There is a species of institutional racism that never announces itself as racism. It arrives instead as paperwork: a letter here, a refused FOI request there, a prosecution that somehow survives contact with evidence its own investigators knew was false. It is slow, procedural, and almost impossible to prosecute in reverse, because every individual document can be defended as a bureaucratic decision made in good faith. Only when you lay the documents side by side – as I am going to do here – does the pattern become impossible to explain any other way.
I want to tell the story of what happened to the former Indigenous Commissioner for ACT Revenue – and, in time, to me as well. What follows rests only on material that either is already public – the 2002 letter, the AFP’s 2008 response, the outcome of the 2017 trial – or that I am able to produce on request: correspondence, FOI records, and the university material referred to below. Where I say a document exists, I have it.
The Man Who Couldn’t Pass First-Year Accounting
Angel Marina failed first-year accounting three times at the Canberra Institute of Technology. That is not an incidental biographical detail; it is the hinge on which this entire story turns. Without the qualification, his pathway to promotion within the ACT Public Service was blocked. He was, by his own department’s standards, not equipped for advancement. What he did have was local celebrity: a handful of tries for the Canberra Raiders, enough to make him a recognisable face in a city that is chronically short of anyone recognisable at all. That celebrity became his life raft. It bought him standing he had not earned through competence, and standing, once acquired, tends to look for something to spend itself on.
What Mr Marina spent it on was the Commissioner – and, over time, on the rest of the family around him.
I do not think this requires much psychological elaboration. A man blocked from advancement by his own shortcomings, working alongside an Aboriginal manager who had the qualifications he lacked, found a project: undermine that manager by any means available, and use whatever informal capital he possessed – football fame, personal connections, access to information he had no right to access – into damage.
The Letter of 9 May 2002
On 9 May 2002, Mr Marina wrote to the Chief Executive of ACT Treasury. I am going to reproduce the operative passages of that letter in full, rather than summarise them, because a reader is entitled to judge a document on its own words rather than take my characterisation of it on trust. This is, I think, the single most important editorial decision in this essay: paraphrase invites the suspicion of exaggeration, and I want to remove that possibility entirely.
Mr Marina wrote that he had investigated the Commissioner’s background and established that he was “a compulsive liar, unethical and unsuitable to be a Senior Manager in the ACT Public Service,” and that he was running an undisclosed business preparing job applications in breach of the Public Sector Management Act. He wrote that “friends within the Australian Federal Police” had advised him that the Commissioner’s cousin, Ms Isabell Coe of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, had a criminal record, “as do other members of his family.” He then wrote – and I want this sentence to sit on the page without softening – that this “confirms my experience that Aborigines are compulsive liars and criminals and unsuitable to hold management positions. Mr Mullins is no exception.” He went on to disparage the Commissioner’s academic qualifications, a Bachelor of Arts and a Diploma in Education, as evidence of unsuitability. He claimed to have discussed the Commissioner’s background with a recruitment consultant at Ernst & Young, Ms Tanya Taylor, who he said had “confirmed my assessment that Aborigines are compulsive liars and criminals.” He closed by requesting the Commissioner’s dismissal “due to his unethical behaviour and the general disposition of Aborigines to lie and the criminal records of his family.”
Read that closing sentence again. It does not accuse the Commissioner of a specific act. It grounds a request for his dismissal in “the general disposition of Aborigines to lie.” Three times in one letter, in three different formulations, Mr Marina asserted that Aboriginal people as a class are liars and criminals, and applied that racial generalisation – not any individual, specific allegation – to the Commissioner’s fitness to hold a position in the ACT Public Service.
That is the founding document of everything that followed. Every subsequent investigation, FOI dispute, and criminal prosecution traces back, in one way or another, to a letter whose central claim is explicitly and unambiguously racist.
Friends in the AFP
Mr Marina did not merely claim friends within the Australian Federal Police in that letter. He boasted about those friendships subsequently, to other people, in other contexts. And the record bears out that the boast was not empty.
Multiple allegations were made against Mr Marina over the following years. None of them produced an investigation with teeth. On 9 December 2008, AFP Commander Francis Jamison wrote to the Commissioner directly, stating: “In regard to your allegations of racial attacks by Mr Marina and the AFP, Investigating Police have determined that no offences have been disclosed.” A letter containing three separate racist generalisations about an entire people, used to seek a public servant’s dismissal, was assessed by the Australian Federal Police as disclosing no offence.
I want to be careful here, because I am conscious that “the AFP is racist” is a serious claim and deserves more than assertion. So let me set out what actually needs to be true for the Commander’s 2008 finding to be defensible: either the letter itself does not, on a plain reading, generalise about Aboriginal people as liars and criminals – which anyone can check against the text reproduced above – or the AFP applies a standard under which racial generalisations attached to a dismissal request do not constitute a disclosable offence. I do not think there is a third reading. And once you accept that, the more consequential question is not why the 2008 complaint went nowhere, but why the AFP’s relationship with Mr Marina’s material continued, nine years later, to shape a criminal prosecution of me.
The Prosecution that Shouldn’t Have Happened
The Commissioner’s workplace ordeal spilled into his private life and family. In 2017, I was separately prosecuted on sixteen counts, in a matter that grew out of the same web of disputed documents and the same cast of accusers. I was acquitted on all sixteen. 16-0 is not a narrow verdict; it is a jury telling a court, as unambiguously as a jury can, that the prosecution’s case did not survive contact with the evidence.
The prosecution rested substantially on an affidavit I allegedly submitted to the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal. My legal team told the AFP, more than once, before trial, that the documents underpinning the case were not genuine. A psychiatrist reviewed the affidavit in question and formed the view that whoever had actually written it was functionally illiterate. I am not functionally illiterate. The affidavit that was tendered as mine had, in reality, been prepared by one lawyer, reviewed by a second, and settled by a barrister – a drafting process entirely inconsistent with the document the prosecution wanted the jury to believe was authentically and independently mine.
My legal team put an alternative explanation for the document’s authorship to the AFP before trial. The AFP declined to pursue it and forced the matter through to a full criminal trial on sixteen counts. The two principal prosecution witnesses were Angel Marina and a second witness, Tu Pham. The jury did not believe either of them, and I was acquitted on every count.
A prosecuting authority which is told, before trial, by a defendant’s own lawyers, that the central document is not genuine – and which proceeds anyway to a sixteen-count trial resting on the evidence of witnesses a jury goes on to disbelieve entirely – is not simply an authority that lost a case. It is an authority that made a choice about whose account to credit before the jury ever had the chance to make that choice itself. Given the AFP’s own 2008 assessment that Mr Marina’s racist letter disclosed no offence, and given his boasted friendships within the organisation, I do not think it is unreasonable to ask whether that choice was made on the merits of the evidence or on the identity of the people involved.
The University File that Two Lawful Requests Couldn’t Retrieve
The clearest evidence of what was actually happening sits not in the criminal trial but in a quieter, more bureaucratic dispute: an argument over a university student file. Without any authority I am aware of, and without any authorisation from the ACT Government, Mr Marina wrote to a Ms Jo Thomas at the University of London and obtained the Commissioner’s complete university file. He was not the student. He had no right to that file. He got it anyway.
When the Commissioner – the actual student – subsequently lodged a formal FOI request with the University of London for his own file, the same Ms Thomas refused to hand it over and returned the bank draft he had submitted with the request. I still hold that bank draft, uncashed, to this day. Ms Thomas refused again, notwithstanding that this request was properly formatted and came, this time, through legal representatives acting on the actual student’s behalf.
Consider the asymmetry. An unauthorised third party, with no institutional standing and no legal entitlement, was given the complete file on request. The actual subject of that file, requesting it lawfully and then again through solicitors, was refused twice.
When we finally obtained the material years later – by which point it had lost most of its practical use to the litigation it should have informed – the reason for Ms Thomas’s refusal became clear. The AFP had directed her not to release it.
An Organisation That Is Not Neutral
It would be convenient, for the AFP, if this were a story about one bad letter from one bitter man, contained and finished by 2002. It is not. The pattern of favourable treatment Mr Marina received did not end with the letter; it structured the following decade and a half of investigative decisions, and it is worth pausing on why that matters institutionally rather than only personally.
A police force is not merely a collection of individual officers, some fair-minded and some not. It is a set of standing operating assumptions about which complainants are credible, which documents deserve scrutiny, and which relationships are worth protecting. When a commander can review a letter that states three times, in three different formulations, that an entire racial group is disposed to lying and criminality, and conclude that it discloses no offence, that finding is not simply wrong about one letter. It suggests an operating assumption in which racial generalisations directed at Aboriginal people, even when deployed instrumentally to secure someone’s dismissal, sit within the range of what the organisation is prepared to treat as unremarkable. I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it as rhetorical flourish. Some members of the AFP have, in other contexts entirely separate from my own case, been publicly identified as having associations with people who self-identify as white supremacists. I raise that not to conflate every officer with that fringe, which would be its own kind of unfairness, but to note that the organisation’s own internal accountability mechanisms have, on the public record, struggled to treat those associations as disqualifying. An organisation that struggles to treat association with self-identified white supremacists as a serious internal problem is not well positioned to have treated a letter calling Aboriginal people “compulsive liars and criminals” as anything other than routine.
That is the context in which Mr Marina’s boast about “friends in the AFP” should be read. It was not empty bravado. It described, on this evidence, an organisation whose informal culture was permissive enough that a man who had already demonstrated open racial contempt for Aboriginal people in writing could nonetheless expect – and receive – cooperation, protection from scrutiny, and eventually the use of the AFP’s own prosecutorial machinery against the very person he had targeted.
Why Would the AFP Do That?
This is the question the whole essay turns on, and I think the documents go a long way toward answering it.
The public interest disclosure Mr Marina lodged in December 2003 – the document that started everything, the root from which the 2017 prosecution eventually grew – relied on information drawn from the University of London and from Ernst & Young Canberra, which happened to be the Commissioner’s own immediate prior employer. Mr Marina had no right to seek information from any of these sources. He also sought material from the ANZ Bank, the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department, and the University of Sydney – institutions the Commissioner had worked for or studied at years earlier. I hold documentation of each of these inquiries Mr Marina made, and can produce it.
When I contacted the University of London through my firm, I included a copy of Mr Marina’s 9 May 2002 letter, to demonstrate that his information-gathering was part of a racially motivated vendetta – a letter which, as set out above, does not require much interpretive generosity to read as expressing views consistent with white supremacist ideology. Even with that letter in front of her, Ms Thomas still refused to hand over the material to the actual student.
The material that eventually surfaced explains why. It showed that the document underpinning the 2003 disclosure – and by extension underpinning the AFP’s pursuit of the Commissioner, and eventually his family, for the following decade and a half – was fraudulent. It also contained material suggesting Mr Marina had made racially charged comments in his own correspondence with the university.
There is a further evidentiary problem worth setting out plainly, because it goes to the heart of what the AFP was actually relying on. The material Ernst & Young provided existed only as photocopies: no original signature, and the signature that was photocopied onto it was not the Commissioner’s and did not represent any approval he gave. Separately, the AFP tendered into evidence a handwritten application that it claimed came from the University of London. It is not written in the Commissioner’s handwriting. Where it actually came from is a question that, to this day, has never been satisfactorily answered – and it is a question that could have been answered decades ago, cleanly and conclusively, if the University of London had simply released the Commissioner’s own student file when he first lawfully asked for it.
Put the sequence together: an unauthorised racist obtains a file he has no right to; the genuine subject of that file is refused it, twice, through lawful channels; the AFP directs the university to keep refusing; and the disputed material – unsigned photocopies and handwriting that isn’t the Commissioner’s – becomes, over the following fifteen years, the evidentiary spine of a criminal prosecution that a jury unanimously rejected. I do not think that sequence is a coincidence. On the documents I hold, it looks like a protective arrangement operating through paperwork rather than through anything more explicit – which is, if anything, the more troubling possibility, because it requires no single person to have made an obviously corrupt decision.
It is worth dwelling on how mundane each individual step in that chain looks from the inside of the institution responsible for it. A registrar declining to release a student’s own file is, in isolation, a data-protection decision – the kind of thing universities make thousands of times a year for defensible reasons. A police force declining to act on a discrimination complaint is, in isolation, a resourcing or evidentiary judgment call. A prosecutor proceeding to trial despite defence objections to a document’s authenticity is, in isolation, simply prosecutorial discretion – courts exist precisely to resolve exactly that kind of dispute. Each of these decisions, defended on its own terms, sounds like ordinary institutional caution. It is only when you notice that every one of these ordinary, defensible, institutionally cautious decisions happened to fall in the same direction, against the same Aboriginal person, over the same fifteen-year period, that caution stops being a sufficient explanation on its own. Institutional racism does not typically require a conspiracy or a written policy. It can require only that a series of individually defensible discretionary calls consistently break one way when an Aboriginal person is on the other side of them – and that no one within the institution is required to notice, let alone explain, the pattern that discretion has quietly produced.
Testing the Alternative Explanations
I have made a serious allegation – that a pattern of institutional decisions across fifteen years amounts to racially motivated protection of a false accuser – and a serious allegation deserves to be tested against its strongest competing explanations, not just its weakest ones. Three non-racial explanations seem worth taking on directly.
The first is that the AFP genuinely believed, at each stage, that it was acting on credible evidence, and that what looks like a pattern from the outside is really a series of independent, good-faith misjudgements. This is the most charitable reading available, and I do not dismiss it lightly. But it struggles against the specific sequence of events here. Good-faith error does not usually survive being told, by name, by qualified lawyers, before trial, that the central document is inauthentic – and then proceed anyway to a sixteen-count prosecution resting on witnesses a jury goes on to disbelieve unanimously. A single misjudgement is consistent with good faith. A misjudgement that is flagged in advance, ignored, and then vindicated by the jury’s verdict is harder to place in that category.
The second is that the University of London’s repeated refusals were simply routine data-protection caution, unconnected to the AFP. This explanation runs directly into the asymmetry described above: the same registrar released the file, without authority, to a third party who was not the student, and then twice refused it to the student himself, through two separately constituted lawful requests. Ordinary data-protection caution does not typically produce that particular asymmetry – it is difficult to construct a routine-caution account that explains why the unauthorised outsider succeeded where the file’s own subject, acting through solicitors, failed twice.
The third is that Mr Marina’s usefulness to the AFP had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with some other institutional interest – protecting a source, for instance, or avoiding the embarrassment of admitting an earlier investigation had been mishandled. This is plausible in the abstract, and institutions do sometimes protect their own errors rather than the people who exposed them. But it does not explain the content of the founding document. Whatever secondary institutional interests were later in play, the letter that started this chain of events grounds its request for dismissal explicitly in a racial generalisation about Aboriginal people, stated three times. An account of institutional self-protection has to explain why an organisation would choose to protect that letter, and that letter-writer, rather than simply distancing itself from both. I have not found a version of the self-protection explanation that accounts for this without ultimately returning to race as part of the reason the letter was treated as an asset rather than a liability.
None of this proves motive in the way a court requires. What it does, I think, is show that the documentary record does not sit comfortably with the available non-racial explanations, and sits considerably more comfortably with the racial one.
A Note On Jason Arday
I raise Jason Arday’s case here for one narrow reason, and I want to be precise about the limits of the comparison. I am not asserting anything about the merits of Arday’s case, the strength of the concerns raised about him, or the motives of anyone involved in the Liverpool John Moore University (LJMU) review or in Nathan Cofnas’s public commentary – I do not have the standing or the evidence to make those judgements, and this essay is not the place to attempt it. What I am pointing to is a structural shape, not a verdict: a pattern, visible across very different institutions and eras, in which a challenge to a Black or Indigenous professional’s position gains institutional traction not because the underlying evidence has been rigorously tested, but because the surrounding institutions find it easier to accept the challenge than to interrogate it. Whether that shape fits the Arday case on its facts is a separate question, for a separate piece, resting on its own evidence.
Where This Leaves Things
I won my own case 16-0. I am still, years later, working to establish exactly why it was ever brought. The documents I hold – the FOI correspondence, the uncashed bank draft, the record of Mr Marina’s unauthorised inquiries to the ANZ Bank, the Attorney-General’s Department and the University of Sydney, the AFP’s own 2008 finding – do not, on their own, prove racism in the sense a court requires. But they describe, with real consistency, an institution that behaved as if the truth of the underlying allegations mattered less than protecting the process that had already been set in motion.
I have an obvious interest in how this is read: this material forms part of a submission currently being prepared for the UN Human Rights Committee, prepared with a New York-based human rights attorney. I set that interest out plainly rather than leave a reader to infer it. It does not, I think, change what the documents say. It does mean readers are entitled to weigh my account accordingly, and to ask their own questions of the record – which, where it can be shared consistently with protecting people who did not choose to be part of this story, I am willing to make available.
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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, August 2026
Police corruption at his finest. The needs to be a thorough internal investigation into the Australian Federal Police did, and appropriate charges need to be laid, once that investigation has concluded. If the investigation concludes no charges are warranty, it will again a show that the AFP is nothing more than a protection record in a cover-up..
Time and time again the Australian Federal Police are called out for the racism time, and time again, the allegations are ignored by the government. Why? Because the government uses the AFP to be its stand over merchants when criticism of the government starts to get out of hand..
The AFP have these matters run, unaddressed, for a quarter for century. They’re going to pay a big price in the United Nations when we finally get it there. By big price, I mean the big reputational hit they will take, and they’re going to be held up on the world stage for the racist institution that they is.
Something that we can’t allow to others to forget in all the noise around Angel Marina and the AFP. The man who headed the ACT DPP during Bakchos’ racially charged prosecution was Jon White. The same Jon White who was as recently elevated to a judge in the ACT Supreme Court. That’s entrenching racism in the ACT just-us system.
Here’s the link to the post about Judge Jon White:
https://blakandblack.com/2026/06/24/appointment-without-accountability-jon-white-the-act-dpp-and-the-long-shadow-of-a-political-prosecution/?unapproved=17938&moderation-hash=c2e1de1956292d2a85107b5f3826ccdd#comment-17938
There is a problem with justice if a low level public servant like Angel Marina can abuse this position to access material on his line manager that he knows he is not entitled to access and the only reason he was able to access it, was because he misused his official position to get that material and then the so-called justice system close ranks around him because the target of his actions was an Indigenous person. This becomes more pronounced because of the letter Angel Marina wrote on 9 May 2002, which is outrageously disgusting and racist.
Nothing spells fit-up more than when the AFP direct a university not to handover documents to a student, that the student is legally entitled to under the university’s own policies.