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Who Will Hold the Department of Defence Accountable?

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I asked the Inspector General of the Australian Defence Force (IGADF) about some decisions from Defence that I believe warrant investigation.

I was under the impression that the IGADF would have some jurisdiction over complaints if Defence bureaucrats had a perceived conflict of interest.

In this session, they seem to wash their hands of all responsibility of inspecting this potential breach of integrity. Could it be something to do with the fact that the document in question was critical of the Brereton Report, which the IGADF created?

I will continue to make sure soldiers are given due process and generals are made accountable. If anyone is going to be put in jail for war crimes, the first ones locked up should be the politicians and generals that sent our men there.

Transcript

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you, Mr Gaynor, for being here. I understand you’ve received a complaint in relation to the decision-maker on Defence freedom of information application 577/23/24. Are you in a position to confirm that you have received that and you’re processing it?  

Mr Gaynor: No, I can’t answer that question, because I don’t understand which case it might relate to with just that number, but I can take that question on notice.  

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you very much. Catherine Wallis was the person who decided to block the release of the Afghanistan Inquiry Implementation Oversight Panel report. She is the Director-General of the Afghanistan Inquiry Response Task Force. The panel report is highly critical of the taskforce Catherine Wallis leads. I must say that the defence department pulled out some quotes that were favourable to Ms Wallis or to the oversight panel, but there are many, many other quotes that Defence neglected. So the panel report is highly critical of the task force Catherine Wallis leads, and she’s the decision-maker on whether to release that report under freedom of information. On the face of it, that would be a conflict of interest that you would be able to investigate, wouldn’t it?  

Mr Gaynor: These questions would be better directed to the Afghanistan Inquiry Response Task Force or to the Department of Defence. If freedom of information application 577 refers to a freedom of information application for the oversight panel’s report, then my office has had nothing to do with that report or with that freedom of information application. The role of my office is principally threefold. It’s an integrity, inquiry and assurance agency. My statutory role is to examine failures in the military justice system, to inquire into the deaths of ADF members where those deaths appear to have arisen out of or in the course of their service, and also to superintend the statutory Redress of Grievance complaints scheme, which is available for all ADF members.  

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you for your response. It would seem to me that under the first one, ‘integrity’ and ‘inquiry’, this would be perfectly placed, because there appears to be a massive conflict of interest with Ms Wallis signing off and, in fact, signing off on a previous FOI application but not signing off on this one. 

Mr Gaynor: Yes. I say ‘yes’ not to indicate agreement, but I understand your question. But my role is to examine matters affecting the military justice system. What you’re talking about here is an administrative decision that’s been made under the FOI Act. There are other ways of seeking review of such decisions, both internal and external to the Department of Defence.  

Senator ROBERTS: Do you have any information on why Catherine Wallis deleted her position title on the taskforce from her signature on this decision, despite including it on a different decision only days earlier?  

Mr Gaynor: My office conducted the IGADF Afghanistan inquiry. We delivered the report to the Chief of the Defence Force in November 2020. Noting that my office is an independent statutory office within the Defence portfolio that’s otherwise separate from the administrative functions and the department’s functions, I don’t have any visibility or oversight of freedom-of-information decisions that are made within the Department of Defence.  

Senator ROBERTS: With your familiarity with the Defence systems, presumed on my part, I’m wondering how someone with such a conflict of interest could be allowed to make the decision of blocking the release of the report which is critical of her work. Could you tell me who you think would be the best avenue for us to go to?  

Mr Gaynor: No, Senator, I genuinely cannot. There would be an official within the department who is responsible for freedom of information, but I don’t know who that individual is. Freedom-of-information decisions that are received by my office are made within my office. I don’t have visibility of the department’s decision-making.  

Senator ROBERTS: Your duties as inspector-general don’t cover scrutiny of freedom of information from Defence?  

Mr Gaynor: That’s correct.  

Senator ROBERTS: Thank you very much, Mr Gaynor. 

Mr Gaynor: You’re welcome.  

CHAIR: Is that it?  

Senator ROBERTS: That’s it 

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Lest We Forget

Today I honour those men and women who willingly answering the call to duty.

Lest We Forget.

Transcript

The men and women of our Australian Defence Force have a history of willingly answering the call for duty to protect our freedoms and our sovereignty. They do so sometimes at huge personal sacrifice, whether that be leaving their families and loved ones, or putting themselves in harm’s way to ensure the safety of others.

It’s all in a day’s work for our men and women of the armed forces. Our Defence Force personnel and our Aussie veterans are important and respected people who have committed to the defence of Australia in so many ways, in many ways, whether they have been deployed to active conflict, on peacekeeping operations, or have actually served without being deployed.

For some of our defence force personnel and our veterans, the battle, though, goes on long after they have returned from operational deployment. We must remember this at all times. The veteran death toll by suicide since 2001, by the most conservative of measures, is 10 times greater than our losses in Afghanistan.

Today, and every day, we need to remember these Aussies, and we must join to stop these preventable deaths of our servicemen and servicewomen. So, I hope you join with us in cherishing our armed forces and cherishing days like today, and that on days like today, help our younger generations to remember why our soldiers are being honoured and appreciated.

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Urgent PFAS Compensation Needed For Farmers

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This week I visited farmers in and around Oakey who have had their lives and livelihoods destroy by PFAS contamination from the nearby Army Aviation Centre in Oakey. One Nation is calling for affected resident to receive like-for-like compensation as soon as possible so they can get on with their lives. PFAS FACT SHEET https://tinyurl.com/ya877sqy

Transcript

Hi, I’m Malcolm Roberts and I’m a senator for Queensland, and I’m near the Oakey Army Base here in just west of Toowoomba. We’re going to show you a clip of some water flowing overland and it’s going through this water course here, and it shows PFAS contamination.

And what annoys me is that governments in this country, both liberal, national and labor, just ignore the damn data. They just completely ignore it. Now, I happen to have worked in an industry where if you ignore data, people die, so I’ve become very conditioned to data and I understand its power.

Now, the European Union has set a new limit for PFAS contamination in beef. It’s eight nanograms per kilogram of body weight, it’s much, much lower than in Australia. And, in fact, the Department of Defence and some other departments in this country don’t even recognise any damn level at all is significant.

So what happens if we continue to ignore this data, we continue to ignore the plight of people? What will happen if someone in the EU is inspecting our meat and they come across highly contaminated PFAS? The whole of our beef industry will be shut down, that’s what’s at stake.

So we need the government to come clean, look at the data and admit what they’ve been doing for 40 years knowingly in this country. I’m so sick and tired of this, and we need people here who in this country, who have been belted and smashed, livelihoods, future for their retirement completely destroyed, and the Department of Defence has known about it.

We need like for like compensation, we need those people to be relocated and we need those properties to be declared unsafe. That’s all we want, but we want people to abide by the data. For goodness sake, these are people’s livelihoods at stake, whole lives at stake.

And it’s not only the people involved in the PFAS contamination zones like this one, this is where overland flows are contaminated, overland flows are coming from the base, but it’s also mums and dads because they are not being told that some of the beef is contaminated and they’re feeding contaminated beef to kids.

It’s all over Australia, that’s what we want fixed. The people in this land, in this land here, are taking responsibility, but they need to be compensated for that, like for like compensation, and we need to have healthy, safe food levels for production in this country.

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