition of an ancient Aboriginal site, and the Crown Resorts money laundering toll currently stands at five directors and a chief executive. And let’s not forget former Australia Post boss Christine Holgate, who resigned over $20,000 in fancy watches.
Not so in the military, where deadly stuff-ups can be buried for years in bureaucratic process.
NSW Supreme Court judge Paul Brereton’s war crimes report, released in November after a five-year inquiry, revealed credible allegations that 25 special forces soldiers killed 39 Afghan prisoners and civilians.
The Chief of the Defence Force, Angus Campbell, said the “deeply disturbing allegations” were “damaging to our moral authority as a military force”.
But how can that moral authority be restored while Defence remains silent on the accountability of its senior leaders?
Brereton said clearly in his report that senior officers were responsible “for what happens ‘on their watch’, regardless of their personal knowledge, contribution or fault”.
Yet so far, not a single officer has suffered any form of sanction for failing to prevent the alleged crimes.
Defence’s response is so ham-fisted that even the commanders who want to hand back their medals in shame are unable to do so.
That’s a glaring inconsistency for the 2000 special forces veterans facing the loss of meritorious unit citations, or honourable past members of SASR’s now-abolished 2 Squadron.
Scott Morrison and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds tried to distance the government from Brereton’s findings, getting out ahead of the report to announce a new war crimes investigator, and an independent panel to oversee Defence’s implementation of the report.
Campbell is now using that panel process to justify Defence’s glacial bureaucratic response.
The panel’s ability to recommend a course of action to the government will be limited by what Defence puts in front of it.
It’s time for Campbell and Reynolds, or whoever succeeds her, to lead from the front.
Full confidence in the nation’s special forces cannot be restored until the issue of command responsibility is openly and honestly addressed.
Time to say bye-bye to the wokerati’s bullying tactics
Voters have had enough of being told how to think and how to behave and want to reassert more traditional values and attitudes that served them perfectly well.
Our values give us cause for optimism amid the terror, fear
Despite all the violence and hatred, I am still optimistic about Australia.