This book brings together key academics and practitioners from across Australia to provide a comprehensive reflection on the under-researched area of Australian military disciplinary law. It covers a broad range of topics on the nature of military discipline law, legacy issues arising from its historical origins, contemporary challenges regarding its application in the domestic and international domains, and likely future directions.
The contributors are all qualified Australian lawyers with varied backgrounds as civilians, reservists and current and former permanent Australian Defence Force (ADF) legal officers. The balance of authorship ensures that the collection as a whole reflects both the internal operation and culture of the ADF, and provides an independent, critical perspective on it.
The issue of military discipline in both domestic and international settings has received extensive and ongoing media and public attention in the last decade. The public interest in the topic was apparent between 2013 and 2017, when investigations of the ‘Skype’ and ‘Jedi Council’ scandals revealed that male ADF members had been producing and sharing online footage of sexual encounters with women without the consent of the women involved, and accompanied by sexist and disrespectful commentary. The implications of discipline on overseas military operations were brought to the public attention in 2016, when the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force commissioned an inquiry into allegations that members of the Special Operations Task Group in Afghanistan breached the Law of Armed Conflict between 2005 to 2016.
