Many years ago, after a court case had concluded, a barrister remarked to me that his opponent always seemed to represent members of a particular Australian outlaw motorcycle club. If you keep representing people like that, he suggested, it must mean you are sympathetic to what those people believe. I am not certain the observation is entirely fair to the lawyers concerned – advocacy is not always agreement – but I have carried it with me for years, because it names something true about institutions as well as individuals. Pattern is evidence. When a body of people repeatedly protects the same person, from the same accusation, over the same span of decades, at some point the protection becomes indistinguishable from endorsement.
That observation returns to me now when I consider the conduct of the ACT branch of the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Federal Police over the past twenty years. For two decades they have run interference to prevent those of us who wanted Angel Marina brought before a human rights tribunal from doing so, over a letter he wrote on 9 May 2002. Applying the barrister’s logic: one can only conclude that ACT Labor and the AFP share Mr Marina’s views. I can find no more coherent explanation for why they have protected him and obstructed scrutiny of that letter for so long.
Read for what it actually says, the letter of 9 May 2002 can only be understood as the product of someone expressing white-supremacist views. That is my interpretation of the document, and I state it as such – but it is not an idle one. It is the same conclusion reached, independently, by the most senior public servant to have read the letter at the time, under oath, many years later. If that is what the letter reveals about Mr Marina, then the sustained institutional effort to shield him from scrutiny becomes very hard to explain except as a reflection of shared sympathies.
This essay is about that effort – how it began, how it has been sustained for twenty years, and how it eventually produced a criminal prosecution against me on sixteen counts, of which a jury acquitted me in full. The Australian Federal Police exist, among other things, to investigate people who target others because of their race or religion. That is uncontroversial; it is the job we ask of them. The difficulty arises when the AFP’s own conduct, in a specific and long-running matter, has itself borne the marks of racial bias. I have documented that experience at length elsewhere and will not retread all of it here. But before the argument can be made properly, the underlying facts need to be set out clearly, in order, and with the distinction between what is established and what is contested made explicit throughout.
I want to be precise about the shape of the claim I am making, because precision is the only thing that gives an argument like this any weight. I am not asserting that every officer who has touched this file over twenty years personally holds the views expressed in the 2002 letter. Institutions do not require universal belief to produce a consistent pattern of protection; they require only enough people, in enough of the right positions, willing to look away, delay, or actively intervene when the file threatens to move. What I am asserting is that the pattern itself – sustained, cross-institutional, and remarkably consistent in its timing – is evidence of something more than administrative inertia. Bureaucracies lose files by accident. They do not, by accident, produce a forged affidavit, sixteen criminal charges, and a five-hundred-thousand-dollar defence, at precisely the moment a citizen tries once more to bring a twenty-year-old racist letter into the light.
Because this essay rests on twenty years of interlocking events, it is worth setting out at the start what is established fact and what is my own interpretive conclusion, so that a reader can weigh each separately. Established, and not contested by any party: the authenticity of the 9 May 2002 letter and Mr Ronaldson’s signature on it; the letters of December 2003 between Mr Mullins’ lawyers, Ms Pham, and Mr Harris; the account, tendered in evidence by both the AFP and the ACT Government, that Mr Mullins’ dismissal was engineered as a “sting” to derail a human rights complaint; the 2004 AFP seizure of legal advice from Mr Mullins’ property; and my acquittal, after trial, on all sixteen counts. Advanced as my own case, argued from the evidence but not themselves adjudicated as findings of fact: that Mr Marina’s 2003 disclosure relied on a fabricated email chain; that Ms Pham’s conduct amounted to unlawful retaliation; that the affidavit tendered against me was forged within the ACT Government; and the overarching conclusion – that the pattern of protection reflects shared sympathy with the letter’s content, rather than mere institutional dysfunction. I have tried to keep that distinction visible throughout rather than let the weight of the narrative blur it.
The Letter Of 9 May 2002
In May 2002, Angel Marina wrote to the Chief Executive of ACT Treasury asking that his line manager, Mr Mullins – an Indigenous Australian – be removed from his position. The stated rationale, on any fair reading of the letter, came down to the fact that Mr Mullins is Indigenous. The authenticity of that letter has never been in dispute. The signature at the top of the letter – Mr Ronaldson’s own signature, referring the matter in relation to Mr Mullins – was confirmed as a genuine original ink signature, a fact Mr Ronaldson himself confirmed to police on several occasions and again under cross-examination during my trial in 2017. Mr Marina, by contrast, has been consistently evasive whenever asked about the letter.
The Chief Executive who received the letter, Mr Ronaldson, testified in 2017 that he remembered it distinctly, because he had never before read comments so outrageous and so plainly racist in a letter – let alone one written by a public servant about his own line manager, and sent up the chain to someone more senior still. Mr Ronaldson also testified that he left ACT Government employment within six weeks of receiving the letter and was not in a position to follow the matter up. The letter was known to the then Chief Minister, Mr Jon Stanhope, and the then Treasurer, Mr Ted Quinlan. A separate allegation concerns Mr Mullins’ subsequent application for a substantive position within ACT Treasury, which he understood he had obtained through a manager in Corporate Services, Ms Louise Fitzgerald. On my reading of events, both Mr Marina and Ms Fitzgerald ought to have faced disciplinary proceedings over their conduct in that period, and Mr Marina’s conduct arguably warranted termination. Neither faced any consequence at all.
I set out the operative passages of the letter below, rather than merely characterise them, because a reader is entitled to judge the document on its own words rather than take my summary of it on trust:
“I have investigated Mr Mullins’ background and have established that he is a compulsive liar, unethical and unsuitable to be a Senior Manager in the ACT Public Service. Mr Mullins is running a business preparing applications and work histories without the consent of the Department, in breach of Sections 8 and 9 of the Public Sector Management Act 1994.
Friends within the Australian Federal Police have advised me that Mr Mullins’ cousin, Ms Isabell Coe of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, has a criminal record, as do other members of his family.
This confirms my experience that Aborigines are compulsive liars and criminals and unsuitable to hold management positions. Mr Mullins is no exception.
[Ms] Louise Fitzgerald, Manager Corporate Services, has given me a copy of Mr Mullins’ application for his substantive position of Manager, Policy, Legislation and Projects, Revenue Management Branch… Mr Mullins’ attached application clearly shows that he has limited Public Sector experience and holds unrelated qualifications, being a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Diploma in Education. I believe that Mr Mullins is not qualified to act in the position of Director, Revenue Management Branch. I have discussed Mr Mullins’ background with Ms Tanya Taylor, Recruitment Consultant of Ernst & Young, who has confirmed my assessment that Aborigines are compulsive liars and criminals and that Mr Mullins’ teaching qualifications made him unsuitable to work at either Ernst & Young or ACT Treasury.
I request that Mr Mullins be dismissed from the ACT Public Service due to his unethical behaviour and the general disposition of Aborigines to lie and the criminal records of his family.”
I do not think this passage requires extensive commentary. It states, three separate times and in three different formulations, that Aboriginal people in general are liars and criminals, and it applies that generalisation to Mr Mullins’ fitness for a position rather than to any individual, specific ground. It invokes recruitment consultant Tanya Taylor as having independently “confirmed” the same generalisation, and it invokes unnamed “friends within the Australian Federal Police” as the source of an unverified claim about the criminal history of Mr Mullins’ relatives – among them Ms Isabell Coe, a co-founder of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy – offered not for any stated relevance to Mr Mullins’ own conduct but as further proof of an inherited criminality. This is the document two decades of institutional conduct has served, one way or another, to keep from a human rights tribunal.
This is the foundational fact against which everything that follows must be read: a serving public servant wrote a document that a subsequent senior officer, under oath, characterised as the most racist thing he had encountered in his career in the public service – and the ACT Government took no disciplinary action whatsoever.
It would be one thing if the letter had simply been buried through neglect – filed, forgotten, and never acted upon because no one further up the chain ever read it. That is not what happened here. The letter was known, at the time, to both the Chief Minister and the Treasurer. Two of the most senior political figures in the Territory were aware of a document that a career public servant would later describe, under oath, as the most racist thing he had encountered in his working life, directed at an Indigenous public servant by the very colleague who reported to him. And still nothing happened. No censure. No inquiry. No apology. The silence of the most senior officials in the Territory, in the face of documented knowledge, is itself part of the record – and it is the first instance of a pattern that would repeat for the next two decades.
The Public Interest Disclosure And Its Problems
In December 2003, lawyers acting for Mr Mullins – by then Commissioner for ACT Revenue – wrote to Ms Tu Pham and her line manager, Mr Mike Harris, the Chief Executive of the ACT Chief Minister’s Department. These letters are not in dispute; they have been before a court, and all parties accept they are genuine. They put the department on notice that Ms Pham was going to be taken to the human rights commission for her failure to deal with Mr Marina’s racism – a failure that fell squarely within her own responsibilities.
On 19 December 2003, Mr Marina submitted what was described as a public interest disclosure against Mr Mullins to Ms Meredith Whitton, then head of corporate services for ACT Treasury – the same line manager Mr Marina had spent the previous two years trying to have removed, on the same basis. I describe this disclosure as “alleged” advisedly, because it relied on documents purportedly obtained from the University of London that were not, on my inquiries, available to Mr Marina on 19 December 2003. I have confirmed this directly with the University of London. The University has also stated that it does not recognise the chain of emails Mr Marina attached to the disclosure. A forensic analysis of that email chain found that the penultimate email in the sequence was received by Mr Marina ninety minutes after he had already replied to it – a sequence that is not physically possible, and which undermines any claim that the chain represents an authentic, contemporaneous record. Separately, the University of London’s own material shows that the underlying email exchange was conducted with Ms Tu Pham, not with Mr Marina, whatever Mr Marina later testified on oath. No one senior to Mr Marina authorised the inquiries he made about Mr Mullins.
The significance of the 19 December 2003 disclosure is that Ms Pham used it to terminate Mr Mullins’ employment before the complaint against her own conduct could progress to the human rights commission. In doing so, she became, in effect, judge in her own case – dismissing the very person whose complaint threatened her – before that complaint could be tested. This is, at minimum, a serious denial of procedural fairness. Given that the ACT Crimes Act contains provisions addressing retaliation against people who bring complaints, I consider it arguable that her conduct met the threshold of a criminal offence, though I want to be clear that this is my assessment of the pattern, not a matter that has itself been the subject of a criminal charge or conviction.
The “Sting”
When Mr Mullins was escorted from the building following his termination, the officer who escorted him was a senior executive, Mr Glenn Gaskell. Mr Gaskell told Mr Mullins – and this was reported to Mr Mullins’ lawyers that same evening – that the termination had been engineered as a “sting” organised by Mr Peter Garrisson, then Deputy Government Solicitor in the ACT Government Solicitor’s Office, and that its purpose was to derail Mr Mullins’ pending human rights commission complaint against Ms Pham. This account has since been tendered as evidence in one court matter and one tribunal matter, first by the Australian Federal Police and subsequently by the ACT Government itself, and as far as I am aware it has never been disputed by any party. The legal advice referred to in that account was seized, in copied form, by the AFP during a search warrant executed on Mr Mullins’ property in 2004.
I want to pause on what this establishes. An ACT Government Solicitor’s Office, through one of its senior officers, is alleged – on evidence tendered by two separate government bodies without contradiction – to have engineered the sacking of a man specifically in order to prevent a human rights complaint about racism from being examined. That is not a minor administrative irregularity. It is, if the account is accurate, a deliberate act to place an official’s career above a citizen’s access to a human rights remedy.
The Freedom Of Information Request And Its Consequences
That is where matters should have rested. They did not. In 2013, intent on finally bringing Mr Marina to account before the Australian Human Rights Commission, I lodged a Freedom of Information request for the public interest disclosure Mr Mullins had submitted to Mr Stanhope in June 2003. That disclosure had been responded to on Mr Stanhope’s behalf by Mr Mike Harris, then Chief Executive of ACT Treasury – a wholly unremarkable delegation of authority that nobody has ever disputed.
The difficulty arose only once my FOI request brought Mr Garrisson back into the matter. The June 2003 disclosure, once I obtained it, showed that Mr Garrisson had been either corrupt or negligent in his handling of these matters from their inception in late 2003 through to the point of my application to the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal a decade later. Whatever his reasons, the pattern is consistent: every time someone has attempted to bring these matters before a human rights body, Mr Garrisson has appeared, in one capacity or another, running interference to protect Mr Marina. Every document I rely on for this claim has been before a court and adjudicated by a jury.
The President of the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal ultimately found she had no power to compel the department to produce documents it claimed not to hold. That was the outcome I expected, and in a sense the outcome I had hoped for – because it allowed me to demonstrate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee that I had exhausted every avenue available under the local legal system, and that the system had failed to function as it was meant to.
The False Affidavit
The next development came in January 2015, when I was contacted by Senior Constable Mike Harris of ACT Policing, who advised that Peter Garrisson had made a complaint, in his capacity as ACT Government Solicitor, alleging that I had submitted a forged affidavit to the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal. I told Constable Harris plainly that this was, in my view, entirely without foundation, and that Mr Garrisson had a long history of shielding Mr Marina and obstructing efforts to bring his conduct before a human rights body – this, I said, was simply the latest instance of that pattern.
At that point, Constable Harris told me he did not have a copy of the affidavit I was alleged to have submitted, and asked whether I had one. I told him I would not discuss the matter without my lawyer present. On my lawyer’s advice – given the long history of interference in this matter by Mr Garrisson – I did not speak further with Constable Harris. In April or May of 2015, I was charged with sixteen counts of using a false instrument and submitting a false affidavit.
The chronology that follows is, to my mind, the most damning part of this whole account. In January 2016 – seven months after I was charged – Constable Harris contacted my lawyers for the ACAT matter asking for a copy of the affidavit. In short: I had been charged on the basis of a document the police did not themselves possess. Eleven years after the initial charge, the AFP has still not produced the original affidavit.
The affidavit tendered against me at trial ran to roughly fifty-five pages, including annexures. My lawyers at the time had no copy of it. They had no draft of it. They had never been given instructions to prepare such a document, and they did not hold most of the material annexed to it. This raises an obvious question: how could lawyers acting for me have prepared an affidavit, complete with annexures, that they did not have in their possession and had never been asked to draft?
It should be noted that the affidavit on which I was charged and later acquitted was provided to the AFP by the same Mr Peter Garrisson who appears throughout this account.
My defence rested on the position that the affidavit tendered into evidence was a forgery created within the ACT Government. The jury accepted that account and acquitted me on all sixteen counts. The cost of mounting that defence exceeded $500,000. It caused me significant mental anguish and, through that anguish, physical harm as well. My barrister’s assessment at the time was that a conviction on even one of the sixteen counts would likely have resulted in a custodial sentence in the order of eight years – eight years of my life, for a crime a jury ultimately found I did not commit.
Accountability Denied
Despite repeated requests that Mr Garrisson be charged with the same offence he is alleged to have facilitated against me – providing a false affidavit to a court – the AFP has declined to take any action. Their position, as it has been put to me, is that the system worked: I was acquitted, and I should be satisfied with that outcome. I have pointed out, more than once, that had the system actually worked as intended, I would never have been charged at all, and would never have had to stand trial on evidence that a jury ultimately rejected. Acquittal is not vindication for the years, the cost, and the harm that preceded it; it is simply the correction of a wrong that should never have occurred. No one has been held to account for constructing a case against me on a false affidavit.
Considering The Alternatives
I have argued that this pattern is best explained by shared sympathy with the letter’s content. That is not the only possible explanation, and it deserves to be tested against the others before it is allowed to stand.
The first alternative is ordinary bureaucratic dysfunction: large public services lose files, misplace records, and produce uneven outcomes as a matter of course, without any of it being ideological. I accept that this happens, and that some of what I have described could, in isolation, be explained this way. What it does not explain is the recurrence of a single named individual, Mr Garrisson, at every point over more than a decade at which this specific matter threatened to reach a human rights body – the 2003 dismissal, the 2004 search warrant material, the 2013 FOI request, and the 2015 charge. Generalised dysfunction is random in its effects. This pattern is not; it clusters, every time, around the same file and the same point of institutional exposure.
The second alternative is institutional self-protection that has nothing to do with race: officials shielding a colleague, or the Territory’s reputation, from any embarrassing complaint, regardless of its subject matter. This is a genuinely serious possibility, and I do not think it can be ruled out entirely – institutions protect their own for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the substance of a complaint. But the account tendered in evidence by both the AFP and the ACT Government describes the 2003 termination specifically as a manoeuvre to derail a human rights complaint about racism – not a generic performance complaint, not a personality dispute, but a complaint about race discrimination specifically. If the motive were pure institutional self-protection, one would expect the same protective reflex around comparable non-racial complaints in the same office over the same period. I am not aware of evidence of that broader pattern; the protective effort in this record has been trained, specifically and repeatedly, on this file.
The third alternative is prosecutorial overreach of the kind that happens for reasons unconnected to any of the parties’ identities – police occasionally build weak cases, and juries occasionally acquit as a result, without any of it reflecting a considered institutional choice. This is the most difficult alternative to dismiss outright, because prosecutorial error is common and rarely sinister. But it does not sit easily with the specific sequence here: sixteen felony counts laid on the strength of a document the police had not seen, followed by a seven-month delay before anyone thought to ask for a copy of it. That is not the profile of a case built too quickly on thin evidence. It is closer to the profile of a case built to produce a charge first and a justification later – which is a different thing, and one considerably harder to explain as ordinary error.
None of this proves the conclusion I have drawn. It cannot, on the evidence available to me, be proven to the standard a court would require, and I do not claim otherwise. But having set the alternatives against the record, I think the pattern of protection is better explained by sympathy with the letter’s substance than by any of the race-neutral accounts available. That is the argument this essay makes; readers are entitled to weigh it against the facts I have set out and reach their own view.
The “System Worked” Defence
I anticipate the response this account will receive from the institutions concerned, because I have already received it. The system worked, they say: I was charged, I was tried, and I was acquitted. That is due process functioning as intended, and I ought to accept the outcome and move on.
This defence deserves to be taken seriously before it is rejected, because on its face it is not an unreasonable thing to say about a criminal justice system. Acquittals do happen. Juries do sometimes reject the prosecution’s case. If that were the whole of it – an honest prosecution brought on a genuine, if ultimately unpersuasive, piece of evidence – then “the system worked” would be a fair description of the outcome, however painful the process.
But that is not what the evidence shows here, and the distinction matters. A system that works is one in which the prosecuting authority possesses the document it has charged a citizen over. Here, the AFP charged me on an affidavit it did not itself hold a copy of, and did not seek a copy of until seven months after laying sixteen charges. A system that works is one in which the defence can test the provenance of the document against instructions the client’s own lawyers gave. Here, my lawyers held no draft, no instructions, and most of the annexures were never in their possession at all – facts that go to the heart of how the document could have come into existence in the form tendered to the court. A system that works, finally, is one in which a credible allegation that a court officer supplied a false affidavit is itself investigated, regardless of that officer’s seniority or institutional position. Here, that allegation has been made repeatedly, against the same individual who appears at every other turn in this chronology, and it has not been investigated at all.
“The system worked” is true only if the measure of the system is the twelve people in the jury box. It is not true if the measure includes the two years of prosecution, the half a million dollars, the mental and physical toll, and the eight years of a life that a barrister’s honest assessment says I came close to losing – for a case built on a document nobody investigating it could ever produce. An acquittal is not evidence that the process which produced the charge was sound. It is, in this instance, evidence that twelve strangers did the job that the AFP itself should have done before ever laying the charges
Conclusion
I began this essay with an observation a barrister once made to me, and I return to it now. The only fair reading of Mr Marina’s letter of 9 May 2002 is that it expresses white-supremacist sentiment. The fact that senior officials across two decades and multiple institutions – ACT Labor, the ACT Government Solicitor’s Office, and the Australian Federal Police – have worked, consistently and at real cost to others, to prevent that letter and its author from ever facing a human rights tribunal, lends real weight to the argument that they share the views expressed in it. I state that as my considered conclusion, not as a matter that has itself been tested and proven in a court. But I would ask anyone reading this account of the facts to explain, in any other terms, why an institution would spend twenty years, and in my case a false criminal prosecution on sixteen counts, protecting one man’s racist letter from ever being examined by the body designed to examine exactly that kind of harm.
The matter now proceeds, through counsel in New York, toward the United Nations Human Rights Committee – the forum I have sought, in one way or another, since 2013, and the forum the ACT’s own tribunal system confirmed it could not provide. I do not expect that submission to undo the cost of the past two decades. I expect it to do what the domestic system would not: examine the letter, examine the pattern of protection around it, and say plainly what it is.
– – –
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, July 2026
I’m so sorry that you had to go through that. I only hope that one day you can get genuine justice and that Peter Garrisson gets to find out what it’s like standing trial only if he does stand trial over this he will have committed the crime whereas you didn’t..
There’s a fundamental difference between the barrister & the ALP/AFP. The barrister has a legitimate commercial relationship & arguably, a clientele. The ALP/AFP do not. That’s the difference between business and corruption.
.
Further, the AFP has vested authority to enforce the law without favour or commercial gain. The ALP has neither commercial nor legal reasons for supporting Angel Marina (or it shouldn’t have) or anyone involved in the cover-up of his actions.
.
While the charges against you were ultimately dismissed by the jury, the two years from your first contact by AFP Constable Mike Harris to the prosecution and acquittal imposed a physical and psychological toll on you and your family that can only be described as unwarranted and malicious, and the damage is ongoing. The continuing refusal by the vested authorities to investigate from whence the forged affidavit came and to hold that person or persons to account reinforces the perception that the AFP are racist.
.
As you say in this essay, with the evidence to hand your case is strong, but you don’t have the authority to act on it. The AFP do and we know only too well that they have the material or the capacity to collect such evidence as needed to make a case that should meet the criminal threshold expected by an unbiased court. The question is, given the experience of two decades and in particular Mossop’s statements and actions during your trial, is the ACT judiciary uncompromised? The UN is your sole reliable avenue to expose the truth.
Thanks for your comments, Watershedd, the question has to be asked why did the AFP decide to prosecute me on a false document, which they had to have known was a false document? There is absolutely no way any marginally intelligent person would have believed that an affidavit that was prepared by a solicitor, reviewed by a second solicitor, and settled by a barrister would contain so many errors and be so poorly drafted. The only conclusion I can draw is that the people who made the decision in the AFP to prosecute me were Mr Angel Marina’s so-called “friends in the AFP”, those friends that he keeps crowing about, those friends that he threatens people with. It’s worth noting that Mr Marina threatened Mr Mullins, his Indigenous line manager, with his friends in the AFP if Mr Mullins didn’t do what Mr Marina wanted. Clearly Mr Marina thought that he had some powers of persuasion over at least some officers within the AFP, and it seems he was able to use those powers of persuasion to achieve ends that had nothing to do with justice.