By Dr Dan Mealey
Every Australian, every veteran, every lawyer, every human rights advocate, and every person who still believes citizenship should mean something, ought to be deeply unnerved.
Dan Duggan is not a convicted man.
He’s an Australian citizen, a father of 6, a former US Marine Corps pilot, and a man who has denied the allegations against him. Yet he’s been held in custody in Australia since 2022, reportedly in maximum-security conditions, while the US seeks to prosecute him over allegations that he unlawfully helped train Chinese military pilots in South Africa more than a decade ago. If convicted in the US, he could face a sentence measured not in years, but in decades. ABC has reported a possible sentence of up to 65 years.
Allegedly (a word now forgotten by our deteriorating media and justice culture), Duggan received payments connected with aviation training later characterised by the US as unlawful military assistance to China. The allegations relate to conduct between 2009 and 2012. Duggan denies wrongdoing. Reuters has reported that he argued his alleged conduct did not constitute a crime in Australia under the dual criminality principle, though the Federal Court dismissed his legal challenge and found no jurisdictional error.
This is no longer merely about Dan Duggan.
It’s about whether Australia will allow an allied power to reach into our country, seize an Australian citizen, and remove him to face catastrophic punishment for decade-old conduct that was not, at the time, treated by Australia as some great national betrayal.
It’s about whether Australian citizenship has any real protective force.
It’s about whether veterans with specialist skills: pilots, medics, intelligence personnel, cyber operators, engineers, logisticians and special operations soldiers, can ever truly leave service and rebuild civilian lives without a foreign state later reinterpreting their employment through the lens of a new, geopolitical moral panic.
And it’s about whether we are now prepared to throw veterans under a bus driven by political leaders who have spent decades doing business with the very nations they now accuse individual servicemen of assisting.
Let’s be honest here.
Australia is not at war with China.
The United States is not at war with China.
Australia has built enormous prosperity through trade with China. Our political class, corporate class, university sector, agricultural sector, mining sector and investment class have all grown fat at the CCP’s Yum Cha.
Former prime ministers, senior ministers, board members, consultants, vice-chancellors, exporters and mining executives have all participated in, defended, profited from or normalised Australia’s engagement with China.
Former Victorian Premier Dan Andrews faced intense criticism and sensational headlines in September 2025 for attending a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military parade in Beijing, where he was photographed alongside leaders including Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un.
BHP’s Olympic Dam mine in South Australia is one of the world’s major copper, uranium, gold and silver deposits, and Australia’s uranium industry has long operated in a world where strategic, commercial and moral lines are not always clean. World Nuclear News reported as far back as 2008 that Australia had begun shipping uranium to China under bilateral arrangements, while noting Olympic Dam as one of Australia’s uranium mining locations.
So the question must be asked plainly.
Why is the burden of moral purity now falling on one veteran pilot?
Why is a former military aviator, who allegedly worked in an international aviation training context more than a decade ago, being treated as though he alone personifies the West’s compromised relationship with China?
Why are the powerful allowed nuance, commerce, diplomacy and plausible deniability, while the veteran gets handcuffs, solitary humiliation, extradition and the threat of dying in a foreign prison?
That is the dangerous precedent. Not simply that Dan Duggan may be extradited. But that veterans may now find themselves uniquely exposed to retrospective geopolitical punishment, while civilians and politicians who operated in far murkier waters enjoy protection, pensions, board appointments and then journalists’ praise for it all.
We’ve watched this pattern before.
We saw it again in the treatment of Ben Roberts-Smith VC, MG. Whatever narrative about him his enemies hoped to invent, Australians still saw a soldier who had carried the burdens of war on behalf of a country that became far too eager to sneer at him. His arrest became a spectacle that woke up the world to the plight of Australian veterans, and that spectacle should shame us. Duggan’s case is different, but the instinct is familiar: isolate the veteran, strip away the presumption of decency, and let the machine do the rest.
When veterans are useful, they are honoured.
When politically inconvenient, they are abandoned.
When their service suits the national myth, they are heroes.
When their existence complicates the preferred narrative, they are isolated, investigated, and publicly shamed.
The treatment of Dan Duggan has become one more example of Coalition veterans being discarded by the same political and military establishments that once relied upon their discipline, skill, and loyalty.
And now the danger is bigger than one man.
If this extradition proceeds, every veteran with dual-use expertise should be asking: what work can I safely do after service? What foreign client will later be declared unacceptable? What training, consultancy, advisory role, contract, aviation task, security job or technical service might be reclassified years later as “criminal?” What happens if the law of an allied nation follows me into civilian life, across borders, across citizenship, across time?
This is why Australians must call on the Governor-General to act.
Not because the Governor-General should recklessly override the courts. Not because the office should become a political weapon. But because the Governor-General is not merely a ribbon-cutting ornament. The Governor-General has constitutional and statutory duties and acts on ministerial advice, advice for which ministers remain responsible to Parliament and ultimately to the Australian people.
Australians must demand that the Governor-General ask the questions that the political class appears desperate to avoid:
Is this extradition just?
Is it proportionate?
Is it in Australia’s sovereign interest?
Is it acceptable that an Australian citizen, not convicted of these allegations, has spent years in custody while a foreign power prepares to remove him for conduct said to have occurred more than a decade ago?
Is it acceptable that veterans who served Western nations can be pursued in this way while the commercial and political architects of our China dependency stroll untouched through the front doors of Parliament House, universities, consultancies and boardrooms?
This moment calls not for silence, but for pressure.
Human rights lawyers should intervene.
Veterans’ organisations should speak.
Members of Parliament should be forced to answer.
The Attorney-General should be asked to reconsider.
And the Governor-General should be called upon, respectfully but firmly, to require the most serious ministerial advice before Australia permits this surrender to proceed.
Dan Duggan’s case should be heard with justice, not geopolitical theatre.
If the United States has a case, let it be scrutinised with fairness, proportionality and full regard to the rights of an Australian citizen. But Australia should not behave like a provincial branch office of Washington. We are either a sovereign nation, or we aren’t. Citizenship either means something, or it doesn’t. Veterans are either protected by the country they served and later called home, or they are disposable men to be traded when diplomatic winds change.
If Australians allow this to pass quietly, then the precedent will stand: that a veteran can serve, migrate, naturalise, raise a family, build a civilian life, and still be seized years later when the politics of the world shift around him.
This is not how a decent country treats its citizens.
Australia must not hand Daniel Duggan to the machine.