What Australia Actually Did

The question that has not been asked

In the six weeks between the twenty-eighth of February and the eighth of April, the Australian government took a series of decisions in response to the American and Israeli war against Iran. Most Australians do not know what those decisions were. The decisions were not debated in the parliament. They were not put to the Australian people. They were announced, where they were announced at all, in fragments that the ordinary news cycle absorbed and moved past. Some of them were not announced at all, and became public only through leaks to the Murdoch press. Taken together, they form a record that an Australian citizen has a right to see, and that a serving parliamentarian has an obligation to place before the people whose name was used to authorise it.

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This article is primarily a record of what was done, followed by a limited analysis of what that record appears to show. It is not a full argument about what should have been done. I have tried to present the facts as they are documented in credible open-source reporting across multiple outlets, and to distinguish clearly between what is established and what is disputed. All information set out below is drawn solely from publicly available reporting as at the date of writing. No classified material has been disclosed, and any subsequent correction to the public record would require corresponding correction to this article. Where a claim is contested, I have said so. Where the record is thin, I have said that too. The reader is asked not to accept my framing but to examine the evidence and draw their own conclusion.

The question that frames this examination is simple. In the past six weeks, has the Australian government acted as an independent partner in an alliance or as a subordinate actor whose decisions were shaped by pressures it did not choose and for which it is unable to give a coherent account? The question matters because the answer determines what kind of country Australia is currently being governed as, and whether the gap between the nation its citizens believe they live in and the nation its government is enacting on their behalf has grown to a point that requires response.

The sequence of events

On the twenty-eighth of February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated air strikes on Iran. The attack began during a period in which active negotiations were in progress. Iranian officials had been engaged in scheduled talks with American counterparts in the preceding days, with a further round of negotiations set for Geneva. Iran’s supreme leader and a number of senior figures on whose authority those negotiations were proceeding were killed in the Israeli decapitation strikes on his residential compound.

Within hours of the attack, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued a joint statement with Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles. The statement expressed support for the United States and Israeli strikes and declared that Australia stood with “the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression.” The statement was issued before the administration in Washington had itself settled on a coherent justification for the war, and before any independent Australian assessment of the action’s legality under international law could plausibly have been completed. It committed Australia to a public endorsement that could not be withdrawn once issued, and it was made without consulting the parliament, without briefing the opposition in any substantive way, and without informing the Australian public of what the government understood about why the war had been launched.

On the third of March, Iran struck the Al Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, where Australian personnel and infrastructure were stationed, as part of its retaliation against American and allied positions in the Gulf. This was the first point at which Australian personnel were physically targeted in the conflict. The deployment at Al Minhad was pre-existing, but the government’s response to the strike did not include any public reassessment of whether Australian personnel should remain in positions that had now become active military targets.

On the fourth of March, in international waters approximately nineteen nautical miles off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena was struck by a Mark 48 torpedo fired from the United States Navy submarine USS Charlotte. The Dena was returning to Iran from the International Fleet Review 2026 and the multinational naval exercise MILAN 2026, both hosted by the Indian Navy at Visakhapatnam. She had been an officially invited guest of the Indian Navy. She had been welcomed on her arrival in Visakhapatnam by a post from the Eastern Naval Command on the seventeenth of February describing the visit as reflecting “long-standing cultural links between the two nations.” Her crew had participated in the fleet review, in the multinational exercise, and in cultural visits to sites including the Taj Mahal. She had departed Visakhapatnam on the twenty-fifth of February, three days before the war began. She was approximately 1,700 nautical miles from Iran’s nearest coastline when she was attacked.

The Dena carried a crew of approximately 180 personnel. One torpedo struck and the vessel sank within two to three minutes. There is no public reporting of any search and rescue effort by the Charlotte following the strike. The Sri Lanka Navy, responding to a distress call, recovered 32 survivors. The Sri Lankan authorities subsequently recovered 87 bodies. Approximately 60 personnel remain unaccounted for.

Whether the Dena was armed at the moment of the attack is contested. Sri Lankan authorities and several regional analysts, including former Indian Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Arun Prakash and strategic affairs analyst Brahma Chellaney, stated that the vessel was operating in a post-exercise configuration and was unarmed or lightly armed in accordance with the protocols of the Indian fleet review. The United States Indo-Pacific Command denied that the vessel was unarmed. An analysis published by the United States Naval Institute concluded that the Dena was likely unarmed at the time of the attack, having expended its firepower during the multilateral exercise. It should be acknowledged that under the law of naval warfare, a warship of a belligerent state may constitute a lawful target regardless of the state of its magazines, and that the United States has asserted such a basis for the strike. The Walker framework does not rest on the contested legal characterisation of the attack itself. It rests on the Australian governmental response to an incident in which Australian personnel were physically present, which was to offer no public assessment, no expression of concern about the circumstances, and no acknowledgement that an event of this gravity warranted any Australian statement at all. What is documented in open-source reporting is that the vessel was returning home from a peaceful multilateral gathering, in international waters far from any active theatre of the war, and that it was struck by a nuclear-powered submarine against which, in practice, it had negligible capacity to defend itself.

On the sixth of March, Prime Minister Albanese confirmed, under questioning and not by proactive disclosure, that three Royal Australian Navy personnel had been aboard the USS Charlotte at the time the Dena was sunk. He stated that the Australian personnel were on board as part of a training rotation under the AUKUS security partnership. He stated that they had not participated in any offensive action, and suggested that they had not been at the consoles or in the control room during the engagement. Neither of these claims can be independently verified. What is documented is that Australian naval personnel were physically present aboard the vessel that conducted the attack, and that their presence was made possible by the training arrangements entered into under AUKUS.

On the tenth of March, the Australian government deployed air-to-air missiles, an advanced warplane, and approximately 85 personnel to the United Arab Emirates. The deployment was announced as a defensive posture adjustment. The relationship between this deployment and any specific Iranian threat to Australian personnel or interests was not explained.

In mid-March, approximately 90 Special Air Service Regiment commandos were deployed to the Gulf region. This deployment was not announced. It became public only on the third of April, through a leak to the Murdoch press. When asked about the deployment at a media doorstop, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles declined to confirm or deny, stating that the government does not comment on the operations of its special forces. The Australian public was therefore not informed at the time that elite military personnel had been committed to a war zone in circumstances in which their role, their rules of engagement, and their exposure to combat had not been disclosed.

Throughout this period, the Trump administration publicly criticised Australia for what it characterised as insufficient support. In a cabinet meeting in March, the President stated that “Australia was not great. I was a little surprised by Australia.” In a subsequent post on Truth Social, he declared that the United States did not need the help of anyone, including Australia. At no point during the war did the Australian government publicly comment on the legality of the American and Israeli attacks under international law. When the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson appeared on ABC Television’s 7:30 programme on the nineteenth of March and accused the United States and Israel of terrorist acts, the Australian government’s response was to reiterate that questions of legality were matters for the United States and Israel to address.

On the nineteenth of March, on the ABC’s 7:30 programme, the Prime Minister was asked about the war. He described the original objectives of the war as stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, which he said had been “clearly achieved.” He added that the second objective of “degrading the opportunity that Iran has for engaging in military action” had also been met, and that the third objective was “regime change.” The original justifications issued by the Trump administration had shifted between these and several others across the opening weeks of the war. The Prime Minister did not note the shifts. He presented the justifications in the form in which they had most recently been offered in Washington, as if they had been stable from the beginning.

What the record shows

The record I have set out above is not an interpretation. It is a sequence of documented events. Each item is supported by credible reporting in multiple sources, and I have tried where possible to note the points at which reporting diverges. A reader who doubts any specific item can verify it independently. The question is what the record, taken as a whole, shows about the conduct of the Australian government.

The first thing it shows is that the government endorsed the war before it had any basis on which to assess the war’s justification. The joint statement was issued within hours of the attack. No independent intelligence assessment could have been completed in that window. No legal analysis of the action’s compatibility with international law could have been produced, or at least none has been disclosed. No consultation with allies or with the parliament could have occurred. The simplest inference from the timing and sequence is that the endorsement was issued on the basis of an alliance practice in which endorsements are pre-committed, rather than on the basis of independent Australian assessment of the evidence. That is an inference, not a documented fact. It is, however, the explanation most consistent with what is publicly known about the sequence, and the government has offered no alternative account.

The second thing it shows is that the government’s account of what was done has required continuous revision as events forced disclosure. The presence of Australian personnel on the USS Charlotte was acknowledged only after leaks forced acknowledgement. The SAS deployment was acknowledged only after leaks forced acknowledgement. The UAE deployment was announced in terms that did not connect it to any specific threat or objective. The Prime Minister’s account of the war’s justifications has tracked the Trump administration’s shifting explanations rather than offering any independent Australian assessment. In each case, the government has been a step behind disclosure. The operational-security justification for non-disclosure of special forces movements is legitimate, and the government will invoke it. What that justification does not explain is why the original political endorsement was issued within hours while questions of legality, purpose, and Australian strategic interest have been declined for six weeks.

The third thing it shows is that the Australian government has declined, at every opportunity, to make any public statement about the legality of the American and Israeli conduct under international law. This is not a small matter. Australia is a signatory to the United Nations Charter. The Charter prohibits the use of force against a sovereign state except in self-defence or with Security Council authorisation. Neither condition has been established on any publicly disclosed basis, and the legal arguments offered by the United States and Israel for anticipatory self-defence are regarded by many international law scholars as inconsistent with the Charter. A state of sixty years’ standing as a member of the international rules-based order declined for six weeks to offer any judgement on whether the war was legal. Norway’s Prime Minister issued a statement on the morning the attacks began describing the strikes as inconsistent with international law. Canada and New Zealand issued more cautious statements expressing concern. Australia said nothing.

The fourth thing it shows is that when the Australian government’s conduct was criticised by the Trump administration for being insufficient, the subsequent pattern of Australian deployments expanded rather than contracted. The deployment of the SAS in mid-March followed a period of public American complaint about inadequate Australian support. Temporal sequence does not prove causation, and defence planners may point to prior planning cycles as the explanation. What the sequence does show is that the direction of the Australian response to American pressure was toward further commitment rather than toward re-examination.

The fifth and most consequential thing the record shows is that Royal Australian Navy personnel were physically present aboard the vessel that committed an act which, even on the most charitable reading of international maritime law, raises serious legal and moral questions. The attack on the Dena sank a ship that had been a guest at an Indian multilateral exercise and was returning peacefully to Iran 1,700 nautical miles from the nearest theatre of active hostilities. The submarine that fired the torpedoes left the scene without attempting search and rescue. Eighty-seven crew members were recovered as bodies. Approximately sixty remain missing. The claim that the Australian personnel on board were not at the consoles, even if accurate, does not alter the fact of their presence. The training arrangements that put them there were entered into under AUKUS, an agreement the Australian parliament was told would strengthen Australian sovereignty and contribute to regional stability. In the specific operation of the fourth of March, the arrangement instead placed Australian personnel as material witnesses to the sinking of an unarmed or lightly armed vessel returning from a peaceful multilateral exercise.

What it means

I do not offer this record in order to argue that Australia should have done something different. That is a separate conversation, and it belongs to the Australian people rather than to me. I offer it because the Australian people have not been told what their government did in their name, and a democracy cannot function when its citizens are kept in ignorance of the actions taken under their sovereign authority. The first requirement of self-government is knowledge of what one’s government has done. Without that knowledge, every subsequent political choice is made on false ground.

What I can say, within the discipline of the analytical framework this Briefing has used across the preceding series, is that the record described above is a textbook instance of the sovereign deficit the diagnostic series named. The government acted not on the basis of independent Australian judgement about Australian interests, but on the basis of pressures arriving from Washington and the expectations of an alliance relationship that has been calibrated over decades to prevent the exercise of independent judgement from occurring. The endorsement within hours was not the product of a deliberative process. The absence of public legal assessment was not an oversight. The concealment of deployments was not an accident of communications. Each of these is what the sovereign deficit looks like when it is applied to the actual conduct of a government under pressure. The pattern is consistent. The analysis is not speculative. The framework was built before these events occurred, and the events have fitted themselves into the framework without requiring any adjustment.

This is not a partisan observation. The same pattern of deference was visible under the previous Coalition government, which signed the original AUKUS agreement in 2021 with the same absence of meaningful parliamentary scrutiny, the same treatment of alliance expectations as a substitute for independent Australian assessment, and the same conflation of subordinate behaviour with strategic seriousness. The Liberal opposition has offered no meaningful critique of the current government’s conduct during the Iran war. The Coalition’s defence spokesman James Paterson has called for greater Australian military support for the war, which is to say that his disagreement with the government is that it has not been subordinate enough to Washington. The problem is not that Labor is insufficiently conservative or that the Coalition is insufficiently progressive. The problem is that both major parties have, over several decades, co-created a strategic posture calibrated to an assumption about American judgement that the events of the past six weeks have shown to be untenable, and neither of them is currently capable of raising the question that the events demand be raised.

What comes next

The Available Remedies series, which began this week with an article on the upstream principle, is the longer work that will attempt to examine what might actually be done about the conditions the record above reveals. That work is slow by design. It is slow because the question of what to do about structural failure cannot be answered honestly in a single article, and because any answer that could be offered quickly would almost certainly be wrong.

But the work cannot begin from a false starting point. It cannot begin from the pretence that the conduct I have described above was not conduct that the Australian people had a right to know about, or that the gap between what was done and what was said about what was done was somehow narrower than it is, or that the sovereign deficit the diagnostic series named in the abstract was not now visible in the documented record of the past six weeks. The starting point has to be an honest reckoning with what has actually happened. That is what this article is. Not an argument about the future, but a statement about the present that has to be made before the argument about the future can be trusted.

What I have written here will be uncomfortable for readers who would prefer that it not be true. I understand the discomfort. I share it. I do not take any satisfaction in setting out a record that implicates a government in my own country in conduct that I find, as a citizen and as a parliamentarian and as a doctor, profoundly troubling. But the obligation to name what has happened is not reduced by the discomfort of naming it. A country cannot reform what it refuses to see. The first task, before any remedy can be examined, is to see.

This is the moment when any citizen who, having seen the record, believes it matters, has an obligation to stand up and be counted. Not in performative solidarity with any faction, but in honest acknowledgement of the facts, and in the willingness to hold open the question of what the facts require of us. The question is uncomfortable. It is also unavoidable. The coming series will examine what response is available to a country that has arrived at this point. For this week, the task is simply to place the record before the reader, and to ask what the reader sees when they look at it.

This article is part of the Walker Briefing, published at bfwalker.substack.com. It should be read alongside “The War That Proved the Diagnosis” published previously, and as a companion to the new series, The Available Remedies, which examines structural responses to the conditions described.

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