Appointment Without Accountability: Jon White, the ACT DPP and the Long Shadow of a Political Prosecution

Jon White has been appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory. In the ordinary course of events, such an appointment would pass without comment from this platform. Judges are appointed. The machinery of justice turns. We are expected to extend goodwill and assume competence. But there are moments when silence becomes complicity, and this is one of them.

Jon White was the Director of Public Prosecutions for the ACT when I was prosecuted on sixteen charges – charges I can describe without equivocation as racially motivated, politically driven, and built upon a fabricated document. I was acquitted on all sixteen counts. The result was not close. It was not a matter of the jury splitting the difference or finding some middle ground between the prosecution’s case and the truth. It was 16-0. A complete and total vindication.

In the years since that acquittal, there has been zero accountability from the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions for the decision to run that case. There has been a serial lack of accountability from the Australian Federal Police for the decision to charge me in the first place. And now the man who presided over the DPP during the prosecution that came within a whisker of sending an innocent Aboriginal man to prison for eight years has been elevated to the highest court in the Territory.

This essay is not written in anger, though anger would be entirely justified. It is written because someone must write it, because the platform Blak and Black has spent sixteen years documenting precisely this kind of institutional failure, and because the people of the ACT deserve to understand what the appointment of Jon White to the Supreme Court actually means in the context of the history I am about to describe.

The Prosecution and What Drove It

Before my trial began, my barrister received a call from the prosecutor. According to my barrister’s account of that conversation, the message was remarkable for its candour. It was not a matter of whether I would lose, but when. And when I lost – the prosecutor’s assumption, not mine – the DPP would insist that I take down Blak and Black, this website, this platform, because it was embarrassing the Australian Labor Party.

That single communication tells us everything we need to know about the true purpose of my prosecution. A prosecution is supposed to be a neutral instrument of justice. It is supposed to proceed from the evidence, follow the law, and serve the public interest. It is not supposed to be a mechanism for silencing political inconvenience. Yet that is precisely what my prosecution was.

Why was Blak and Black embarrassing the Labor Party? Because this platform contained, among other things, a copy of a public interest disclosure – a formal document reporting significant corruption by the Australian Labor Party in the ACT, in New South Wales, and subsequently in Victoria. It also contained detailed documentation of the ongoing racial harassment of an Indigenous family by a public servant named Angel Marina, harassment that was driven by his irrational hostility toward his previous line manager, who had been the Indigenous Commissioner for ACT Revenue.

If the decision to prosecute me was made on the direction of, or in furtherance of the interests of, the ALP, then it was not a neutral decision. It was not made in the interests of justice. It was a political decision – a decision to use the criminal law as a weapon against a journalist and advocate whose work was exposing corruption and racism at the heart of the ACT’s governing party. That is an affront to Australia’s rule of law. It is an affront to the entire concept of justice. And nobody has been held accountable for it.

The Forgery at the Heart of the Case

The centrepiece of the prosecution against me was an affidavit. It was alleged that I had provided this affidavit to an earlier hearing in the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal. The problem – and it is not a small problem – is that the affidavit was never provided to the Tribunal.

More significantly still: the affidavit that was being legitimately prepared on my behalf had been prepared by a solicitor, reviewed by a second solicitor, and settled by a barrister. Three experienced legal professionals. The document that formed the basis of my prosecution was so shoddy, so unprofessionally prepared, so riddled with errors of form and substance, that it would have embarrassed a first-year law student. It was manifestly not the work of three professional legal practitioners. It bore none of the hallmarks of a document that had passed through the hands of experienced lawyers. It was, in the assessment of my legal team and on its face, a document that appeared to be a forgery.

Both the Australian Federal Police and the DPP were informed before my trial that the document they were relying upon was a forgery. They refused to countenance that possibility. They refused to investigate it. They proceeded regardless, because doing so suited an agenda – an agenda being driven by the Australian Labor Party, who wanted to discredit and bury the public interest disclosure that sat at the centre of everything.

The prosecution also attempted, during the trial itself, to tender into evidence the minutes of a meeting that did not happen. They were unsuccessful. They also attempted to tender a document purportedly written by the Indigenous Commissioner for ACT Revenue. They were unsuccessful in getting that document admitted either, because it could be demonstrated that it contained so many errors and inconsistencies that it could not have been written by the person whose name appeared in the signature block. No consequences have followed from those attempts. No consequences have followed from the broader conduct of the prosecution.

The Withheld Evidence and What It Would Have Proven

There is another dimension to this story that goes to the integrity of the prosecution itself, and to the DPP’s conduct of the trial. During my trial, the DPP withheld material that was exculpatory – material that, had my legal team possessed it, would have been instrumental in exposing the lies being told under oath in the courtroom.

The document in question was an email from a Ms Meredith Whitten to Tu Pham. In that email, Ms Whitten recommended that the complaints of racism made by the Indigenous Commissioner for ACT Revenue against Angel Marina should be investigated.

This document was critical for a specific and devastating reason. In 2003, Mrs Tu Pham made a statement to the Public Service Commission. In that statement, she said that the first time the Indigenous Commissioner for ACT Revenue had complained about Angel Marina’s racism was shortly after his appointment as Commissioner for Revenue. She reiterated this account verbatim under oath in an ACT Magistrates Court matter in 2006.

Then came 2017, and my trial. Under oath once again, Mrs Pham said something quite different. She now said that she must have made a mistake in 2003. She said there had been no complaints of racism made against Angel Marina. She said her memory of events that had occurred in 2002 was better in 2017 than it had been in 2003. One might be forgiven for finding that proposition somewhat extraordinary.

The email from Ms Whitten to Tu Pham gave the lie to that evidence directly. If there had been no complaints of racism against Angel Marina – as Mrs Pham would now have the court believe – what exactly was Ms Whitten recommending that the department investigate? The document’s meaning was unambiguous. Its implications for the credibility of Mrs Pham’s evidence were severe.

But because it was withheld, and because it only came into my legal team’s possession through the courageous action of an honest AFP officer who handed it to us toward the end of the trial, we missed the opportunity to cross-examine Ms Whitten, Mrs Pham, and Angel Marina on its contents. The window had closed. The witnesses had given their evidence. The damage – to truth, and to the course of my trial – had been done.

The Human Cost

I want to be precise about what the two years between being charged and standing trial cost me, because precision matters here and vagueness would allow the comfortable to remain comfortable.

My barrister advised me before the trial commenced that in the event I lost, I was probably facing an eight-year custodial sentence. I would also be forced to take down Blak and Black. Eight years of my life and the silencing of this platform – that was what was on the table while I waited, charged with crimes I had not committed, for a trial I could not be certain of winning even though I was innocent. There is no guarantee in litigation. Innocence is not a shield. I knew that better than most.

The mental and physical toll of that period was immense. I now carry permanent health consequences from what was done to me during those years. The anxiety, the strain, the weight of potential imprisonment, the threat to my family, my work, my voice – these are not abstractions. They are conditions I live with.

My defence cost five hundred thousand dollars. That is five hundred thousand dollars I was required to spend to defend myself against charges that were racially motivated, politically driven, and founded on a document that everybody involved – including, it must be said, the ALP – must have known was a forgery. The absence of any reckoning with that cost continues to this day. Nobody has offered restitution. Nobody, in any official capacity, has acknowledged the severity of what was done.

Accountability and Its Absence

The pattern that emerges from this account is not one of isolated error or honest misjudgement. It is a pattern of institutional failure compounded by institutional protection. The AFP charged me on a forged document. The DPP prosecuted me in pursuit of political objectives. Evidence was withheld. False testimony was given. Documents of questionable provenance were tendered. And when it was over – when sixteen charges had collapsed and an innocent man walked free – nobody faced consequences.

This matters profoundly in the context of Jon White’s appointment to the Supreme Court. The DPP, during his tenure as Director, prosecuted a case that should never have been brought. It prosecuted that case after being told the central document was a forgery. It withheld exculpatory material. And it communicated, through its prosecutor, that the real goal of the prosecution was not justice but the silencing of a platform that was embarrassing the Australian Labor Party.

The ACT Attorney-General who made the recommendation for Jon White’s appointment is part of the same ACT Labor Government whose political interests were served by my prosecution. The circularity of that arrangement is not subtle. The people who presided over a politically motivated prosecution of an Aboriginal man are now in a position to elevate the Director of the DPP who ran it to the highest court in the Territory. And they have done so without any prior reckoning with what occurred.

The rule of law is not merely a procedural concept. It is a substantive commitment – a commitment that the law applies equally, that prosecutorial power is not wielded for political purposes, that the machinery of criminal justice is not turned against individuals because they have the temerity to document corruption and name it in public. When that commitment is violated, and when those violations are followed not by accountability but by promotion, the damage to the rule of law is deep and lasting.

Institution and Individual: A Necessary Distinction

There is a distinction that fairness requires me to draw, and that intellectual honesty compels me to observe clearly. The failures I have described in this essay are, first and foremost, institutional failures. They are failures of the ACT DPP as an office, failures of the AFP as an organisation, and failures of the ACT Government as the political authority that ultimately shaped the conditions in which both operated. Institutions make decisions through processes, hierarchies, and cultures that are rarely reducible to the will of a single individual. The prosecution that was brought against me was the product of such a process.

It would be neither accurate nor fair to attribute every dimension of that institutional failure directly and personally to Jon White. A Director of Public Prosecutions does not personally conduct every prosecution that runs under his or her watch. Prosecutorial decisions are made by officers at various levels; cases are run by individual prosecutors; the conduct of a trial is shaped by the lawyers in the room, not solely by the person at the head of the organisation. These are structural realities, and they matter.

What Jon White was responsible for, as Director, was the culture, the governance, and the oversight of the office he led. A Director who sets clear standards of prosecutorial integrity – who insists that exculpatory material be disclosed, that political considerations play no role in charging decisions, and that cases founded on questionable documents be rigorously examined before proceeding – creates conditions in which the failures I have described are less likely to occur. Whether that leadership was provided during the period in question is a matter for examination, not assertion. It is precisely the absence of any such examination, any inquiry, any process of review, that makes Jon White’s appointment so troubling.

My concern is not that Jon White is personally corrupt, personally malicious, or personally responsible for every decision taken by every prosecutor in the ACT DPP. My concern is that the institution he led produced a prosecution that had no legitimate foundation, that was conducted in a manner that raises serious questions about disclosure and candour, and that was described – before it even commenced – as a vehicle for political silencing rather than the pursuit of justice. And my concern is that none of this has ever been examined. The appointment proceeds as though it did not happen.

The Legal Threshold and Why It Matters

Readers of this essay who are legally trained will understand that the conduct I have described does not automatically constitute malicious prosecution in the legal sense. That tort carries a high bar – and rightly so. The common law has long recognised that prosecutors must be free to make difficult decisions, to run cases whose outcome is uncertain, and to exercise judgment in conditions of incomplete information. A system in which every acquittal exposed a prosecutor to civil liability would be a system in which no prosecutor would ever bring a difficult case. That would not serve justice either.

For malicious prosecution to be established at law, several demanding elements must be proven: that the prosecution was initiated by the defendant; that it was concluded in favour of the plaintiff; that it was brought without reasonable and probable cause; and that it was animated by malice – meaning a purpose other than the proper administration of justice. Each element requires evidence, and the threshold for each is significant. Absence of reasonable and probable cause is not easily inferred from an acquittal alone; juries acquit for many reasons. And malice, in the legal sense, is notoriously difficult to establish when institutional actors can point to an arguable case, however thin.

I am not an expert and I make no claim to have established these elements to a legal standard. What I can say – and what I do say, on the basis of my own experience and the record I have described – is that the facts of my prosecution present a pattern of conduct that any fair-minded inquiry would regard as demanding explanation. The pre-trial communication about silencing this platform. The use of a document that multiple parties knew to be a forgery. The withholding of exculpatory material. The attempted tender of minutes from a meeting that did not occur, and of a document that could not have been written by the person who supposedly authored it. These are not the hallmarks of a prosecution brought in good faith on the available evidence.

The high legal bar for malicious prosecution exists to protect the integrity of prosecutorial decision-making. But it was never intended to serve as a shield behind which institutional misconduct can shelter indefinitely without scrutiny. The bar defines a legal cause of action. It does not define the limits of legitimate public inquiry. It does not mean that patterns of conduct falling short of that legal threshold need not be examined. And it certainly does not mean that the person who led the office during which these events unfolded is therefore suitable – without examination, without inquiry, without acknowledgement – to be elevated to the highest court in the Territory.

Jon White’s Record As Director: An Acknowledgement

Fairness also requires that I acknowledge the following. Jon White served as Director of Public Prosecutions for the ACT for a substantial period. He was reappointed to that role, which is itself a form of official endorsement. By the measures typically applied to such appointments – the smooth administration of a significant public office, the management of a professional workforce, and the maintenance of a prosecutorial service that handles an enormous volume of ordinary criminal work – his tenure will have had dimensions that this essay has not discussed, and does not propose to evaluate.

I am not in a position to assess the full breadth of his record. I have not seen every decision his office made, every policy it developed, or every case in which its conduct was exemplary. There will have been many. Criminal prosecution offices do vital work, most of it unremarked and uncontested – prosecuting violence, protecting victims, upholding the law in ways that serve the community without attracting public attention. I have no basis for suggesting that the entirety of the DPP’s work under Jon White’s leadership was compromised, and I do not suggest it.

What I have a basis for – a direct, personal, documented basis – is the assessment of how his office conducted itself in the prosecution brought against me. In that matter, the record is what it is: sixteen charges, sixteen acquittals, a forged document, withheld exculpatory evidence, a pre-trial communication revealing political objectives, and a zero-accountability aftermath that stretches to this day. Those facts sit alongside whatever else Jon White’s record contains. They do not disappear because other parts of that record may be less troubling. Suitability for judicial office is not established by averaging the good against the bad. It requires consideration of the whole.

The question this appointment raises is not whether Jon White did good work in other cases. I am prepared to accept, as a reasonable inference, that he sometimes did. The question is whether the failures that attended his office’s prosecution of me – and the complete absence of any reckoning with those failures – are consistent with the standards we expect of a Supreme Court judge. On that question, I have a view. It is a view grounded in my own experience, not in speculation. And it is a view I am entitled, as a citizen and as the publisher of a platform that has spent sixteen years demanding institutional accountability, to express.

Why This Platform Exists

Blak and Black was established in 2010. It was established precisely because the kind of thing I have described in this essay happens – because institutions protect themselves, because power insulates itself, because the people most likely to be targeted by the misuse of prosecutorial authority are those with the least institutional protection and the most to say.

The attempt to use my intended conviction as a means to force this platform offline was not incidental to the prosecution. It was, on the account given by the prosecutor before the trial started, central to its purpose. They wanted Blak and Black gone. They wanted the public interest disclosure gone with it. They wanted the documented evidence of racism against an Indigenous Commissioner for ACT Revenue gone. They wanted the voices that were naming corruption and demanding accountability gone.

They did not succeed. The trial failed. The charges failed. The platform remains. But the fact that they tried – the fact that the criminal law was used in this way, with this purpose, to this end – is something that must remain on the public record. Not because I wish to relitigate the past, but because the past has not been resolved. No one has been held accountable. And now the Director of the DPP under whose watch this prosecution ran is to sit on the Territory’s Supreme Court.

It is not my place to tell the ACT Attorney-General what to do. It is my place, as the publisher of Blak and Black, to tell the truth. The truth is that Jon White’s appointment to the Supreme Court of the ACT proceeds in circumstances that have never been examined, investigated, or resolved. The truth is that the prosecution over which he presided as Director was, on the evidence of the prosecutor’s own communications before the trial began, a politically motivated prosecution designed to serve the interests of the Australian Labor Party rather than the interests of justice. The truth is that sixteen charges collapsed because they should never have been brought. These are not matters of opinion. They are matters of record. And the record deserves to be read before new appointments are made and old failures are allowed to disappear quietly into the institutional memory of a government that has never acknowledged what it did.

Conclusion: The Unanswered Questions

Australia speaks often and confidently about the rule of law. It speaks about judicial independence, prosecutorial integrity, and the principle that no one – no government, no party, no interest – stands above the law. These are not empty words, or they should not be. But words require deeds to give them substance, and the deeds that followed my acquittal on sixteen charges have been conspicuously absent.

The questions that remain unanswered are not complicated. Who authorised the use of a document that multiple parties knew to be a forgery? Who made the decision to proceed with the prosecution after being told the document was forged? Who decided that exculpatory material would be withheld? Who communicated to the prosecutor that the real purpose of achieving a conviction was to silence Blak and Black? And who, in the ALP, gave the direction – or created the conditions – under which an Aboriginal man could be prosecuted on fabricated charges for the political convenience of a governing party?

These questions have not been answered. They have not been asked in any official forum. The UN Human Rights Committee submission that documents this matter in full detail remains before that body, because the domestic mechanisms that should have provided accountability have conspicuously failed to do so.

I have tried in this essay to be precise about what I allege and what I do not; to distinguish between institutional failure and personal culpability; to acknowledge the limits of my knowledge as well as its depths; and to recognise that the legal threshold for malicious prosecution is high and that I make no claim to have met it. What I do claim, and what I maintain, is that the pattern of conduct in my prosecution raises questions of the most serious kind about the integrity of the office Jon White led – questions that have never been answered, and that his elevation to the Supreme Court without any prior reckoning makes more urgent, not less.

Jon White is, in my view – and I state plainly that this is my view, formed on the basis of my direct experience with the ACT DPP under his directorship – not a suitable person to serve as a judge of the Supreme Court of the ACT. That conclusion is reached not through personal animus, not through ignorance of the broader record, and not through any claim that the legal elements of malicious prosecution have been established. It is reached because an institution he led prosecuted an innocent man on a forged document for political purposes, withheld exculpatory evidence, and has never been held to account – and because no appointment to any court should proceed as though that history does not exist.

The ACT Attorney-General will make of that view what she will. But she should make it in full knowledge of the history set out in these pages. And the people of the ACT, who are now to be subject to the jurisdiction of a Supreme Court on which Jon White will sit, should make of it what they will too.

Accountability deferred is not accountability avoided. It is accountability that waits.

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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, June 2026

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