Tested and Found Wanting
by David Archibald
11 May 2026
I expect that I am one of the few people in Australia who has read the Brereton Report in its entirety. I read it on the day it came out. Nobody who has read the whole thing could take it seriously after getting to page 120.
In the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation case, I read the entirety of the judgement. This was yet more tedious, because there was a lot of ‘Person 1 said’ and ‘Person 6’ and so on. The feeling I got from what the judge wrote was that it could have been that Ben Roberts-Smith shot the bloke with the prosthetic leg. In a moment of rage or something.
Now comes his current trial. There are interviews with other SAS troops on the internet. It turns out that it was the judge in the defamation trial who was selective about what he accepted as evidence. He accepted the story of one bloke who hadn’t seen Ben Roberts-Smith shoot anyone, but had a feeling, and did not accept the evidence of the colonel in charge of the regiment who had been on site at the time and said that nothing had happened.
So the judge had been in error, at best. Not impartial. He had wanted Ben Roberts-Smith to go down. Some $300 million has been spent on the persecution of Ben Roberts-Smith to date. The persecution had four blokes who had committed war crimes and traded those four for a shot at Ben Roberts-Smith. We have not been told what the four did. They have been told that if they perjure themselves, they won’t go to prison. None of the four have a public profile as a hero. Getting a conviction on any of them won’t suit the persecutors’ interest, which is kulturkampf against authentic Australian culture and the notion that Australia is worth fighting for. Which is the same reason that Cardinal Pell was persecuted.
From time to time we have moments that test us. For Australia’s political parties, it was the Farrer by-election. where each party had the opportunity to weigh in on Ben Roberts-Smith. Only One Nation passed that test. Remaining silent wasn’t an option. If you couldn’t see that a perfectly fine, almost flawless Australian was being persecuted by evil people with an unlimited budget, then you know nothing about how Australia is being run now. The political parties that did not come out in support of Ben Roberts-Smith have disqualified themselves from government by their silence.
Another thing. This is not a case of ‘we should back our troops no matter what and not be concerned about they did in our defence when they were having a bad day in battle’. Having heard what people who had served with Ben Roberts-Smith said about him, people who had spent years with him, none had anything bad to say about him. They all said that Ben Roberts-Smith treated them with consideration and kindness. Except for a certain weasel who orbited the battlefield in a helicopter but was never on it. Andrew Hastie was driven by spite because Ben Roberts-Smith had rated Hastie as not good enough for the SAS in officer selection. Ben Roberts-Smith was overruled because the SAS was desperate for officers at the time. It is evident that Ben Roberts-Smith is completely innocent. He doesn’t need a ‘what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas’ pass.
We can thank the persecutors of Ben Roberts-Smith for one thing. It provided a moment of clarity in the Farrer by-election, which likely sealed the deal for One Nation. Anybody can rabbit on about migrants and economic management and change their mind once they actually get into government, as Julia Gillard did with the carbon tax. But only those who have the right values — shared, common, decent Australian values — will do the right thing in government because it is the right thing to do.
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.