I don’t want to be here.” Andrew Hastie was a reluctant witness in the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation case. Hastie appeared only under force of subpoena in 2022: compelled to attend court, obliged to swear an oath, and to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. His was an unhappy (of many) visit to the witness box.
But it brought with it an additional scrutiny: he was, at the time of the case, not only a member of parliament, but the assistant minister for defence. Of the dozens of former SAS soldiers compelled to give evidence to the defamation case – many resentfully – Hastie was the only one named and photographed, the only one not afforded the protection of being a “sensitive witness”. In his judgment, Justice Anthony Besanko was approbative: “Mr Hastie was an honest and straightforward witness.” Three times, in fact, he characterised the former officer, now MP, as “straightforward” in his testimony.
Of Hastie’s former comrade who brought the defamation case – Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith – Besanko was equally forthright, but less complimentary. Hanson, personally, said she would prefer to call Hastie a “wanker”. Membership of “the regiment” – the SAS – is famously clandestine.
Roberts-Smith and Hastie are perhaps its best-known former members. The pair’s service, while contemporaneous, was not tightly aligned. Hastie, an officer, has written he remembers his first encounter with Roberts-Smith – the corporal ordering officer candidates into push-ups in a dead-of-night training exercise.
He told the federal court there was a “widespread view” across the SAS that Roberts-Smith was a bully. Before the federal court, Hastie was asked to testify as to his recollection of an operation on a compound in a village known as Syachow in October 2012. It was his only operation in Afghanistan alongside Roberts-Smith.
It was alleged before the federal court that on that mission Roberts-Smith ordered a subordinate soldier – known as Person 66 – to execute an unarmed prisoner in a so-called “blooding” incident. Hastie did not shy away from recounting details of the event in his testimony. Person 66, too, was subpoenaed to appear in court.
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