181․ At page 67:
… but there's no point, um, beating around the bush in that regard. By that I mean the law was being habitually broken. And I don't mean, um, I mean the law, yeah, but it definitely comes down to it wasn't things I didn't like or things that were unethically, it was certainly – it's suspicious anyway as I said. I can't make that judgment but there were things that I believed needed to be looked at by either judges or, um, the High Court would be a good thing … I imagined, one of the things the prosecution will claim is, "Oh, well, you just weren't happy about the way your internal complaints went." But I – I refute that completely, in that I will intend to prove that the complaints that I made were never properly dealt with, never legally dealt with, forcing me, um, to consider further options, because they were either sidestepped or they were ignored or they were, a smoke screen was used. Anyway that's obviously a matter for the court.
182․ He described at pages 78–79 having prepared the IGADF Submission between May and August 2014:
… it took me till the end of two thousand and fourteen to write a detailed – so that – another August, so May, June, July, August, three – three or four months after I first saw the police in May, two thousand and fourteen, ah, that I finished, um, a very long document detailing all the – what I would call relatively small breaches of the law, because I'd written this to the Special Operations Command. But the point I was clearly trying to make was not about the illegal searches and the illegal investigations or that. But there was something very wrong in the Defence Force that, um, as I said, the first complaint was to … the AFP … it was about spending. So even from a spending point of view, doing investigations which had no – had no – had no genuine purpose but were just being done to window dress in order to make the minister or the press happy, I believe is illegal, because it's a waste of tax payers money and you couldn't – you couldn't get away with it – I'm sure you wouldn't get away with it as police officers. … And that was just a symptom of a – of a complete lack of leadership, because not only these investigations cost money, they cost lives, they cost people – as I was later to find out, in the JEDI [council] case, which was another symptom of a sick, a sick management policy where anything – anything would be done, and I mean that, you know, anything would be done by Defence in order to make themselves look good or the senior management look good and sacrifice the soldiers … but the documents which I saw with my own eyes, the documents which I took and the documents which I spent hours and hours of downloading purposely to show that the Defence Force habitually lied to the Australian public, which I believe is an offence, habitually lied to their own people. Habitually, um, destroyed the lives of their own soldiers, betrayed their own special forces operatives … the ADF knew they committed no crime, they were still sacrificed to the god of public relations and it just sickened me.
183․ Even taking into account the decline in Mr McBride's mental state following his return from Afghanistan, I do not accept that he held a belief that what he was doing was not a criminal offence. He was not such a bad lawyer as to have genuinely reached a legal conclusion along the lines expressed in his interview. Rather, he had a hope at the time that his actions would ultimately be vindicated in some way other than by being found to be legally correct. I consider that the statements he made to police at the time were reflective of a desire to justify his conduct in the context of having been charged and that they expressed a hope that there may be some legally plausible defence, but did not
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