Who pays

It reads like a fight between two politicians and a party, a cartoon, a demand it be deleted, a senator’s rebuke. Read against the rest of this case, it is not a personality clash. It is a machine, and the machine has already sent its bill to four people who never chose to be in the argument: a witness who did his legal duty, the reporters who spent years proving a hard truth, a court trying a man who has not yet been convicted of anything, and a public asked to accept that slurs are now how these arguments are conducted.

None of what follows is a new fact. Every figure and every quotation below has already been sourced elsewhere in this case; what this article adds is the desk’s own reading of what they add up to.

01A spat, supposedly

Strip away the personalities and what is left is a pattern this desk has seen before: political money and political language turned on the people who happen to be standing where a war crimes prosecution and an election campaign now overlap. One Nation ran a cartoon branding Andrew Hastie, the Liberal MP for Canning, a former SAS captain now sitting as an opposition frontbencher, a traitor, eight times, while campaigning in his own seat. Hastie is not a bystander in the underlying matter. He is one of 21 SAS veterans who gave evidence under subpoena in the defamation proceedings that examined war crimes allegations against Ben Roberts-Smith, litigation estimated to have cost up to A$25 million in all, the costs of the whole action rather than of either side alone, and that the newspapers who reported the allegations won ^{6 5}.

Four parties carry the cost of what has followed, and none of them are the ones fighting the political fight. The witness who was compelled to testify. The reporters and the masthead that spent years and millions proving the reporting was true. A court now trying a separate criminal matter that the political noise threatens to prejudice. And a public asked to treat name-calling as a substitute for argument. This article takes each in turn.

Correction, 7 October 2026. This section said the Roberts-Smith litigation “cost up to A$25 million to defend”, which put the whole figure on the newspapers’ side. The up to A$25 million is the reported estimate of what the case as a whole cost, as this case’s article “The writ” records; the sentence now says so. ⁵

02The witness’s bill

Andrew Hastie did not choose to be a witness. He was compelled: one of 21 SAS veterans required by subpoena to give evidence in the defamation litigation that examined the war crimes reporting. Testifying under subpoena is a legal duty, not a political act. The bill for doing it was a cartoon calling him a traitor, run eight times by a party campaigning against him in his own electorate.

Hastie’s own description of what that does is direct: “It’s a slur on me, it’s a slur on other veterans who have given under oath evidence.” The slur does not stop with him. It is aimed at anyone who might one day be asked to do what he did, give sworn evidence in a case that implicates powerful people, because the signal it sends is plain: testify, and you can be called a traitor for it, on a public platform, by people who face no such obligation themselves.

That is the witness’s bill, and it is not paid only by the witness. It is paid by the next veteran a court might need to hear from.

03The reporter’s bill

Proving the war crimes reporting true took years of litigation, in the most expensive defamation case in Australian history: the whole action is estimated to have cost up to A$25 million, a figure for the case as a whole, not the newspapers’ own bill. ⁵ The newspapers won. That is the price of doing the kind of journalism this case is built on: reporting a hard, contested, powerful-interest story and then being able to survive the legal response to it.

There is a general concept for what a defamation action can become when its practical effect, whatever its merits, is to impose cost, delay and fear on critics and reporters rather than simply to test a claim: a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP. Australia has no federal anti-SLAPP law; only the ACT has a limited public-participation statute, and it does not expressly cover defamation. This case is this desk’s illustration of what defending the truth can cost, whoever brings the writ, not a finding about any particular suit’s purpose; Roberts-Smith was entitled to sue, and nothing here says otherwise.

The practical question the A$25 million figure raises is not about one case. It is about the next one: which reporters, and which mastheads, can afford to survive the legal cost of reporting on the powerful, and which cannot.

Correction, 7 October 2026. This section said proving the reporting true “cost up to A$25 million”. That figure is the reported estimate of the cost of the whole defamation action, not of the newspapers’ defence alone; the sentence now says so. ⁵

04The court’s bill

Roberts-Smith now faces a criminal trial, five counts, which he denies. He is presumed innocent of those charges, and this article does not suggest otherwise. That presumption is not a technicality. It is what a fair trial is built on, for him as much as for anyone else.

Hastie’s own warning was about exactly that risk: “How are we ever going to have a fair trial with this sort of politicisation of an issue so central to who we are as a country?” He paired the warning with his own restraint, stating: “I urge every Australian to respect the rule of law, the criminal justice system, and the accused’s right to a presumption of innocence and a fair trial.”

A compelled witness, warning that a political fight over his own evidence could taint a criminal trial, is the court’s bill made plain. The presumption of innocence protects the accused. A cartoon war conducted around a live prosecution puts that presumption under pressure it was never meant to bear.

05The public’s bill

When “traitor” stands in for an argument, the casualty is not any one person’s reputation. It is trust in the institutions built to settle these questions properly: a court to try the criminal charges, a parliament to debate the politics, a free press to report both without paying an unaffordable price for it.

Senator Jacqui Lambie’s response named that cost directly. “Any veteran out there thinking about voting for One Nation or standing for them, I tell you what, you had better think twice,” she said, adding: “Attacking Andrew Hastie, a veteran that has served in our Afghanistan war, or any other veteran, is the lowest ebb you can possibly do.”

This is not the first time this case has found the same machine running under a different name. The next article in this series, “The pattern”, asks how old it is.

The witness, the reporter, the court, the public: four bills for one cartoon war, and none of the people paying them chose to be in the fight.

If it’s a rort, we cover it.