How Ben Roberts-Smith could help Hanson bring down a future Liberal leader

According to an opinion survey published by this masthead last week, other than Pauline Hanson herself, the Australian One Nation supporters most admire is Ben Roberts-Smith.

There is a lot to admire. As a soldier, Roberts-Smith showed almost super-human personal courage in close engagements with Taliban forces in Afghanistan, which saved the lives of several Australian soldiers at immense risk to his own. The Victoria Cross – the simple citation of which is “For Valour” – recognises courage that goes far beyond that commonly shown by soldiers in battle.

However, it is not just admiration for valiant deeds that makes Roberts-Smith so attractive in the eyes of One Nation supporters. He may be a hero, but for them, more importantly, he is a victim: not a soldier accused of war crimes, but a brave, noble Australian being persecuted by the establishment.

Roberts-Smith has become the totemic figure for the right that Julian Assange was for the left.

There is one very important difference: Roberts-Smith emphatically denies the allegations against him (and nothing I write is intended to suggest that he is guilty). Assange admitted his guilt. Even if it ended with a plea bargain for a lesser charge, Assange’s claque of supporters and apologists openly rejoiced in what he was accused of having done – as anyone who saw the 2023 propaganda film The Trust Fall: Julian Assange will remember.

Apart from that obvious difference, however, the similarities, reflected in the attitude of their defenders, are endless. Both are instances of the hero-as-victim narrative. In the case of Roberts-Smith, the heroism was the physical courage of a brave soldier, who put his life on the line for his men. With Assange, the heroism was not physical, but what his apologists called moral courage: putting his freedom on the line to expose the malign conduct of the American military.

The price they paid for their courage was persecution by the military establishment. The fact that Assange’s prosecution lasted for many years (and Roberts-Smith’s is likely to do so as well), reinforces the victimhood narrative. So do the humiliations they suffered in the course of those prosecutions. As both were enlarged in the public mind, they became – in very different ways - charismatic figures.

But the most important similarity of all is that both Roberts-Smith and Assange became symbols of something much deeper than the conduct alleged against them. They became proxies for public anger. For supporters of Roberts-Smith, respect for the solider on the battlefield was distilled into contempt for civilians and lawyers who presume to sit in judgment on acts done in battle. For Assange, admiration for the whistleblower was distilled into loathing for the US military.

It was of no concern to their supporters that the crimes of which Roberts-Smith is accused are not alleged to have happened in the fog of war, or that the conduct which Assange admitted in no way fell within any accepted definition of whistleblowing. The determination of guilt or innocence is a forensic exercise, to be undertaken in the cold, unsentimental environment of a criminal trial. But righteous anger has no time for the sober processes of the criminal law – indeed, when the grievance is against the system itself, those very processes are themselves the enemy.

A weary world needs heroes, and nobody needs them more than outraged fundamentalists. By elevating Assange and Roberts-Smith to the status of martyrs, political activists of, respectively, the left and the right found in them idealised personifications of their contempt for a system of which they themselves, in less dramatic ways, feel victims.

The Assange case ultimately ran its course with a plea bargain (from which Assange’s acolytes immediately tried to walk away). The Roberts-Smith case has a very long way to go. Already, however, it is affecting our politics. That is now evident in the adoption by One Nation of Roberts-Smith – his case enlarged into a metaphor for all the grievance, anger, contempt and alienation by which its supporters are driven. A remarkable feature of the Farrer by-election in May was the widespread display by One Nation of Roberts-Smith corflutes – although he was not a candidate, nor even a member of the party.

That anger has now found a target in Andrew Hastie. It is of no concern to the One Nation tribe that Hastie, like Roberts-Smith, was a valiant soldier who also put his life on the line for his country. His “crime” is that he gave evidence in the Roberts-Smith defamation case. Yet Hastie was called as a witness under subpoena. His evidence was given under oath. So far as I am aware, it has never been suggested he lied to the court. The judge concluded that what he said was true. But the fact that he complied with his legal obligation to appear, and told the truth, is of no concern to aggrieved vigilantes. Nor is the fact that, should he be called as a witness in Roberts-Smith’s prosecution, he would also appear under the compulsion of a subpoena.

On Saturday, One Nation scored an historic win in the Secret Harbour by-election, not only defeating Labor but outpolling the Liberal Party by more than two-to-one. The seat falls within Hastie’s federal electorate. Over the next 18 months, we can expect him to be increasingly subjected to the venom and vigilantism already displayed by many of Roberts-Smith’s admirers.

As One Nation seeks, by stirring populist outrage, to corrupt what should be a forensic criminal process with its narrative of victimhood, the true victim could be Hastie – a decent man who served his country bravely; his only “crime”, to have complied with the obligations the law imposes on every citizen.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.