David McBride left the Alexander Maconochie Centre in Canberra on Thursday morning, released on parole after serving 27 months of a five year and eight month sentence for taking classified defence documents and passing them to journalists.
Thursday was the first day he was eligible. Parole for Commonwealth offenders is decided by the federal Attorney-General rather than by a state or territory board. A spokesperson for Attorney-General Michelle Rowland confirmed the grant to Australian Associated Press and declined to say anything further, noting that the government does not comment on individual parole matters.
McBride, a former army lawyer, collected 235 documents from defence offices between 2014 and 2015. Of those, 207 were classified secret. He gave them to ABC journalists in 2016, and the reporting that followed, published as the Afghan Files, set out allegations that Australian special forces personnel had unlawfully killed Afghan civilians.
He was charged in 2018. In November 2023, after the court upheld a Commonwealth intervention that withheld evidence the government argued could damage national security, he pleaded guilty to three charges of obtaining and disseminating classified defence information. Sentencing followed in May 2024, with a non-parole period of two years and three months. The ACT Supreme Court rejected his appeal in early 2025 and the High Court refused him special leave that October.
“It's a beautiful day to be free," the 62 year old told reporters from his car on Thursday.”
Former senator Rex Patrick, who founded the Whistleblower Justice Fund and campaigned for McBride's release, said he had been brave in exposing what he saw. "I salute David who walks away from prison with his head held high," Patrick said.
The inquiry that ran alongside the reporting reached its own conclusions. The Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force published its Afghanistan report in November 2020. It found credible information of 23 incidents in which 39 Afghans were unlawfully killed by Australian special forces personnel, and referred 19 people for criminal investigation.
Nobody referred by that inquiry has yet stood trial. The first person charged, in 2023, is still working through pre-trial argument over what classified material can be put before a jury, and prosecutors have told the court there is no realistic prospect of a trial starting this year.
McBride's convictions stand. Parole moves him into the community for the balance of the sentence rather than ending it, and the three convictions remain on his record.
He is out with more than three years of that sentence still to run. The prosecutions arising from the conduct his documents described are not expected to reach a courtroom before 2027.
