Dan Duggan has spent more than four years in maximum-security custody while fighting extradition to the United States, raising fundamental questions about Australian sovereignty and citizens’ rights.
Through the pivot to Asia, successive Force Posture Reviews from 2011 to 2023 and AUKUS, Australian leaders have passed most of our sovereignty to Washington in military matters, and in some areas of foreign policy as well. Now the government is about to do the same with the rights of Australian citizens. Many observers have deplored the fact that an Australian citizen is about to be extradited to the United States on criminal charges compiled by a US grand jury without proper legal scrutiny or procedure.
This is an urgent update.
Dan Duggan was a US Marine pilot who left America, renounced his US citizenship, and became an Australian citizen in January 2012. He married an Australian and he is the father of three in their family of six children. In his new life, Duggan operated a civilian flying school in Tasmania. From 2010 to 2012, he made three brief visits to South Africa, where he was employed by the Test Flight Academy of South Africa to train its staff pilots and assist with a civilian test pilot course which included some Chinese as clients. He trained his pupils on a T2 Buckeye, an obsolete three-seat trainer built by North American Aviation in 1958. The aircraft was renowned for its in-flight stability and tolerance of pilot mistakes, but was decommissioned and replaced in the US Navy by the McDonnell Douglas T45 Goshawk in 2008.
On 12 September 2017, a grand jury in the United States indicted Duggan in the Washington District Court of Columbia on four charges: one count of money laundering, one of conspiracy to defraud, and two of violating an arms embargo. More specifically, the grand jury alleged that Duggan conspired to teach Chinese pilots to approach and land on aircraft carriers, no doubt in anticipation of crewing the yet-to-be commissioned Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning.
In late 2022, then Australian attorney-general Mark Dreyfus agreed to a Washington request to extradite Duggan. His successor, Michelle Rowland, has done nothing to overturn that decision. This is despite the fact that nothing Duggan did in South Africa or elsewhere breached Australian law.
In what appears to be genuflection to Washington, Duggan was ‘provisionally arrested’ in Orange, NSW, on 21 October 2022 and has been held without trial at the Macquarie Correctional Centre maximum-security facility for more than 1,000 days, many of them spent in solitary confinement.
US grand jury procedures are dodgy to say the least. Hearsay evidence is permitted. The jury can take evidence ex parte, without the presence of the accused. The one that indicted Duggan gave no details of his alleged training, no precise details of his flight activities in South Africa, no details or dates, no names of the people he trained or of those who did the training, and no evidence that the training related to aircraft carrier landing procedures, including about approach, landing, and touch-and-go take-off.
On 22 October, I spoke by telephone to Dan Duggan. He was intelligent and articulate, and highly concerned about his incarceration. He very much missed his family, and dreaded what might happen to him if he is extradited.
I also spoke to some of Duggan’s supporters, including Duggan’s principal lawyer, Bernard Collaery, the solicitor renowned for defending Witness K in the legal saga involving Australian intelligence bugging of the East Timor cabinet in 2004. Collaery has been handling Duggan’s case for much of the drama, but is not hopeful that extradition can be prevented.
On 23 October, I also spoke to Sister Susan Connelly, a member of the Josephite Justice Network, a humanitarian Catholic organisation based in Sydney. Susan has been very active in opposing the treatment of Duggan. She recalls how she attended a preliminary court hearing in Canberra with about 40 other protesters some time ago. Without explanation, the hearing was moved to a smaller court with not enough seating for the protesters. A shackled Duggan was brought in and placed in a glass box as if he were a dangerous criminal.
Sister Susan is about to organise a novena in Australia, a public prayer meeting lasting nine days, a tradition observed mainly in the Catholic Church. I am sceptical that her novena will achieve anything to give the Australian attorney-general or her department second thoughts about whether to continue extraditing Dan Duggan, himself a good Catholic. But I wished her the best of luck in her call on the Almighty.
On 3 November, President Trump and his Republicans face mid-term elections. Because of Trump’s mercurial way of making decisions, we have no certainty that he knows or cares about Duggan’s case. If he does, he could go either way – proceed with extradition or quash it. With no evident pressure from the Australian government to overturn extradition, a release for Duggan is unlikely.
Richard Broinowski AO is a former Australian diplomat, general manager of Radio Australia and adjunct professor at the Universities of Canberra and Sydney. He has published eight books, the latest being an expansion of his 2003 book Fact or Fission – the truth about Australia’ nuclear ambitions. The later edition includes extra chapters on Australia’s intention to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. (Scribe 2022). Richard Broinowski was a senior Australian diplomat who served in Iran in the 1970s and the Australian Ambassador to Cuba in the mid-1990s.