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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has backed the governing council of the Australian War Memorial after its members effectively overturned a judging panel’s decision to give a major literary award to a book on war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith.
The judges chose veteran journalist Chris Masters’ Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes as the 2024 winner of the memorial’s Les Carlyon Literary Prize in December that year.
But six months later, on the basis there were inconsistencies between different versions of the criteria for the award, the council reinstated a rule that the prize could only be won by first-time authors, disqualifying Masters.
Disgraced soldier Ben Roberts-Smith appealed all the way to the High Court and lost in his defamation case.Credit: Sam Mooy
Asked on Sunday whether he still had faith in the council, which includes former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott, medical entrepreneur Glenn Keys and former Labor MP Warren Snowdon, Albanese said: “Yes. [Former Labor leader] Kim Beazley’s the chair there, a great West Australian.”
Revelations in this masthead by Masters and investigative reporter Nick McKenzie that Roberts-Smith was complicit in the murder of four unarmed men in Afghanistan, which have now been confirmed to a civil standard, have been deeply uncomfortable for the War Memorial.
Its former chairman, billionaire businessman and Seven network owner Kerry Stokes, bankrolled a substantial portion of Roberts-Smith’s litigation. When the disgraced soldier initially lost in court, the memorial added only three paragraphs of context about the case to a plaque next to a display of his uniform.
Flawed Hero, the book at the centre of the controversy.
Roberts-Smith sued the reporters and this masthead for defamation over the reporting of his war crimes. His appeal was thrown out by the High Court this month.
Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh said the memorial was independent but his office had sought an explanation on what had happened with the prize after The Guardian reported the issue on Friday.
“[The War Memorial] are running that process, and it’s now concluded, and they communicated that with people that were involved in that competition, and they’ll keep doing these education programs in various different ways,” Keogh said.
A spokeswoman for the memorial said advertisements for the 2024 prize were inconsistent and some excluded a rule requiring that entrants be new authors.
“When this was brought to council’s attention in June 2025, they unanimously restated their intention that the award remain for emerging writers and were not privy to the shortlist or longlist,” the spokeswoman said.
“The memorial will be writing to all entrants to apologise for the delay and any inconvenience,” she said. “Entries already submitted by emerging authors for their first major publication relating to Australian military history, social military history or war history will remain under consideration in any future process.”
The spokeswoman said the council was conducting a review to ensure the integrity of future competitions.
The Guardian reported that the memorial had allowed established authors to enter the prize since 2022 and the judging panel was unaware of any reversion to the previous rules.
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The head of the judging panel, Karl James, wrote to memorial director Matt Anderson after the council reinstated the first-time-author criteria, warning that failing to award the prize to Masters risked “greater reputational damage … than awarding it to a controversial winner”. The memorial did not make an exception.
In an opinion piece for this masthead, Masters writes that his relationship with the memorial – which he admired as an institution that could show how war brings out the best and worst in people – deteriorated as Stokes defended Roberts-Smith.
And he writes of the council’s decision to kibosh the judges’ decision to award him the Carlyon prize: “How is that an Aussie fair go, to change the rules at half-time?”
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