By Dr Dan Mealey, who served in Afghanistan
How Australia’s media, police theatre, and institutional cowardice have spent a decade turning Ben Roberts-Smith right into a pre-trial image of shame, hazard, and presumed guilt.
One other ANZAC Day approaches, and with it should come the acquainted pageantry of high brass solemnly reciting “Lest We Neglect” from the pulpit of performative reverence, feigning help for the Australian soldier whereas betraying the very spirit these phrases are supposed to honour.
Excuse my cynicism.
Credit score the place credit score is due: the highest brass has turn out to be exceptionally performative of their concern towards troopers affected by PTSD, a label that conveniently shifts the main focus and the locus of 1,800 veteran suicides away from their management failure, towards their troopers’ psychological issues.
Excuse my cynicism, as soon as once more. However the wounds borne by Australian troopers run deeper than PTSD, and Ben Roberts-Smith’s ordeal is emblematic of these deeper accidents.
For the final decade, Australia has watched one thing sinister in movement. It has watched the manufacture of guilt – a guilt assembled in headlines, repeated in media introductions, fused into imagery, after which fed to the general public till a person’s authorized standing turns into nearly irrelevant beside the general public id constructed for him.
The contamination has not been refined. The ABC, The Guardian and numerous different information retailers have for the final decade launched Roberts-Smith, as “Disgraced Struggle Felony, Ben Roberts-Smith,” with this accusation previous a felony court docket course of.
These are usually not impartial descriptions floating harmlessly above a pending felony course of. They’re branding instruments. They’re cues. They inform the general public not merely that allegations exist, however what ethical conclusion it’s anticipated to achieve earlier than the felony trial has even begun. They inform the nation what kind of man he’s presupposed to be. Importantly, they inform potential jurors what emotional posture to undertake earlier than proof is examined in the one discussion board that’s meant to matter.
That is the poison of media contamination. As soon as a person is launched for years as disgraced, felony, fallen, poisonous, and morally completed, the ritual disclaimer in regards to the presumption of innocence turns into little greater than wig-and-robe judicial pageantry. Officers nonetheless mouth it, journalists nonetheless sometimes nod at it. However presumption of innocence will not be preserved by muttering the phrase after you may have spent a decade salting the earth round it.
Police media places of work have been by no means created primarily for some romantic ideally suited of transparency. Scotland Yard’s first formal press workplace was about management, and the logic has endured: management the primary model of occasions, suppress rumours, keep confidence, help investigations, deter wrongdoing, and shield the establishment. A few of these functions are respectable. Some are deeply uncomfortable. All of them sit in stress with the presumption of innocence when the equipment of publicity is unleashed earlier than an individual has even stood earlier than a court docket.
Felony Lawyer, and former Police Prosecutor James Glissan provides an in depth authorized evaluation of how felony regulation proceedings actually work, explaining the court docket process from arrest to court docket listening to, and clarifying the nuances of a lawsuit defined in plain English.
The purpose made in Felony Lawyer James Glissan’s linked evaluation above is devastating as a result of it’s true in apply: as soon as the primary story is out, as soon as the pictures are launched, as soon as the identify is all over the place, the injury is completed. The primary assertion turns into the headline. The correction, if it ever comes, turns into a a lot much less sensational (and hense a wholly unnoticed) footnote.
And within the Roberts-Smith case, the visible theatre was not incidental. The official AFP and Workplace of the Particular Investigator media launch said: “Photos of the arrest and the press convention is out there through Hightail.” That line is chilling. It reveals the fashionable structure of felony publicity in its rawest kind. Earlier than a felony trial has begun, earlier than a jury is empanelled, earlier than the accused has had his day in court docket, the State is already packaging the imagery of guilt for distribution. The regulation should communicate of innocence. The picture doesn’t.
And pictures are the whole lot.
The purpose made in Felony Lawyer James Glissan’s linked evaluation above is devastating as a result of it’s true in apply: as soon as the primary story is out, as soon as the pictures are launched, as soon as the identify is all over the place, the injury is completed. The primary assertion turns into the headline. The correction, if it ever comes, turns into a a lot much less sensational (and hense a wholly unnoticed) footnote.
And within the Roberts-Smith case, the visible theatre was not incidental. The official AFP and Workplace of the Particular Investigator media launch said: “Photos of the arrest and the press convention is out there through Hightail.” That line is chilling. It reveals the fashionable structure of felony publicity in its rawest kind. Earlier than a felony trial has begun, earlier than a jury is empanelled, earlier than the accused has had his day in court docket, the State is already packaging the imagery of guilt for distribution. The regulation should communicate of innocence. The picture doesn’t.
And pictures are the whole lot.
A person is arrested in public. Cameras are current. Police uniforms fill the body. Police automobiles, lights, handcuffs, urgency, spectacle, pressure. The message this sends to the general public will not be quiet, not restrained, and never procedural. It’s thunderous. This man is harmful. This man is felony. This man is a flight danger. This man is already, in some deeper public sense, responsible. That’s what spectacle does. It bypasses the mind and colonises the creativeness. Most significantly, it colonises the creativeness of the very citizenry from which jurors are drawn.
Which brings us to essentially the most disturbing function of all.
It’s one factor, already unhealthy sufficient, for police and prosecutors to make use of pre-arranged media structure for the institutional functions set out in coverage logic.
It’s one other factor fully when police and prosecutors serve the very journalist on the coronary heart of the Roberts-Smith defamation saga, by giving that journalist the inside track.
On the day of the arrest, ABC’s 7.30 instantly turned to Nick McKenzie, describing him as one of many reporting duo who revealed the allegations, and requested for his response to “these photographs we simply noticed.”
Whether or not each operational element is ever compelled into daylight or not, the looks is grotesque sufficient. The journalist whose profession and Walkley Awards have been inseparable from Roberts-Smith’s destruction, was preferentially given a front-row seat by the AFP to report on the arrest in real-time, whereas the State distributed the imagery. That’s not the clear separation of establishments. It’s a grotesque convergence of State energy and media urge for food.
And that’s the purpose that ought to enrage each Australian who nonetheless cares about equity.
As a result of as soon as the media class has spent years defining a person with phrases like “disgraced” and “conflict felony”, and as soon as cameras are rolling as police lights flash and handcuffs seem, the sensible message to the world is not merely that fees exist. The message is far louder than that. The message is that this man has already been morally sorted. That he’s not simply accused, however marked. Not simply charged, however harmful. It’s a message directed to the general public, to employers, to neighbours, to households, and most dangerously of all, to potential jurors, that this man is responsible.
That’s why that is greater than Ben Roberts-Smith.
That is about whether or not Australia nonetheless understands the distinction between reporting and conditioning. Between justice and theatre. Between due course of and public ritual humiliation.
And Australia ought to know higher, as a result of Australia has already lived by a catastrophic warning. On 7 April 2020, the Excessive Court docket of Australia unanimously allowed Cardinal George Pell’s attraction and quashed his convictions. Unanimously. Seven to zero. Earlier than that, Pell had been subjected to years of sustained and fevered media condemnation, then imprisoned for greater than 400 days earlier than the Excessive Court docket overturned the case. This lesson ought to have been seared into the nationwide thoughts: media frenzy will not be reality, ethical certainty will not be proof, and establishments might be swept alongside by the passions of an aroused public circus.
That’s why the comparability issues. Like Pell, Roberts-Smith has turn out to be the unwilling centrepiece of a collapse in ethical and judicial restraint. In each instances, there’s the identical foul blurring of reality and “public curiosity”, the identical danger that prosecutorial or investigative judgment turns into contaminated by a media tradition that errors social engineering for reporting. The extra severe the allegation, the extra simply the phrase “public curiosity” turns into a weapon within the palms of journalists who think about themselves not as reporters of truth, however as conductors of nationwide morality.
The Prosecution Coverage of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) holds the place that “the extra severe the alleged offence is, the extra probably it will likely be that the general public curiosity would require {that a} prosecution be pursued.” That mentioned, right here lies the Achilles heel of the DPP, as a result of it’s not the general public defining what’s within the “public curiosity.” “Public curiosity” is within the toolkit of journalists. And too a lot of them have abused that privilege, utilizing it to not inform the general public however to pre-define what the general public ought to really feel, concern, and condemn.
“Public curiosity” has turn out to be a masks behind which journalists pursue narrative dominance, skilled glory and ideological malice. As soon as that occurs, the excellence between fact-reporting and social engineering collapses. What stays is a press class that has confused its function with that of a nationwide conscience.
And when this goes fallacious, when journalistic impropriety is uncovered, when courts reveal how a lot of public understanding has been formed by urge for food, omission, insinuation, theatrical framing, and selective moralism, what penalties observe? Normally none. No real regret. No proportional accountability. Definitely no equal struggling to the struggling inflicted on these they’ve publicly branded for years.
That’s the reason the Roberts-Smith affair will not be merely about one soldier. It’s in regards to the illness of a tradition.
This illness has many fathers: a media class intoxicated by its personal righteousness, establishments extra desirous about controlling narratives than defending equity, and a broader nationwide envy that delights in reducing down males who’re conspicuous, adorned, bodily imposing, inconvenient, or tough to suit into modern ideological scripts.
Australia has not merely scrutinised one among its most adorned troopers. It has culturally stalked him. It has permitted envy, ethical self-importance, and bureaucratic self-protection to merge right into a marketing campaign of destruction.
And the individuals who carry the heaviest a part of that burden are usually not the editors, not the police media items, not the commentators, not the prosecutorial bureaucrats, and never the journalists accumulating status, scores, and awards from the carnage.
It’s Ben’s household.
It’s those that love him.
It’s his dad and mom.
It’s his two teenage daughters decreased to hysteria watching their Dad arrested with calculated and premeditated malice.
It’s the individuals compelled to observe a son, a father, a human being become a nationwide image of shame whereas the authorized course of that’s supposed to check guilt has scarcely begun.
They’re made to soak up not solely concern, however humiliation by proxy.
This isn’t justice. This isn’t a good go. That is not Australia.
And the ultimate obscenity is that this: as soon as a nation will get used to this course of, as soon as it accepts that loaded labels, strategic imagery, police-media choreography, and years of narrative conditioning are merely how high-profile justice now works, then the presumption of innocence is useless in the whole lot however identify. It survives solely as a phrase spoken by officers whereas the cameras roll and the Hightail hyperlinks flow into.
Australia ought to be ashamed that it has come to this.
Ashamed that so many journalists are not able to restraint.
Ashamed {that a} felony trial might be prefaced by a decade of branding and an arrest introduced like an episode finale.
Ashamed that so many individuals now appear unable, or unwilling, to recognise the distinction between an equitable court docket course of, and a city sq. lynching.
And most of all, ashamed of the leaders who will quickly stand at ANZAC Day podiums intoning “Lest we overlook,” whereas having lengthy since forgotten their very own troopers, their dignity, and their proper to equity earlier than the regulation.
A nation that allows this can not credibly declare to honour service. It merely exploits troopers in conflict, abandons them in peace, after which wraps their betrayal in self-serving ceremony.
An Analytical Briefing (Model 6) Pre-arrest Publication is an IT forensic investigation report undertaken by the authorized defence staff which discovered Channel 9 Reporter Nick McKenzie filed his story in regards to the arrest of Ben Roberts Smith at Sydney Airport the day earlier than the arrest clearly displaying he had been tipped off by the AFP.
The Discovering
Nick McKenzie — the 9 Leisure investigative journalist who has
reported on Ben Roberts-Smith for nearly a decade, was a named defendant in
Roberts-Smith’s defamation proceedings, and has an admitted historical past of moral
misconduct on this particular matter — filed an article on the Sydney Morning
Herald’s programs on 6 April 2026.
Roberts-Smith was arrested on 7 April 2026.
The article was titled: ‘ben-roberts-smith-arrested-over-multiple-war-crimes’
The arrest had not but occurred when the article was filed.
This implies somebody with advance information of a categorized AFP operational
arrest — flight particulars, timing, airport location — supplied that data to
McKenzie earlier than the arrest occurred. McKenzie will not be a impartial journalist on this
matter. He’s a direct participant within the previous civil litigation with a
documented private {and professional} stake within the end result of this prosecution.
Cairns Information has an entire copy of the forensic report which will likely be printed shortly.#
