Australians are raised on ideas of freedom, justice and equality: principles that the nation is said to embody, and its defence forces uphold.
And it’s implicitly understood that serving military officers take no pleasure in committing acts that are usually criminal, as it’s a sacrifice made for the greater good.
The career path taken by former Australian ADF lawyer David McBride reveals this outlook. He studied at Oxford University and attended the UK’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. McBride served as a major in the British Army and did two tours of Afghanistan as an ADF lawyer.
As McBride put it to Sydney Criminal Lawyers in 2021, he was a “true believer”. And like others raised on the notion of the Australian Defence Force being a noble institution, he didn’t consider troops would be left to run amuck, with some officers, his clients, then scapegoated to compensate.
So, the lawyer blew the whistle. McBride raised his concern around the “Instagram war” playing out in Afghanistan, a keeping up of appearances “to get likes from the public” and his officers were then personally paying the price for this failure of ADF management.