The Footage.

What everyone is arguing about, it turns out, is the camera.

Ben Roberts-Smith landed at Sydney Airport on the sixth of April and was met, as pre-arranged, with media notified in advance and a Nine News crew positioned and ready, by Australian Federal Police officers and a videographer. His daughters were there because he was arriving on a flight and his daughters had come to meet him. The arrest was orderly. It occurred in the open air of a federal jurisdiction. Nobody broke a door.

There are sensible reasons to film an arrest. They are mostly practical, and the AFP would be within its rights to cite them. You get a record of what happened, which is useful in an era when everyone else is also filming and some of those films get edited, recontextualised, or simply misremembered. You reduce the scope for later dispute about what was said, how the subject was handled, whether officers behaved appropriately. The camera protects the process. It may also, eventually, become evidence. This is what police cameras are for.

Whether you then distribute the footage to news organisations before any proceedings have concluded is an entirely different question. Evidence, generally speaking, does not require a premiere.

The AFP's internal critics, and there appear to have been several, called it grandstanding. They were probably right about what it was, even if the word understates the problem. The issue isn't vanity. The issue is what the footage, once released, does to the thing it was supposed to protect. Footage distributed before a trial has a way of becoming the trial, in the public's estimation. It seeds the argument at exactly the moment the argument was supposed to hand over to something more rigorous. Every opinion formed from watching the arrest at Sydney Airport is an opinion formed in the absence of a cross-examination, a standard of proof, a judge. The footage doesn't determine guilt or innocence. But it shapes the atmosphere in which those questions will nominally be decided - and atmospheres are not nothing.

The decorated soldier, the public spectacle, the choreographed humiliation. This reading requires some effort to sustain. Airports are not doorsteps. The AFP did not break a window. The daughters were present because they came to meet a flight, not because the AFP arranged the scene around them. What distressed the people making this argument was not, on closer inspection, the daughters. It was the camera. And what the camera's existence implies, in that reading, is that someone might eventually have to answer for something in a setting where the answer is required to be honest.

In a functional justice system, this is unremarkable. It has been made remarkable only by comparison with places where such requirements have recently become optional, or negotiable, or pardoned away.

Australia's courts still require people to answer questions under oath, before a judge, to a standard of proof that exists independently of any political calculation. The outcome of the Roberts-Smith case will be decided by people whose professional obligation is to apply the law without regard for either camp's feelings about the man. The culture war portion of this argument, hero or war criminal, the rival certainties loudly held by people with no access to the evidence, is, procedurally speaking, over. It has been superseded by a process designed to render it irrelevant. The tragedy of the pre-released footage is that it extends the culture war past the point where it was supposed to stop. It keeps the argument in the public realm, and out of the hands of the people whose job it is to settle it.

The AFP, in pre-positioning its camera and its media contacts, behaved, just a little, like the thing Australia is not supposed to be. Not corrupt. Not politically motivated in any obvious sense. But theatrically inclined in a way that sits uneasily alongside the solemnity of what it was setting in motion.

The argument about the camera will continue. It has mostly been, from the beginning, an argument about something else entirely.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.