Monday 25th of November 2024
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best we forget .....

The Australian Defence Force stands accused of gross breaches of behaviour in regard to sexual harassment and assaults. There can be no doubt that instances of sexual abuse of young men and women occurred during the six decades examined by DLA Piper in its seminal report delivered to the government in October last year. The question now is: what to do about it?

In conducting its review the DLA Piper team - Gary Rumble, Melanie McKean and Dennis Pearce - received and considered many hundreds of reports of sexual abuse in the Australian Defence Force, almost all from former members.

That the alleged assaults and abuses go back as far as 60 years does not diminish the imperative to take them very seriously. Nor does the broad time span covered by the report release the government or ADF leaders from responsibility to act in response to the allegations, quickly and decisively.

Defence Minister Stephen Smith made yet another error in judgment by failing to release the report in full at the earliest possible moment, instead providing only a heavily edited summary until forced into the open when the media obtained more detailed extracts. However, he is finally moving to respond to the report and has begun hinting at what might happen next.

The Chief of the Defence Force, General David Hurley, has made it clear that he will do his utmost to assist any further inquiry and committed the ADF to follow his lead.

The report must be acted upon, urgently. It must be determined to what extent the litany of alleged abuse by former and serving members of the ADF is true or false, or unable to be confirmed due to the passage of time. The inquiry must make recommendations that might include criminal investigations, apologies or compensation to victims.

A royal commission would certainly have the necessary stature and powers for such a task, although the magnitude of the work confronting a royal commission in this case would certainly drag on beyond the expectations of the victims and the public, and probably disappoint many victims whose accounts could not be verified.

The Australian Law Reform Commission has identified several weaknesses in the underlying Royal Commissions Act of 1902 and recommended the instigation of a second tier of public inquiry, an official inquiry. Such an inquiry, with powers to compel the production of documents and attendance to answer questions, might have been an appropriate response to the DLA Piper report. Unfortunately the government has not responded to the recommendations of the commission's report, tabled in February 2010.

Nonetheless, some form of official inquiry, perhaps even a royal commission with all of its ponderous procedures and vast costs, is necessary. Only a high-level independent inquiry can satisfy the government and the public of the facts in this matter. There is another reason a top-shelf inquiry is essential. That is, to discredit the widely reported but totally inaccurate assertion that there exists within the ADF today a culture that encourages, condones or ignores sexual misconduct. This egregious slander is trotted out by careless, biased or lazy commentators at every report of misconduct in the Defence Force. There is no such culture.

It defies logic to assert that the same group of extraordinary men and women who serve with such distinction, courage and compassion on combat operations or during natural disasters somehow simultaneously nurture and encourage predatory sexual behaviour of the scale inferred by many media commentators. It simply isn't true. This doesn't suit the narrative of some, but there it is.

In almost 49 years of service in nearly every part of the army and other parts of Defence, I have certainly encountered some incidents of sexual harassment but, thankfully, never sexual assault. In every single case what I saw was rapid and appropriate action to support the victim and deal formally with the perpetrator. I have never met one officer or senior NCO who would deliberately cover up or ignore a report of sexual harassment, let alone sexual assault.

Like the society from which our servicemen and women are drawn, there will always be a few despicable individuals who betray the trust granted to them. When they do crop up, the ADF is as repelled by these individuals as the rest of Australia and deals with their behaviour vigorously, openly and effectively. Sadly, for many of the victims who broke decades of silence to report past injustices to the DLA Piper inquiry, this was not always the case.

The perpetrators of those crimes must be found and punished. If any of them are still lurking in the ADF, they must be subjected to the full force of the law. They have no place in the modern Australian Defence Force. More importantly, there must be an accounting for the suffering they and other perpetrators inflicted on men and women who sought to serve their country, but were instead abused.

John Cantwell retired from the Australian Army in 2012 with the rank of major-general. He was the Australian National Commander in Afghanistan and the Middle East in 2010.

Only A Top-Shelf Inquiry Can Show There's No Culture Of Abuse

 

getting at the truth ....

Wasn't it Georges Clemenceau who said, ''Military justice is to justice what military music is to music''?

The former journalist who became prime minister of France knew a thing or two about war and justice. He was prime minister at the final stages of the First World War and much earlier he ran his own newspaper called La Justice.

In his early years he lived in New York and taught French and horseback riding at a private girls school in Connecticut. One of his other memorable remarks was: ''Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee''.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying Georges was onto something well before the outside lawyers' report on a large number of complaints from Australian servicemen and women alleging abuse, assaults and rape between 1951 and 2011.

The investigation by the law firm DLA Piper, which was released this week, found that overwhelmingly the allegations appeared plausible and that many had not been reported previously.

Significantly, the authors of the report said they ''encountered resistance'' from current and former leaders during the investigation process.

The hostility was partly a response to outside lawyers coming in and ruffling the exquisite finery that had been draped over the myriad assaults and rapes.

The other internal concern was, according to the authors, that ''drawing attention to past abuse in the ADF could damage the ADF's current reputation and thus, damage the ADF's operational capability''.

If, as Dr Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, he was not aware of the possibilities that lay with the words ''operational capability'' (with a hat-tip to James Spigelman).

That naval officers might be buggers did not alarm Winston Churchill, but times and attitudes have moved on.

Earlier investigations had identified other horrors but, as this most recent report said, ''It seems that none of the matters went to trial''.

Assaults, rapes and bullying are no longer part of the human rights or rule of law landscape. So why should it be so in the military?

This is where Clemenceau had his finger on it. Military justice was not much of a justice system at all.

The trial process was dominated by serving or reserve officers, many of whom were lawyers. There was a lot of secrecy and closed courts. The protection of the system was more important than the enforcement of the law.

I hasten to add that was not always the case but certainly there was an attitude among officers that because they had been bastardised it was unworthy of youngsters to complain about the same thing. Cover-up and get on with it, was the order of the day.

The new Military Court system that was introduced last month may set a different tone. The judges cannot be serving officers but the paws of the Australian Defence Force have not been altogether prised off the bone because all military justice appointees ''will have past military experience or knowledge''.

Correspondingly, there have been timely observations about the ''internal'' justice operations of the Catholic Church.

Complainants are invited to waive their rights at law if they let loose the church's own procedures.

Loose is the operative word. As has been revealed in numerous investigations, the latest on Four Corners last week, the church has been more interested in protecting its own reputation and its ''operational capacity'' than providing satisfactory remedies for the victims of the clergy.

The cover-up and denial of justice was also brought to light by Chris Geraghty, a former Catholic priest and until quite recently a NSW judge. In his book Dancing with the Devil he confessed to his own inadequate response when a young seminarian sought his help in relation to the sexual conduct of the notorious and unfortunately named Father Vincent Kiss.

So entrenched is the idea that the institution has to be protected that Irish priests have declared they will flout a new state law that overturns the sanctity of the confessional and requires them to report details of sexual abuse.

The precious protection of self-regulation infuses numerous other professions and pillars of society, too, not least the police and the legal profession.

The police have been magnificently exculpated by their own internal investigatory processes, which come into play when ill-trained and inadequate officers kill a mentally disturbed member of the public.

The case of Adam Salter in 2009 is one of a number of shockers. He was shot dead by police when he posed no danger to them. The coroner said the police intervention was an ''utter failure'', ending with the killing of the person they were supposed to help.

The police closed ranks and produced a whitewash of an internal investigation, even involving deliberate lies, according to counsel for Salter's family, Stephen Rushton.

The police have clung to internal investigations for ''operational'' reasons.

The National Police Accountability Network has long argued that internal investigations should be scrapped, as non-police are perfectly able to do the work at arms length.

However, it is the legal profession that is the bastion of total self-regulation. At every step of the internal process, lawyers are investigating lawyers for misconduct. The ''independent'' legal regulator is also a lawyer, and the judges before whom go the more serious professional infractions are, we sometimes forget, lawyers.

I well remember a lawyer vehemently pressing his finger into my shirt-front and saying: ''I'm passionate about self-regulation.''

He must have momentarily forgotten that the whole point of a proper system of justice is that it is dispassionate.

Nothing To Hide - Just Ask Them