Impunity still has some limits

Ben Roberts-Smith has finally been arrested for war crimes.

If our laws and institutions are to have any meaning, then serious breaches, egregious breaches, high-profile and horrifying breaches must have repercussions.

The seeming impunity of Ben Roberts-Smith, who has only today been arrested for war crimes the Brereton Report detailed over five years ago, has stood as a very stark reminder that the story we like to tell ourselves about the rule of law, about consequences for the flouting of norms, is shaky at best.

It feels queasily quaint today, in an age of Epstein and Gaza, and I honestly don't know where to place it in relation to the omnicidal expansion on fossil fuels on a planet rapidly approaching catastrophic climate tipping points... but I so clearly remember reading the Brereton Report when it came out, in the midst of COVID lock-downs and feeling sick to my core.

Not ever having been one to glorify soldiers or war - far from it - the matter-of-fact reporting of an Australian SAS officer kicking an unarmed, bound old man down a cliff and, finding him still not dead, ordering a junior to shoot him... I shudder at the thought.

It was known at the time that this story referred to Ben Roberts-Smith. He has now been formally charged over it. And yet, for years, he continued to be feted and celebrated.

This called into question the very foundations of the rule of law in Australia. The blatant exercise of power - not least by Kerry Stokes - and the extraordinary claims to impunity involved in suing publications for defamation over reporting the story just beggar belief. The violent supremacist implications of the act and the justifications and the lawsuits...

I don't want to waste a lot more precious time and energy on this truly reprehensible man. But I want to make a couple of quick reflections.

The first is that his behaviour reflects not strength but deep weakness somewhere at his core.

Hannah Arendt wrote that "Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent." Violence is what men (mostly) and governments do when they have no other way of feeling powerful. They have no authority that can be followed. They have no capacity to work in concert with others to achieve anything. So they resort to violence.

It backfires. Violence destroys power, as Arendt articulated.

For Ben Roberts-Smith, the power he thought he could exercise with impunity is now, finally, crumbling.

The second, however, is the warning.

Ben Roberts-Smith's impunity was emblematic of the grander collapse of the system.

The fact that his impunity has now come to an end should in no way be taken to suggest that the systemic collapse is not still a thing.

There's a lot further to go.