‘BRS is kind of like a high priest’: How the soldier split the Libs

Ben Roberts-Smith has split the Liberal Party.

The party’s key leadership challenger, Andrew Hastie, has fallen out with his one-time mentor, Tony Abbott, after the former prime minister publicly backed the accused war criminal.

Hastie now faces a mounting campaign against him from conservative media outlets, his own party base and Roberts-Smith’s inner circle. He has lost donors and been ostracised by colleagues.

“Tony Abbott, that relationship, I’d say is broken now,” a source close to Hastie tells The Saturday Paper. “If your so-called friends can’t come alongside in the most raw, fundamental question of all, then what’s tax policy or macroeconomic policy?”

It is understood that the relationship with Abbott was already under strain after Abbott privately pressured Hastie to make way for Angus Taylor in the February leadership ballot. Abbott is now expected to put up his hand to become the party’s federal president.

Former leader Sussan Ley’s subsequent resignation from parliament triggered today’s byelection in her old regional New South Wales seat of Farrer, where One Nation is using Roberts-Smith’s face on corflutes alongside the slogan, “He fought for us. One Nation stands with him.”

Farrer, which Ley held for 25 years, is widely expected to fall to either independent candidate Michelle Milthorpe or One Nation’s David Farley, a result that would strip the Liberals of yet another lower house seat, leaving the Coalition with just 42 seats in the House of Representatives.

A One Nation victory would also hand the insurgent far-right party a platform to wage exactly the kind of culture war Hastie has been pushing back against since Roberts-Smith was arrested on April 7 and charged with five counts of the war crime of murder, relating to the Victoria Cross winner’s alleged killing of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012.

Hastie and Roberts-Smith are not strangers. Both served in the SAS, and Hastie, an officer who deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 with the regular army and again in 2013 with the SAS, was among 21 former special forces soldiers subpoenaed in Roberts-Smith’s failed defamation case against The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Hastie told the federal court that within the SAS there was a “fairly well-established rumour” that Roberts-Smith had kicked an unarmed prisoner off a cliff in Afghanistan. He also said Roberts-Smith was viewed as a bully and that although he had once held him in high esteem he was no longer “proud” of the soldier.

Roberts-Smith’s subsequent appeal was thrown out by the full bench of the Federal Court of Australia. The High Court later refused to grant Roberts-Smith special leave to appeal against that decision, which held that he had been proved to a civil standard to have committed war crimes.

Last year, when Hastie was considered a likely candidate for the Liberal leadership, Ben Roberts-Smith’s mother wrote to dozens of Coalition MPs warning them that Hastie was “not fit” to lead the party. She amassed a 39-page dossier relating to his apparent betrayals of her son.

“You should be alarmed at the attachments to this email,” she wrote. “The word document has only a fraction of what harm Andrew Hastie has done to the Liberal Party and to others including our family.”

Hastie may now be called to testify again when Roberts-Smith’s case comes to trial, which is unlikely to take place until after the next federal election, due by May 2028.

“He had Peter Khalil, the Labor member for Wills, call, for crying out loud. He had two British MPs get in contact – more than the entire parliamentary Liberal Party.”

Hastie issued a statement two days after Roberts-Smith’s arrest.

“As a qualified member of the SAS, I was present on one of the operational missions in 2012 that was examined by the Federal Court. I gave testimony under oath, as required by law,” Hastie said.

“Mr Roberts-Smith is now facing criminal charges in relation to this operational mission, so it is possible that I will be called as a witness to this trial. 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. Therefore, I will not prejudice this trial by making any further comment.”

Roberts-Smith, 47, has vowed to fight all charges and has consistently denied the allegations against him.

Hastie’s rupture with Abbott is just one front in what people close to Hastie describe as a broad collapse of Hastie’s conservative support base, including the support of conservative media outlets such as Sky News, The Spectator and The Australian.

Many longstanding donors and supporters have also turned against Hastie in recent weeks, prompting him to abandon his traditional end of financial year fundraising drive on the basis that it would be futile.

“His political base has been shredded,” says one Hastie supporter.

The backlash against Hastie intensified over the Anzac Day weekend, when Sarah Matulin, Roberts-Smith’s current girlfriend, branded Hastie a “traitor” in a comment on Instagram.

Bruce Lehrmann, the former Liberal staffer found by a civil court to have raped his colleague Brittany Higgins, also weighed in on Hastie’s Instagram feed, posting that Hastie’s “betrayal of BRS won’t be forgotten”.

Hastie’s supporters detail a striking isolation among the federal parliamentary Liberal Party, with only a handful of his colleagues reaching out in the weeks following his public statement acknowledging that he may be called as a witness in Roberts-Smith’s criminal trial.

“He had Peter Khalil, the Labor member for Wills, call, for crying out loud. He had two British MPs get in contact – more than the entire parliamentary Liberal Party,” says a source close to Hastie, adding that the silence is partly based on fear. “If Anzac is the last bit of civic religion left, then BRS is kind of like a high priest, so they’re scared of the consequences of going up against him.”

Hastie has also found himself in what sources close to him describe as a coordinated online misinformation campaign being amplified by prominent media personalities such as Karl Stefanovic, the co-host of the Nine Network’s breakfast show Today, with long-time donors and email subscribers cutting their ties on the basis of what they have heard and read online.

The defections sting in part because Hastie was the only Western Australian Liberal to increase his vote at last year’s election, recording a 5.35 per cent swing towards him in his seat of Canning.

At the same time, sources close to Hastie say they fear mining magnate Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person, with a fortune estimated at $40 billion, will fund a campaign against him in his seat.

Rinehart publicly backed the accused war criminal after his arrest, saying she didn’t understand the justification for spending “more than $300 million to try for years to bring SAS veterans, who have served our country, towards criminal proceedings, and most recently the arrest of Ben”.

Kerry Stokes, the billionaire Western Australian media proprietor who bankrolled Roberts-Smith’s failed defamation case against Nine newspapers but who has remained silent since his arrest, is now understood to have come to a sort of understanding with Hastie.

“Andrew has always been respectful to Kerry. He has never sought to damage him,” says a member of Hastie’s camp, adding that “Kerry is 85 and he has been badly burned through this whole ordeal.”

Hastie is understood to reserve particular animus for One Nation. He is believed to view Hanson as “MAGA first”, referring to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, with her embrace of Roberts-Smith only hardening Hastie’s contempt for her and One Nation.

Following Roberts-Smith’s arrest, Hanson said she remained steadfast in her support for the accused war criminal.

“Ben, his immediate and broader defence family, need the Australian people’s support right now and I will not abandon him like so many other politicians,” she said on the day of his arrest. “Ben was disgracefully arrested in front of his twin 15-year-old girls.”

A source close to Hastie says he is particularly offended by attempts to politicise the criminal process. “People have successfully made it a culture war rather than a question of truth and justice.”

Despite the mounting pressure, Hastie is understood to feel empowered by what he has seen and heard over the past month, telling supporters the experience has been “incredibly liberating”. He no longer feels he has to curry favour with conservative media outlets or the Liberal Party’s ageing membership.

“To be free of their influence he feels is liberating,” says one source close to Hastie. “It’s a clean slate. Blue sky.”

The depth of the public divide over Ben Roberts-Smith was revealed this week in a Sky News Pulse/YouGov poll, which found that voters remained split on whether the accused war criminal should be stripped of his Victoria Cross if he is convicted. According to the poll, 38 per cent of voters said he should lose the medal, 44 per cent said he should keep it, and 18 per cent were undecided.

A majority of Australians aged 18 to 34 – 52 per cent – said Roberts-Smith should forfeit the Victoria Cross if found guilty. Among those aged 65 and over, just 20 per cent agreed, with 65 per cent saying he should keep the honour regardless of any verdict.

The poll’s ideological faultlines were equally pronounced, with 60 per cent of Coalition supporters saying Roberts-Smith should keep the Victoria Cross even if convicted, a view shared by nearly three quarters of One Nation voters.

Support for stripping the honour was strongest among Greens voters, at 69 per cent, while almost half of all Labor voters preferred removing the cross.

Among those who chose their words most carefully following Roberts-Smith’s arrest was former prime minister John Howard, who said Roberts-Smith’s arrest would “tug at the heartstrings of millions of Australians”. He had previously described Roberts-Smith as “the modern personification of the Anzac tradition”.

Howard stopped short of the support offered by Abbott and Rinehart, noting that one of Australia’s core values was the rule of law, and that Roberts-Smith was entitled to the presumption of innocence.

Hastie appears to have noticed.

“John Howard, his statement was quite long and meandering for someone who’s pretty to the point,” says a Hastie confidant. “But there was a line about the rule of law — no one is exempt from it. That’s what we focused on.”

The Roberts-Smith case has exposed faultlines that will not close before the next election, between veterans and officers, within the conservative media ecosystem and between those who see a war hero and those who see an alleged war criminal.

Hastie has chosen his side. What that does to his position in his party is another question entirely.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
May 9, 2026 as “‘BRS is kind of like a high priest’: How the soldier split the Libs”.

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