[5] The report found evidence of 39 murders of civilians and prisoners by (or at the instruction of) members of the Australian special forces, which were subsequently covered up by ADF personnel.

[9][11]: 119–121 [Note 1] The report found evidence of the practice of "throwdowns", where Australian troops would carry weapons and equipment not issued by the ADF for the purposes of planting on civilians killed in combat.

[11]: 29  The report speculates that throwdowns started for the "less egregious though still dishonest" purpose of avoiding scrutiny when legitimate combatants were later found to not be armed, but later evolved into the concealment of intentional unlawful murders.

[27][28][29] In December 2020, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton appointed a former Judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria, Mark Weinberg, as the Special Investigator.

[34] In November 2020, the house of a former Army intelligence officer who had provided the Brereton inquiry and Australian Federal Police with evidence of unlawful killings by the SASR was attacked and damaged.

Chris Moraitis told a Senate Estimates committee that it may take 1–5 years before evidence can be presented to the Director of Public Prosections and prosecutions can begin.

"[42] This triggered the response from the Australian Government and MPs from various parties condemning Zhao's remarks as "repugnant", "deeply offensive" and "utterly outrageous", with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison publicly demanding that the Chinese Government apologise,[43][44] and appealing to Twitter to directly remove the "falsified image", but has yet to receive any response from Twitter.

The Chinese Government has rebuffed Morrison's calls for apology, defending Zhao's conduct and stating that Australia should apologise for the loss of lives in Afghanistan.

[47][48] Former 2GB broadcaster and conservative "shock jock" commentator Alan Jones wrote an opinion piece on The Daily Telegraph criticizing Scott Morrison for "talking about our troops in a way that gave Beijing an odious line of attack",[49] and former prime minister Tony Abbott also wrote an opinion piece calling "it's time to muscle up against China".

[50] Western Australian MP and the current Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, Andrew Hastie, himself a former SASR captain and an outspoken anti-CCP figure, criticized the release timing of the 2016 Crompvoets report ahead of the Brereton Report as detailing "unproven rumours" and "has undermined public confidence in the process and allowed the People’s Republic of China to malign our troops",[51] and described Zhao's tweet as "a repugnant slur" and "calculated, deliberate and designed to undermine the political and social cohesion of our country... enabled by Silicon Valley social media oligarchs".

[52] This was following Hastie's statements from a week prior that he was "grieved by the findings" and "feel great shame" by the "warrior ethos" that was "about power, ego and self-adulation... worshipped war itself... the opposite of the humility that I expected to find at SASR"[53][54] and admitted to have knowledge of similar incidents when he served SASR in Afghanistan, but he disagreed with the Federal handling of the cases because "we can't ventilate everything in public... can't spill all our secrets into the open", and suggested "we can do so... behind closed doors in a protected classified space" by establishing a joint standing committee.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the post as "un-factual" while the French government described the tweet as "unworthy of diplomatic methods" and an "insult to all countries whose armed forces had been engaged in Afghanistan".

[56][57] Ardern's comment was immediately rebuffed during a daily press conference by Hua Chunying, the director of the Chinese Foreign Ministry Information Department, who questioned "Can it be that New Zealand agrees with or even supports Australia's deeds?