The ADFA Skype affair will go into Australian defence history, perhaps deserving a place at the Australian War Memorial alongside other boorish quasi-sexual exploits by Australians at arms that the public still knows too little about, and is unlikely to be told, officially at least, during the federal government's impending and very expensive celebration of World War I.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
During that period we will hear much about manliness, honour, loyalty and mateship, and love of country, and the more fraudulent imposters will attempt to appropriate the occasion to claim that we are all somewhat better for the massive effusion of blood that supposedly ''baptised'' our nationhood. In the meantime out in the real world, some officers will be making themselves unpopular, and be regarded as killjoys responding to modern political correctness, as they try hard to eradicate a long-standing culture of dishonour, sexism, racism, selfishness and abuse of one's comrades that has long been endemic in our military. The subtext of the opposition is that this re-education stands in the way of our troops being, if necessary, efficient killers of our enemies.
The task of the re-educators is made by more difficult because service personnel are only slowly starting to get the message that ''we mean it this time'' - and some still don't believe it, in spite of increasing evidence that they do. The senior military personnel have been using all the right phrases for several decades, but, somehow, they have not seemed convincing, looking more as if they were mouthing words they did not really mean, while, down in the mess, laughing loudly about old devilries, drunken escapades, escapades with drunken girls and contempt for other sexes and sexualities. Culture does not necessarily come from the top, but its crib is among the long-servers.
Some might remember the great 1970 Oscar-winning ''black'' comedy MASH, in which a bossy and officious woman officer was humiliated, several times, by her male fellow officers at an army hospital in the Korean War. A hidden microphone broadcast her having sex with an officer, and, the next day, one of the instigators, the lovable ''Hawkeye'', publicly taunts and humiliates ''Hotlips'' and Major Burns about it, until Burns snaps and begins a fight for which he is cashiered. ''Hotlips'' is also humiliated by being exposed naked when a shower tent is made to collapse: the good old boys have been having a bet about the colour of her pubic hair.
How we, even the women in the audience, laughed. The ''blackness'' of the comedy was not, supposedly, about the degradation of women but about the contrast of fun being had during the grim business of patching up the victims of war. And perhaps about pranks being played on people who couldn't take a joke.
One couldn't, or perhaps shouldn't, be too condemnatory of the ADFA offenders if one now thinks that MASH, or an array of similar films in which men compete to put women in their place, is funny. MASH is still a golden oldie. But maybe nobody told the ADFA class of 2011 that it deals with an alternative universe.
There is already a public argument whether the two cadets convicted of offences from the affair - and given good behaviour bonds - were treated leniently by the courts, perhaps even by the system all along. There has also been a good deal of empathy for the victim, who had consensual (if forbidden) sex with another cadet, not realising that he and another had arranged to put a camera in the room and had broadcast the event to other ADFA cadets, named, at least in proceedings, if not made the subject of criminal charges.
The sentencing judge, John Nield, was scathing of the tasteless, vulgar and criminal conduct of the main offender, but as scornful of his sense of honour. He had told blatant and outrageous lies, not only to the victim but to investigators and the court. He had acted deliberately and intentionally to abuse and degrade the victim. He had breached their friendship and exposed her to humiliation and ridicule. He had shown no remorse.
''There cannot be any doubt that the complainant has been greatly affected by the offences,'' Nield said. ''This is revealed by her victim's impact statement, which she, bravely, read out aloud in court in the presence of the offenders.
''As she said, her whole world had been shattered, her dignity stolen, her self-worth and self-respect destroyed. She became known as 'the Skype slut'. She was ridiculed by other members of the armed forces. She became depressed and she was prescribed medication by psychiatrists and referred for counselling by psychologists.
''The offenders' senior counsel submitted that the harm suffered by the complainant was not the result of the defendants' conduct but, rather, was the result of the publicity which surrounded the investigation and the unusual media attention that the investigation engendered.''
[Implicit in this submission to the judge was that the victim, by screaming blue murder to the media when she perceived, perhaps wrongly, that ADFA leadership was not going to do much about it, had brought most of her troubles upon herself. A good number of service personnel and commentators still believe this, a reflection of how far they are out of touch with modern public sensibilities.]
''I do not agree. The investigation of what happened flowed from the happening itself, and the harm suffered by the complainant also flowed from the happening itself. One cannot be separated from the other. The offenders abused and degraded the complainant for their own perverse satisfaction and they are responsible, and no one else is responsible, for the effect … upon the complainant''.
The young men are not monsters, apparently. They are the cream of a generation. Both were said to be well liked and respected by people who knew them well. The main offender seemed definite officer material: ''polite'', ''respectful'', ''mature beyond his years'' with ''excellent leadership qualities'', according to character evidence. The man who made the suggestion of Skyping the encounter, and watched the broadcast with other cadets in his room, was said to be ''compassionate and considerate'', ''decent'', ''caring'', ''respectful'', someone with ''morals'' and ''a great level of maturity'', and a ''good role model''.
Each has suffered embarrassment and humiliation from two years of publicity and court appearances, and the very fact of a conviction will no doubt limit their career prospects.
A good deal positive has been said about the courage and resilience of the victim. This is perhaps the more to be admired because a good many anonymous briefers attempted to mitigate the damage caused by the affair by blackguarding her, or making it seem as if it was her, not the offenders and their mates, who did not really ''fit in'' with the military environment. She had already, it would be explained, been accused of a number of disciplinary offences, been identified as problematic, and had willingly engaged in sex with a fellow cadet knowing that fraternisation of this sort was strictly forbidden. Subtext imputation: she was a slut who brought much of the trouble on herself.
The action of ADFA authorities, in appearing to prioritise the punishment of her for previous infractions before dealing with the offences against her, drew sharp condemnation, not least from former defence minister Stephen Smith. A collateral victim of this outrage, forced to stand aside until cleared by his peers, was ADFA commandant Bruce Kafer, but even assuming that he was harshly dealt with, it is still by no means clear that ADFA authorities ''got it'' until most of the damage had been done, by themselves, to themselves.
One cannot doubt the victimhood of the girl, or, in dealings with issues of sentence, the callousness and lack of real remorse of the young men who had degraded her. The judge was right to consider them.
In the modern fashion, she was interviewed after the sentencing so that the public could see whether she was satisfied with the outcome. Apparently justice is not done unless the victim, the police, the Daily Telegraph and Alan Jones, see the right people vindicated, and wallow the opportunity for a bit of a gloat.
The girl was above this. She was generous: ''Justice Nield has been fair throughout this whole trial and I respect his decision,'' she said. ''Today has brought closure to two-and-a-half years of turmoil. I will now look forward to a new positive chapter in my life.''
Yet the case provides a very good example of a wider principle being increasingly ignored in much discussion of crime and disorder, not least by publicly funded victims' rights groups, police unions, grandstanding politicians, Daily Telegraph journalists, Alan Joneses, and Ray Hadleys. In this case, of course, some of these might have felt inhibited by their general adherence to the ''boys will be boys'' principle, applying only, of course, when the boys are not of foreign extraction.
Sentencing is not about appeasing, satisfying, or bring ''closure'' to ''victims''. When crime occurs, society at large is as much the victim as the actual subject of the criminal act. Devastating as were the consequences on the immediate victim, there could hardly be a better example than this of how society at large was the victim too.
This was a set of offences which had consequences. Lots of them. In the short term most were bad. These included considerable discredit to ADFA, which may well make it difficult to set its sights on men and women of higher calibre than the boys who thought it was just a bit of fun. There is, probably, professional damage to the entire cohort of students present at the time, if only because events like this occur only in a culture without an ingrained sense of honour, decency and mutual respect. There was damage to the defence disciplinary system and chain of command, to the Australian Defence Force and a good many of its officers, to the department, which helped mismanage the response, the minister and the government of the day, and the Australian Federal Police, which had to be prodded to do anything. And perhaps there was even measurable damage to the public at large, which hardly benefits when some of its most important institutions are humiliated, shamed, degraded and made to seem so bastardly and out of touch.
That is on top of the expense of inquiries, compensation schemes, various reorganisation after post-mortems, and the cost to efficiency, effectiveness and decision-making as a result of continuing tensions between ministers and the department, and soldiers and government, brought on by public discussion of the affair.
Trust, in particular, is much affected, but so also is morale, which matters a good deal to military effectiveness.
Quite apart from the reputational damage, to individuals and institutions, is direct expenditure incurred by the affair, which may end up in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
It may well be that one boorish lair, building himself up among his mates by humiliating and degrading a colleague before five other equally boorish and dishonourable mates, has inflicted more economic damage on Australia's armed services than any enemy since World War II. Blue on blue attacks do that.
