Four Corners fallout (II): FOI nuggets, including a passionate speech from Director Anderson

Memorial Meeting of 11 March 2025

Defending Country heard from sources that, soon after the Four Corners program, a meeting at the Memorial had discussed the program. We asked under FOI for 'Minutes, decisions and other documentation from any meeting of the Memorial Council, management or staff, held following the Four Corners broadcast "Sacrifice" of 10 March 2025 and dealing with the fallout from that broadcast'.

The response to our claim came to us on 16 April. It was the Minutes of Meeting 277 of the Development Project Integrated Management Team, held on 11 March at 10 am, the morning after Four Corners. It was heavily redacted, because the meeting also dealt with other matters irrelevant to our inquiry. There was this, however, under 'Target Actions':

Four Corners

o Director sitting with response (major inaccuracies in their report) [sic? DC]

o AWM to continue putting out positive stories, focusing on truth, won’t be starting fight with Four Corners

o Attack on WH particularly disappointing and no basis of fact

WH is Wayne Hitches, Executive Director, Development, at the Memorial, who was mentioned at some length on Four Corners and in the Ombudsman's report. The Ombudsman concluded:

In light of the above, we consider that, even without being invited to participate in an interview, Mr Hitches received a fair opportunity to respond to the allegation made against him in the episode.

For these reasons, the Ombudsman has not found any breach of the Editorial Standards on fair and honest dealing in light of this concern [of the Memorial's. DC].

Director Anderson speaks to all Memorial staff

Also released was part of an address by Director Anderson. It seems to have been delivered separately from the meeting referred to above.

All Staff Address

To those of you silly enough to have watched Four Corners on Monday night, welcome to the abomination!

I stand here, on the lowest point of the Southern/Main Entrance.

On the 15 December 2022, members of the 2nd Commando Regiment travelled from Sydney to Canberra to place their Regimental and Company challenge coins in the foundation beneath the stage of this auditorium.

That’s how I know what we’re doing is right. Our veterans wanted to be in the very foundation of the development.

Please think of that every time you use this auditorium.

But speaking of Four Corners, I sent an email around late last week to forewarn you it was on.

I value freedom of speech and the contestability of ideas. And I’ll return to that in a moment.

I don’t value programs on the national broadcaster that fail to adhere to the ABC’s published editorial standards or right of reply.

Four Corners reported as fact “In a statement to Four Corners, Mr Hitches did not answer our question as to why he did not fill in the declaration (of a conflict of interest)”.

Wayne was not asked for an interview or given a right of reply in the program. He met the reporter on site while he was doing a piece to camera but Wayne was not approached for interview.

This below answer was supplied by Wayne in November, is relevant, and was not used in the edit, allegedly against editorial standards of the ABC and right of reply.

Answer:

The $130m procurement referred to for Anzac Hall (committed at the end of 2022) was well after the 1 year APS requirement to declare a potential conflict of interest

For the Early Works contract that Lendlease tendered within the first 12 months on my employment, I recused myself from the tender assessment panel. I was part of the approval process once the chair of the panel recommended an assessment outcome that then went via me to the Director, and the Minister, prior to awarding Lendlease (fully documented assessment was accepted as clear Value for Money)

[That was part of Mr Hitches' statement. The ABC placed the full statement on the Four Corners webpage, as the Ombudsman's report noted. DC]

Let me be very clear. The ANAO [Australian National Audit Office] audit found NO conflicts of interest by Wayne or anybody else. It had over 2 terrabytes [sic] of data and every document produced and email sent in this place from 2017. It found no conflicts of interest, no evidence of corruption, and no malfeasance – their words.

Instead, the ANAO Audit – and ALL of this is on the public record – found the Memorial was largely effective across the three tests – procurement, project management and contract management – and went a step further to assess the project represents value for money for the Commonwealth. We were asked – and we have – strengthened our systems around record keeping and the frequency with which we seek probity advice.

We are lucky to have someone of Wayne’s skills, experience and, above all ethics, running the project. He has saved the Commonwealth tens of millions of dollars, and will be responsible for enhancing a world class Memorial with world class spaces. Look around!

I will be writing formally to the Managing Director of the ABC restating the above, and highlighting a number of other inadequacies in the report, including dubbing construction sound and vision over the Last Post Ceremony to imply we put the construction work ahead of the Memorial’s signature daily commemorative activity.

We all know construction stops for the LPC – and indeed most other commemorations – and it was both mischievous and hurtful to those we seek to honour, and the professionalism of our development team and CVE staff to suggest otherwise.

The speech goes on but the rest is redacted, deemed not relevant to our FOI claim.

David Stephens

(Full disclosure: the author of this post had telephone and email contact with the Four Corners team but was not interviewed to camera.)

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See also Four Corners fallout (I): ABC Ombudsman boots the War Memorial into touch

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‍Related material: Four Corners transcript extracts. ANAO report and related material (to provide context for the Director's remarks above).

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Photo credit: A demonstration led by the Medical Association for Prevention of War, outside the War Memorial on Remembrance Day, 2019 (supplied).

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