Richard Marles’ action on the Brereton report may raise Australia’s global standing

It was all too easy to miss last week, amid the noise of an already crowded parliamentary sitting and the unprecedented censure of a former prime minister with his uncut, quintessential denials of accountability.

But two years on since the redacted version of the Brereton report was released, and merely six months into the 47th Parliament, it’s become tolerably clear the Albanese government has resolved to jettison Scott Morrison’s slow and politicised response to parts of the war crimes report.

In recent weeks, there have been confirmed reports the defence force has sent — with the unqualified support of Defence Minister Richard Marles — show cause notices to several former and serving special forces commanders as to why they should retain individual honours associated with their deployments in Afghanistan.

The possibility of such a review was, of course, conceived in one of 143 recommendations in the Brereton report, but was memorably shelved last year at the urging of the Morrison government, along with any move to strip special forces troops of their meritorious unit citation.

“This is how we deal with these issues in Australia,” Morrison said of his decision to override defence chief Angus Campbell at the time, “according to the rule of law, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty”.

Yet traces of a shift in approach can also be found in statements by Marles since July, and reaffirmed as recently as last week, regarding the government’s commitment to compensating the families of those killed by Australian soldiers in possible violation of the laws of war.

This initiative, too, was a central recommendation of the four-year Brereton inquiry, but one which similarly languished and fell to the wayside under the Morrison government.

Distilled, the temptation here is to see these developments as emblematic of what commonly manifests as a difference in policy emphasis when a new government takes the reins. But it’s a view that is, at best, partial. Much, after all, has been made of the Albanese government’s wider ambition to right the consequences of several years of foreign policy blunders bookended by Coalition incompetence, and these movements appear to fit the mould.

In this connection, there is no denying that Morrison’s failure to heed the warnings of senior defence officials, regarding the risk of perceived inaction on the Brereton inquiry, has been costly.

For one, the near-indelible impression that allegations of war crimes committed by Australian soldiers enjoy a level of impunity or indifference to censure has severely blunted the government’s criticism of human rights abuses elsewhere. Nowhere has this reality been more profoundly laid bare than with respect to China, which has routinely returned the charge with interest.

Opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie — a former SAS captain who served in Afghanistan — recently echoed this view, citing the inevitable demise of moral authority that accompanies national failures to reckon with dark chapters of the past.

“The Brereton inquiry, as it is known, has been very tough, but it has been necessary,” he told a London audience in July. “For if we cannot hold ourselves to account for unlawful battlefield conduct in Afghanistan, by what standard do we condemn Russian acts of barbarity in Ukraine?”

On a granular level, then, the narrative underpinning the Albanese government’s willingness to tread where the former government resisted is a simple, if not self-serving, one: failure to act on the report’s recommendations harms Australia’s moral integrity, the absence of which diminishes its diplomatic weight on the global stage and, in turn, obstructs its national interest.

Lost in any commentary so far, however, is consideration of the extent to which this approach could — in time — redefine the limits of Australia’s identity.

In 2018, former defence minister Brendan Nelson said: “I question whether the national interest is [being served] in trying to tear down our heroes.” The comment was made in response to allegations about and denied by Victorian Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith, but nonetheless reflected the unbroken reverence with which the armed services have long been held.

And it’s precisely the seeming death of this idea — that the armed services are beyond reproach — and the rise of collective moral accountability that could, if it comes to pass, license a radical break in Australia’s identity.

To this end, it bears emphasising that a number of the commanders issued show cause notices over the past month were found in the Brereton report not to bear individual criminal liability for what allegedly occurred under their command, but rather collective moral responsibility.

Still, the government’s gambit is not without risk. As Steve Pilmore, vice-president of the Australian Commando Association, told Crikey, in the absence of any findings of guilt it appears to run contrary to due process. “The timing is wrong. No one has been found guilty of any of the things in the Brereton report and therefore to seek punishment by way of handing back medals appears to be premature,” he said.

“We live in a country of due process and where we have a set of laws and soldiers defend those laws, so they should be able to expect that those laws protect their freedoms in the same way as anyone else.”

The difficulty with this position, however, is that it wrongly conflates what is ultimately an administrative action — a correction of the record — with punishment.

The reverse position, for what it’s worth, also comes with costs — not least a seeming embrace of the idea that war knows no limits; a notion that does irreparable damage to both the Australian Defence Force and Australia’s standing in the world.

As the Brereton report concluded: “The consequences of not addressing such allegations as and when they eventually arise are measured in the decades.”

It’s this that is front of mind for the government.