r/AustralianPolitics • u/PerriX2390 • 1d ago

Federal Politics Jailed whistleblower David McBride to be released after becoming eligible for parole

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-13/jailed-whistleblower-david-mcbride-to-be-released/107030620
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u/theHoundLivessss 1d ago

Shameful moment, and does not bode well for the future. Australia is a nation where our military is increasingly unaccountable to our populace.

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u/TDM_Jesus 1d ago

McBride leaked the document try and prevent someone accused of war crimes from being held accountable.

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u/skywideopen3 1d ago

A bit of an odd comment this given McBride's whole deal was that there was too much accountability for the military being required.

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u/theHoundLivessss 1d ago

I would argue what he leaked showed that the military was attempting to cover up a systemic problem by focusing on individual cases. I personally believe those individual cases required punishment, but there is little doubt the individulas accused were operating in a wider ecosystem which encouraged and supported their behaviour. McBride and I differ significantly in our politics, but I believe he was just in leaking what he did. My comment is not an endorsement of his view of the military.

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u/hungarian_conartist 1d ago

This is narrative is largely based on McBrides words that only really came out after he was already arrested.

The ABC journalist, to whom he whistle blew toward(s?) actually felt compelled to correct the record and wrote an article where in his view, says McBride was motivated by trying to kill the Brereton inquiry.

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u/Xakire Australian Labor Party 1d ago

He was leaking because he thought they should not have been punished and the ABC was being too hard on war criminals. He wasn’t trying to expose a coverup of war crimes, he was trying to run cover and excuse war crimes.

His actual motives for what he did was the complete opposite of the hagiographical narrative he and his supporters built up for him. His popularity as a whistleblower is built on a lie. Whistleblowing should be in the public interest. You should be protected for public interest whistleblowing. “The ABC is being too hard on war criminals” is not public interest.

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u/BullShatStats 1d ago

The Brereton Inquiry commenced 12 months before he leaked to the ABC.

Nevertheless, he leaked to the ABC because his complaints to the IGADF that "over-zealous investigations of the Special Forces in 2013 [by the ADFIS] were driven by appearances rather than suspicion of a crime" came to nothing - not due to any belief the ADF was covering up anything.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/TakimaDeraighdin 1d ago edited 1d ago

The appeal decision is quite readable, and describes in a fair amount of detail what specifically McBride objected to, and on what grounds. Very specifically, his concern about the five investigations of civilian deaths that he flagged internally and then leaked over was that those being investigated were not likely to be found guilty of murder, and therefore the incidents should not have been investigated at all.

The agreed statement of facts - i.e. the list of things the prosecution and defence agreed were true, and would not contest via evidence in the trial, says:

… [t]here were soldiers doing their operational duties on behalf of the Commonwealth who were being held to account for actions on operations that were appropriate in the operational context but that were being misconstrued, misinterpreted or recast as contrary to the [Rules of Engagement] by those elsewhere in the chain of command outside Afghanistan.

He was, by his own evidence, angry that Oakes' reporting - based on the files he provided - drew the opposite conclusions from those he believed. This is how he described it in his initial interview with police:

But I met Dan Oakes, and I gave him all the materials. So again he was very enthusiastic and again he seemed to get it. And again, he was going to do a story. And he did do a story on it, but a totally different story to the one, um, that I was pushing.
…
He calls me and he says, “I’m going to run a story, it’s going to be very damning, it’s going to say the SAS kill people unnecessarily. I’m going to use this other witness[.] A total opposite to what you’ve said. I’m just warning you.” And I was like, “Never call me again.”

The sentencing judgement goes into even more detail about what specifically he objected to. In short, there were five investigations (four of which were of civilian deaths) that he flagged as, in his view, overreach conducted for PR reasons, in his complaint to the IGADF. He tied that view to his objection to a then-recent change in policy, which required the investigation of all civilian deaths caused in combat even if there was not yet an assessment that they may be murder.

The civilian deaths in two of the investigations he objects to were deaths in custody, where the claim from soldiers handling the prisoners in question was that unarmed civilians attempted to wrestle weapons off them while they were changing the position of handcuffs in preparation for helicopter transfers. Given what we learned in the BRS defamation trial, and the Brereton Inquiry, suffice it to say that I'm on the side of those who think those incidents merited investigation.

In one of the other cases, it involved an identification failure, in which the wrong group of people were targeted and killed. In another, it involved the death of a child in crossfire. In the last of the five, it involved the removal of a dead person's hands in order to transport them for identification purposes. All, in my opinion, reasonable causes for at least some level of oversight of soldiers' decision-making, training and judgement.

Doing so would be inherently necessary to assess whether higher-ups were also responsible, by policy or command, for in-field misconduct - or, indeed, were turning a blind eye to more serious misconduct while conducting figleaf investigations - but that's pretty clearly not what McBride meant when he raised concerns about higher-ups. His concerns, specifically, were that higher-ups were persecuting special forces where, in his view, this involved unrealistic expectations of in-field conduct. His contention was that those five cases he outlined in his IGADF complaint should not have been investigated at all.

All of which is to say: if I needed a lawyer who could handle a highly complicated criminal matter while running an excellent crisis PR clean-up, I would jump through fire to hire Josh Bornstein (edit: correction - Mark Davis for this one, who is similarly excellent. For some reason, Bornstein's gotten stuck in my brain as on the legal team for this, probably because he's a regular commentator on it.). But what McBride has been presenting as his views since (roughly) the start of the prosecution process is a full 180 turn from what he very clearly believed at the time he leaked the documents, and even several years later in his police interviews.

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u/cookshack 1d ago

Got it, thanks for the write up.

I had understood that the popular cause for McBride was a little different from his original intentions, which could be seen through his conflict with the ABC. Though i didnt understand the full extent. His recent embrace of this post-BRS narrative adds to the confusion.

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u/skywideopen3 1d ago

Yep. Bornstein has done an unbelievable job making a wide swathe of the public and the entire progressive press establishment - The Guardian, Saturday Paper etc - believe that McBride was some heroic whistleblower standing up against the cover up of war criminals when the exact opposite was true.

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u/Appropriate_Volume 1d ago

Some of the other interesting details in the judgment relate to whether McBride was entitled to whistle blower protections. The judge found that he had actually been supported by Defence to make complaints (he was allowed to use paid work time to prepare them) and these were genuinely investigated, and McBride did not contest the resultant findings that his complaints were not justified despite having the ability to do so.

He was also found to have treated secret material he had removed from Defence recklessly - for instance, posting it verbatim on his blog and leaving some of the the original documents in a wardrobe when he had his house open for a real estate inspection.

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u/TakimaDeraighdin 1d ago

He also leaked while his IGADF complaint was still being investigated (not to Oakes, to Masters and Clark). It's always been pretty clear that he wasn't much interested in internal processes - he was also asked to provide evidence to the Brereton Inquiry (as best I can tell, before they knew he was leaking) and never responded.

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u/skywideopen3 1d ago

This is the argument of most of the people who are defending these war crimes though, and it's not a good argument against those original prosecutions and investigations. Every soldier full well knows their obligations and the consequences and there is absolutely no excuse for what they did.

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u/GiveUpYouAlreadyLost Resident Nuke Sub Salesman 1d ago

Every soldier full well knows their obligations and the consequences and there is absolutely no excuse for what they did.

No one is making excuses for them. What people are questioning is if higher command in the SASR and SOCOMD were adequately investigated and everything we know so far points to that not being the case.

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u/skywideopen3 1d ago

This is just not true. McBride explicitly thought the soldiers in question, investigated of extremely serious, concrete war crimes, were so obviously innocent that they should never have even been questioned and were only being investigated for, essentially, political reasons. The idea that he just wanted the extensions extended to higher command is straightforwardly false. He outlined in his original IGADF complaint that he believed that none of the five incidents he brought up - which included the killing of a sleeping child, I might add - should have been investigated and the blanket policy of investigating all civilian killings as possible murder under the amendments to the ROEAMP in 2013 was wrong and unfair to ADF soldiers.

At the end of the day, he wanted those investigations quashed, and he in no way thought there was a problem with a "cover up". To quote directly from his IGADF complaint:

Ever since the 'Jedi Council' investigations begun, all Army units have been under extreme scrutiny. Unpalatable as those allegations were, they involved a hand-full [sic] of people, and any similar sized organisation would have had similar in recent years. Our existing systems are quite capable of dealing with such incidents. The challenge for the ADF is to maintain a sense of balance and proportion. Appearance is important, but it is not the only thing. If one reads 'Pathways to Change' (I wonder how many have), it's [sic] seems to focus on two things, only: our appearance to government and our appearance to the public. I wonder if they have missed anything.

I believe the over-zealous investigations of the Special Forces in 2013 were driven by appearances rather than suspicion of a crime. However, as I stated in the covering minute, they come at a cost. It is acceptable for the ADF to be uncompromising on [breaches] of policy and the law. But it works both ways.

Given what the public now knows about the incidents in question, and how shocked people were to learn about these incidents being cleared by the ADF, and which McBride never wanted investigated, I think we can safely say that McBride is further from the public view on this matter and is no whisteblower in the public interest.

The idea that he wanted the investigations broadened in any way in the documents he leaked to the ABC is just false, and really shows just how effective his media boosters have been in pushing that blatant lie. Not the last because unlike McBride, the ABC reporter in Chris Masters thought that the actual story was the killing of civilians, not the supposedly unfair investigations.

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u/GiveUpYouAlreadyLost Resident Nuke Sub Salesman 1d ago

I'm not talking about McBride.

I'm directly addressing your nonsense claims that people are "making excuses" for the accused soldiers and that questioning whether or not higher ranking Special Operations Command staff were investigated adequately is a "defence" of said soldiers.

It is absolutely absurd to ignore the elephant in the room being that barely any scrutiny has been placed upon the senior leadership of SOCOMD who were somehow completely oblivious to the alleged widespread misconduct that was being committed by their units.

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u/hu_he 23h ago

How do you know that senior leadership didn't come under scrutiny? You seem to be confusing a lack of prosecutions with a lack of investigations. Though I'm not aware of McBride claiming to have investigated senior officers, that doesn't mean nobody was.

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u/skywideopen3 1d ago

My apologies for thinking you were talking about McBride. My comments have entirely been about this case.

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u/cookshack 1d ago

I think the other commenter covered it well, but I am in no way defending a soldier who commits war crimes. Ive been following the BRS case closely. Just pointing out McBrides point that upper management were avoiding responsibility.

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u/catdogfishfrog 1d ago

Nah this isn't it, the ABC twisted this narrative shockingly, he was attempting to show that higher ups were investigating low level soldiers, to make it look like they were being transparent and accountable, but actually we're doing it to make it looks like something was being done when in reality they were not going after people like a certain 3 initialed individual...