Nick Feik

There's still speculation as to why he resigned, but the pressure was rising on a number of fronts, some of which we've discussed.

And the

Brereton had earlier told Parliament and the NAC had also said that he'd resigned his position before becoming the NAC Commissioner.

But this wasn't true.

As we've discussed, he was still commissioning.

And we know that Brereton was currently under investigation by the oversight.

Gail Furness, she's the NAC Inspector, a kind of oversight role that she has.

She had an investigation running.

into his defence ties.

And that was what primarily was the basis of a series of quite testy questions between Brereton and David Shoebridge and Senator Pocock also.

So after having heard from the Attorney-General's office, having heard from the NAC Commissioner, the NAC Deputy Commissioners, the NAC Inspector herself turns up, Gail Furness, and she reveals in something of a bombshell that she's undertaken another investigation.

This is a third investigation into a complaint about Brereton's conduct.

We'd just sat through an hour and a half of Brereton and his fellow commissioners and the CEO fronting up to Senate estimates.

They hadn't even mentioned this.

Gail Furness gets up and the first thing she says is, oh, by the way, it only started last month.

Yeah, exactly.

It was also revealed that the second investigation that she'd been looking into, it had been going back and forth between her and Commissioner Brereton's office, that he'd run up $204,000 in legal fees paid by the taxpayer to defend himself from whatever her findings are, which we don't know yet.

So the first one we already know about, that was the officer misconduct finding that was in relation to the Robodet findings.

The second one is ongoing.

It's into Brereton's defence ties.