This week, because of his PR campaign, the interview on News24, and on 2GB, every pet-shop galah has had his or her say on the Ben Roberts-Smith affair. So I’m going to have my say, but let me be crystal clear: I am making no judgment on the guilt or innocence of Ben Roberts-Smith.
Here’s a riddle for you:
What have Giggle vs Tickle, the insane case where under Australian law a biological man can be a woman, Cop31, Chris Bowen and his insane multibillion dollar destruction of our cheap and reliable energy system and pristine farmland, and the insane criminal prosecution of Ben Roberts-Smith all got in common?
I’ll tell you. All three share the same original sin.
And that original sin is when the Australian government without consulting the people signed Australia up to various international treaties. That’s the bottom line. That’s the original sin.
All three of these travesties of politics and travesties of justice and travesties of common sense share not only the fact that they are completely insane and incomprehensible to the average Australian – gender insanity, climate insanity, and judicial insanity – all three are also the direct result of federal governments, Liberal and Labor, disgracefully signing Australia up to idiotic international treaties when they should have known better: the Declaration of Human Rights, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the Rome Statute. In my opinion, all three have proven to be an unmitigated disaster for Australia and have wreaked havoc on Australian lives.
Without getting lost in the legal weeds, the original sin that led to Sall Grover having her life and livelihood turned upside down is because in 1984 the Hawke government established the Sex Discrimination Act under the auspices of the Australian Human Rights Commission. In 2013, Julia Gillard changed the Sex Discrimination Act at the behest of the Australian Human Rights Commission to supposedly provide ‘stronger legal protection against discrimination for … gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex people’. In Sall Grover’s High Court case, which she lost, the ruling was specifically built around the insane Sex Discrimination Act. And under that ruling, a biological man is a woman if he says he is. Which defies logic, biology and common sense. But even the High Court is powerless to disregard international treaties. If we’d never signed up to Human Rights legislation in the first place, if we’d never amended the Sex Discrimination Act at the Human Rights Commission’s behest, Sall Grover would right now be a wealthy and happy woman running a highly successful and popular woman’s only app.
The original sin behind the idiocy of Cop31, Chris Bowen and the madness of the multibillion-dollar insanity of Net Zero and the renewables transition was when the Howard government signed us up to the Kyoto Agreement nonsense and then the Turnbull government signed us up to and ratified the Paris Agreement. The destruction to our economy and to our landscape from this madness is, in my opinion, unprecedented in this nation’s history. If we’d never signed up to that climate change nonsense in the first place, in my opinion, nearly every single Australian would today be far more relaxed, far more comfortable and much, much wealthier.
And Ben Roberts-Smith? Well, there, the original sin was when Australia under the Howard government adopted the Rome Statute into Australian law to ensure that domestic laws were ‘compatible with international standards’. But this required that Australian military law be ‘compatible with’ the International Criminal Court, the ICC. This was completely unnecessary. America refused to do it, and we should have refused too. Indeed, Trump views the ICC as a rogue outfit he wants dismantled and he has implemented sanctions against it.
As Louise Clegg has brilliantly written about in The Spectator Australia:
‘(In 2002), Australia enacted sweeping amendments to the Commonwealth Criminal Code, inserting Division 268. Its purpose was clear: to create offences of international concern and ensure Australia’s jurisdiction was “complementary” to that of the International Criminal Court. Under the Howard government, Parliament ensured that if war crimes were committed, Australia could prosecute them itself, rather than leaving the matter to The Hague. What was once the work of courts martial became proceedings in the ordinary criminal courts.’
And critically, Louise points out: ‘The principle of complementarity does not require what Australia did.’
That was the original sin. Had the Howard government refused to sign us up, Ben Roberts-Smith would not now be in the ruinous position he is in. Yes, he would have possibly faced a court-martial. Full stop. End of conversation. That is the only way, in my opinion, a soldier should ever be accused, charged or tried with a war crime. By a military court. In my opinion, civilian juries and more importantly woke lefty civilian judges should never be trusted with interpreting and determining the moral and legal complexities of the battlefield.
Signing us up to international legal compatibility with the ICC was the original sin. But then it gets worse.
The first Albanese Labor government changed Australia’s war-crimes law in September 2024. This amendment made it easier, in certain circumstances, to prosecute alleged war crimes involving people who were already out of combat, and it applied retrospectively to conduct dating back to 2002.
And what was their rational for this – oh, of course, the government said it was ‘correcting a drafting error’ to ‘bring Australian law into line with international law’. There we go again! Same as sex discrimination. Same as climate change.
This is an absolute disgrace in my opinion. And the Coalition to their eternal shame went along with this travesty. Why? Who in the Liberal party room convinced the rest of them that this was a good idea? Again, it’s complicated, but basically simply by changing the word ‘and’ to the word ‘or’ it meant that a prosecution could go ahead if only one of three conditions were met, rather than all three. And Labor made it retrospective, which, in my opinion, is despicable.
But still, it gets even worse.
Last week Liberal Senator Michaelia Cash raised serious questions in Parliament around the Ben Roberts-Smith prosecution, regarding whether a potential conflict of interest existed in various issues concerning the legal bureaucracy and the prosecution itself.
Then there’s the fact that the Australian government ran ads funded by the taxpayer in Afghan-language newspapers in Australia appealing for information about possible breaches of the laws of armed conflict by Australian forces in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016.
It’s just my opinion, I am not a lawyer, and I make no judgment on guilt or innocence regarding the charges against Ben Roberts-Smith, but as far as I’m concerned, this entire affair stinks to high heaven.
Then there’s the reality of Bondi. Future historians may well be baffled trying to figure out why the same Australian authorities who failed to protect 15 Australians from being slaughtered and another 40 from being mowed down allegedly by two radical Islamists at Australia’s most popular and crowded beach spent hundreds of millions of dollars a VC hero for actions carried out attempting to protect Australia from the threat of radical Islamists?
It was Mahatma Gandhi who said: ‘There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supersedes all other courts.’
How can any Australian, in all good conscience, look at what our governments have done in relation to the Ben Roberts-Smith affair and not be appalled? I’ll be blunt and perhaps a little unkind here, but to me you only had to look at Ben Roberts-Smith and see the toll that this entire affair has already taken on him. And this, unless something dramatic happens, will continue for possibly five or more years. As usual, the process is the punishment.
Just ask my friend Bill Leak, who was hounded by the Australian Human Rights Commission, among others. He himself complained to myself and others over lunch that the ongoing stress was killing him. He died of a heart attack not long after.
On day one of a new Coalition and/or One Nation government, this charade must be put to rest. The new Attorney-General must drop all the charges against Ben Roberts-Smith and any other current war crimes cases, revoke all our Rome Statute international obligations and return military law to the Australian military. That’s in the morning. In the afternoon we also need to pull out of the Paris Agreement, disband the Australian Human Rights Commission and revoke the Sex and the Racial Discrimination Act.
It’ll be quite a busy day.
