Last Sunday evening, 2nd March, 2025, I met John Shipton, the good father, whose fourteen-year international campaign, secured the release from Britain’s highest security prison at Belmarsh, and the return home to Australia of his son, Julian Assange of Wikileaks.
In Canberra’s Central Business District, we met in the Dissent Café & Bar, for Singing Truth to Power, now for David McBride, the army lawyer, graduated from Sydney and Oxford universities, and from Sandhurst, who had told the press of illegal killings in Afghanistan, by Australian soldiers – published as The Afghan Files and since confirmed by the Brereton Inquiry.
McBride’s repeated attempts to notify senior army ranks via official channels were rebuffed, so he smuggled classified documents home in a daypack and went public, releasing them to the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). Charged with theft and distribution of classified material, McBride defended his action as his duty to the Australian Defence Force and to the Australian people. The court left McBride no option but to plead guilty.
Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus refused to use his power under the Judiciary Act, to stop proceedings against McBride. In May 2024, Mr Justice Mossop, stressing deterrence of such conduct, sentenced McBride to five years and eight months jail, with a non-parole period of two years and three months.
The first person in jail over war crimes in Afghanistan, is the whistleblower.
In the Dissent Café, several musicians sang protesters’ songs. Then Jeff Morris OAM gripped our attention. While working for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) it was Jeff, in 2013 who blew the whistle on Australia’s biggest financial scandal. Four years of gruelling activism, which Jeff ran like a military campaign, eventually forced Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull to launch the Royal Commission into the Financial Services Industry.
Jeff listed the very dirty tricks our supposedly respectable CBA played to silence his dissent over four billion dollars of white-collar crime. Even more disconcerting, Jeff also explained how the ‘Separation of Powers’ in Australia, between the Parliament, the Executive, and the Judiciary, is more apparent than real, and that hard-won democratic rights are being progressively eroded over the last fifty years. Australia has inadequate whistle-blower protection, vital to a healthy democracy.
Next morning, outside the Australian Capital Territory’s Law Courts. we re-gathered around a fire engine advertising ‘DEMOCRACY RESCUE’.
Inside, the Supreme Court was packed and silent until two guards brought in the prisoner, former army major, David McBride. The public rose to its feet, cheering, clapping and waving. Making a formal bow, McBride gestured for calm.
McBride’s barrister, Bill Neild SC, argued that in sentencing McBride, Mr Justice Mossop had failed to consider McBride’s motivation, bravery and selflessness in acting to correct a serious wrong. He pleaded that he acted in accordance with the oath he swore on joining the military. Neild also argued against the severity of the sentence.
At a previous public meeting in Lismore, in October 2023, McBride declared that if necessary, his campaign will go all the way up to High Court of Australia, and to the top generals of the Australian Defence Force, who declare they did not know of the illegal killings in Afghanistan, while the law asserts that they should have known. That is their duty.
David McBride’s father was the doctor who blew the whistle on the morning-sickness pill, Thalidomide, causing birth defects such as babies born with no arms.
The three women judges reserved judgement whether McBride has a right to appeal.
