It is my honour and privilege to launch this amazing book and in doing so, to publicly express my sympathies to Private Robbie Poate’s family – Janny, Hugh, and Nicola, and the families of Lance Corporal Rick Milosevic, and Sapper James Martin.

Failures of Command is a heartrending account of the experiences of three families devastated first by avoidable tragedy, then by inexplicable and inexcusable interference in their search for answers, accountability, justice, and closure.

We lost 42 young Australians in Afghanistan, 6 during the period I was the Minister for Defence. Learning of a loss and helping the families through their grief was the toughest part of the job.

Wrongly or rightly and maybe even strangely, I always felt a small sense of relief, when our collective loss came as the result of a firefight rather than a random IED blast. I can only imagine the horror and grief felt by families advised their son has been killed in an insider attack.

Every field of collective endeavour has its own culture. Every industry, every profession, every institution, every political party. That is also true of military forces. Indeed, defence culture is particularly unique.

That’s hardly surprising. In that organisation, employees are trained in the use of lethal force and can be legally authorised to use it. They are programmed to deploy into operations from which they may never return. To take risks; to protect their mates, or to improve the odds of mission success.

Theirs is a warrior culture and is one to be respected and supported. We can expect this culture to push the bounds of human morality and so many other of societal norms. None of this is unique to Australia.

More senior ranks are called upon to make strategic decisions and make judgement calls, which can pose great risk for service personnel and civilians alike. This is high pressure stuff.

We accept the special nature of the work of our military personnel and therefore, expect and tolerate a culture which is necessary for the effective protection of our country and its people. A culture crucial to the success of military operations and the welfare of our troops.

For me, this tacit approval of a culture we would not otherwise tolerate is justified. There could be no effective force without it. And of course, our enemies, are not likely to be so disadvantaged.

Driven by the tragic and avoidable loss of his son, Hugh Poate has gone to great lengths to show us, what we might expect when the “special” status we extend to our men and women in uniform is abused, either by those delusional enough to believe the ends justify the means or by those who know better but are determined to do whatever it takes, to avoid accountability for poor decisions or behaviour.

Actor Jack Nicholson’s quote, “you can’t handle the truth” in A Few Good Men, alerted us in one timeless scripted line, how dangerous the betrayal of our trust can be. That is why Hugh’s contribution is so important.

Indeed, Hugh’s work is important for many reasons. Some of them obvious, some not so. If the book has the impact I expect it will have, it will save lives. Civilian lives, and the lives of defence personnel. No doubt it was this objective which drove Hugh most. That provided the main motivation for the time, energy, and emotion he and Janny put into the book.

If properly responded to, Failures of Command should also enhance our success on the ADF recruitment front. We need to reassure the parents of young Australians that the Defence culture is one which ranks the safety and welfare of our troops as its highest priority.

Properly responded to, Hugh’s book can help to restore public confidence in the ADF in the wake of a string of incidents over many years, including most recently, the findings of the Brereton inquiry which published allegations which should never have been made public, in the absence of a statement from Government in defence of the overwhelming majority of soldiers who have done no more than put their lives on the line for their country.

Those allegations should not have been made public without accompanying Government recognition, that in Afghanistan, we pushed our troops beyond the limits of human tolerance.

They should not have been released without recognition that we drove them to a psychological zone in which I suspect, differentiating between right and wrong became a difficult task. As can be the case in war.

But I make another point about the merits of Hugh’s book which may not be so obvious. In Australia decisions to deploy our troops and assets into overseas operations are made by executive government. May that long be the case.

But I fear it may not be long the case if sufficient community trust and support for that arrangement is not maintained. This should be of great concern to those of us who understand that it is not possible to have fully informed deliberative parliamentary debates on these sensitive questions.

I vividly remember in 2007 being urged by my Dutch counterpart to join him at a press conference at which he planned to appeal to his parliamentary colleagues back home, to renew the authorisation of his country’s contribution to the war in Afghanistan.

I agreed. I have no idea if it helped but they did stay a little longer. But, seeing the writing on the wall, I spent a considerable amount of time in the period which followed, making it clear to our friends and allies that Australia would not accept the lead in Oruzgan Province when the Dutch finally withdrew.

That’s a piece of history neatly recorded in Karen Middleton’s excellent book - An Unwinnable War.

Of course, our troops were aware of the hesitancy ever present in their Dutch partners in Oruzgan Province. Just as they were aware that ISAF’s strategy was at best vague and confused. They rightly questioned whether there was a plan to win.

These are issues I quite aggressively raised with my NATO counterparts at every opportunity, again recorded in Karen’s book. My United States counterpart shared my concerns.

The absence of a clear pathway to success weighed on the morale of our troops.

So too did NATO’s dispiriting catch and release policy.

So too did the problems they too often experienced securing life-saving assets like medivacs and close air support.

So too did and the fact that unlike them, their enemy was not one which wore a uniform or fought to any rules.

No wonder that after so many rotations, problems have emerged such as those revealed in the Brereton Report, and concerningly high levels of PTSD.

Still, in the ANZAC tradition, our troops soldiered on with great esprit de corps.
Failures of Command is not a he-said–she-said account. Many of its shocking revelations come straight from:

• the findings of Coroner John Lock;
• transcripts from the Defence Inquiry Officer’s interviews;
• transcripts of Hekmatullah’s trial in the Supreme Court of Afghanistan; and of course,
• the very good investigative work of journalists like Ian McPhedran and Jeremy Kelly.

Readers of Hugh’s book will be shocked by the failures which led to the death of these three Australian heroes.

They’ll be even more shocked to read what Defence was willing to do, in its attempts to deny the families the answers, justice, and closure they were understandably so desperately searching for.

On ANZAC Day 2009, I visited Forward Patrol Base Mirwais in the Chora Valley.

I acknowledge David Savage here tonight. While serving his country with distinction, David was shockingly injured in an arguably avoidable incident not far from that base.

I had been keen to get “beyond the wire” to thank our troops for their service and their courage. I also wanted to see first-hand, the work of the training and mentoring teams.

I was fortunate to have Keith Pain VC with me. Keith of course, was part of an Australian Training Team in Vietnam. He was able to relate well to the boys and I sensed his presence was much appreciated by them. He’s a character.
I was always in awe of our troops and those who supported them in-country. Mixing with them was always an up-lifting experience. That is the positive memory from my visit to Mirwais.

But I also left the base concerned. First, I’d been a bit surprised by the extent to which our troops were living with their ANA counterparts. That of course changed after Hekmatullah’s attack. In the weeks following that tragic incident, barbed wire was erected to separate the ANA and Australian soldiers.
But two incidents weighed more heavily on my mind during my Chinook ride back to Tarin Kowt. Two events that caused me to question our decision to embed our troops with ANA Kandaks.

The first was a threat an ANA soldier made against me while I was on base. The second was information some of the boys on the ground shared me about the circumstances of the death of Corporal Matthew Hopkins.

Hopkins had been killed in a Taliban ambush while on patrol with ANA soldiers less than a month earlier. I was told that in the heat of battle, the ANA soldiers had gone missing in action. This was later confirmed by the Defence Inquiry Officer’s report.

While I asked questions, I regret now not making more of those two events. The decision to build capacity in the ANA and the ANP were taken on my watch.

It was part of our plan to get us out of an endless war in which we had done significantly good things, but a war we clearly couldn’t win. It was also a plan to give the new Afghan government the best chance of success and longevity.
We were assured the risks inherent in the mentoring team approach was “manageable”. Manageable is an inadequate word but one we must accept in war. But almost 20 percent of the boys we lost in Afghanistan died in green-on-blue attacks. More were wounded.

For anything more I could have done, possibly should have done, but didn’t do, I say sorry to all those so tragically affected.

Hugh, Janny, your book will achieve many things I feel sure. It will certainly ensure the loss of three Australians sons will not have been entirely in vain.

Lest We Forget.