A choice has been made to prosecute Ben Roberts-Smith and an Australian militant in Ukraine but not returning IDF soldiers involved in genocide. Andrew Brown reports.
This publication raised an uncomfortable question in February. It went unanswered. This week, the Australian government made that silence considerably harder to maintain.
On April 7, two Australians were arrested for what they did in foreign conflicts. Same day. Same country. Same federal police force.
Ben Roberts-Smith was taken off a flight at Sydney Airport by AFP officers and charged with five counts of war crime murder over the alleged killing of unarmed Afghan civilians between 2009 and 2012. He is the most decorated soldier this country has produced.
He faces life in prison.
The charges are the product of the Brereton inquiry, a process that ran for years, deployed 54 investigators through the Office of the Special Investigator, and consumed somewhere north of two hundred million dollars of public money.
Two hundred million.
To pursue one man and the broader culture of conduct he allegedly represented.
By nightfall the same day, a 25-year-old army reservist named Vincent Tong-Vuong Tran from Felixstow in Adelaide was in the Adelaide Magistrates Court. His offence was serving as a drone operator for Ukrainian forces from May 2025 until January this year, without federal authorisation.
AFP officers had already raided his home, taken his phone and laptop, and forensically examined the devices. Images on those devices allegedly placed him in a foreign conflict.
He was charged under section 115A of the Defence Act. Twenty years is the maximum sentence. The AFP noted, with some pride, that this was the first time anyone had been charged under this provision.
ISIS vs IDF. Selective justice and the fall of Australian law
So to be clear about what happened this week. Australia charged its most celebrated soldier with war crimes after one of the most expensive and exhaustive military investigations in the nation’s history.
And on the identical day it charged a young man from suburban Adelaide with the crime of operating a drone for a country Australia has given 1.7 billion dollars in assistance to, a country fighting for its survival against a Russian invasion Australia has publicly condemned.
Both men arrested. Both treated as threats to the legal order. Both processed with speed and thoroughness.
Now ask yourself who has not been processed.
Where are the IDF charges?
An estimated one thousand former and current soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces are living in Australia. Some of them were in Gaza. The International Court of Justice has found a plausible risk of genocide in that operation.
Not a suspicion. Not an allegation from a protest group.
A formal legal finding from the highest court on earth, accompanied by binding provisional measures. The International Criminal Court is separately pursuing war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from the same conflict.
Vincent Tran had his phone seized within months of returning to Australia. The AFP forensically examined it. They found what they were looking for.
Has a single returned IDF soldier had their phone examined?
Has one been called in for questioning? Has the AFP executed one search warrant? Has the Attorney General issued one referral?
Has anyone in the Albanese government commissioned a legal assessment of whether section 268 of the Criminal Code, the provision that covers genocide and war crimes and applies to Australian citizens regardless of which uniform they wore, has any relevance here?
The answer to every one of those questions is no.
In February, senior human rights lawyer Chris Sidoti stated publicly that Australians who served in Gaza could face criminal liability if genocide or war crimes are established, and that you do not need to have pulled a trigger for liability to attach.
Facilitation is enough. Knowing participation is enough.
The government did not dispute the legal analysis. It simply ignored it and moved on.
That was February. Then Roberts-Smith happened.
A choice of who matters
The Roberts-Smith prosecution and the Tran arrest on the same day make the government’s position toward returning IDF soldiers not just inconsistent but incoherent.
You cannot spend two hundred million dollars investigating your own special forces, arrest a reservist for flying Ukrainian drones, and then claim you have no framework or obligation to examine Australians who served in a military operation currently before two international courts.
The framework exists. Yesterday proved it works.
Anthony Albanese declined to comment on the Roberts-Smith matter, saying he would not discuss legal proceedings. He has maintained the same silence on the one thousand people from a different conflict who came home to no proceedings at all.
There is a word for the application of law that works in one direction and stops at a particular border. It is not justice. It is not complexity. It is not the careful navigation of alliance politics.
It is a choice about who matters and who does not.
The government should be asked that question directly, on the record, every day until it answers.
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Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist