In the first place the campaign was futile and unnecessary.

Official Histories - Second World War - Volume VII - The Final Campaigns (1st edition, 1963) - Gavin Long
Chapter 9 - The Floods and the Cease Fire
238 FLOODS AND CEASE FIRE 1945

From an early stage in the operations the troops knew that the value of the campaign, and of their efforts, was being questioned by politicians and newspapers at home. The following extracts from a history of the 42nd Battalion express views fairly widely held:

In the first place the campaign was futile and unnecessary.
At Salamaua men went after the lap because every inch of ground won meant so much less distance to Tokyo. But what did an inch of ground — or a mile — mean on Bougainville? Nothing!
Whether Bougainville could be taken in a week or a year would make no difference to the war in general. Every man knew this.
The Bougainville campaign was a politicians' war and served no other purpose than to keep men in the fight. They would have been much better employed on the farms, the mines and in building industries in Australia. Why they were not can only be answered by the few who decided that Australians must be kept in the war at all costs.
Every risk taken at Bougainville was one that could not be avoided; every life lost was begrudged. Men fought because there was no alternative. None wanted to lose his life on Bougainville . . . But despite all this men did fight and fought well. Lieut-Colonel Byrne said of the battalion: "I think that collectively the officers and men of the battalion did a grand job. It was filthy country; they were fighting what appeared to be a useless campaign and they knew it. Men are not fools and even though each man realised he was fighting for something which could benefit his country very little (and in addition his fighting received very little credit or publicity) he carried out orders energetically and in a very fine spirit “ 8

The small amount of publicity given to this and other Australian campaigns of 1945 in the Australian newspapers was undoubtedly a main cause of dissatisfaction. An education officer on Bougainville wrote to the Broadcasting Commission to complain about the dictation-speed news broadcast for the troops. He pointed out that more than half the time was usually given to crimes and accidents in Australia — for example, of the total of 45 minutes 15 had recently been allotted to describing how a man had been bitten by a stingray in St Kilda Baths and how a woman had jumped from an upstairs window, nearly 30 minutes to news of the Russian front, less than a minute each to other fronts, and nothing at all to Bougainville or New Guinea. "The reason for the stingray story as any news editor will affirm, is that `the public is war-weary and does not want to read about the war', wrote a diarist. `But the men up here aren't, and they want to know what goes on in the world'." Also they wanted to be assured that the people at home were being told about their achievements.
It was widely agreed that a policy whereby army public relations officers sent personal paragraphs about men fighting on Bougainville to appropriate small-town newspapers had a notable effect on the spirits of the men.

8 Benson, pp. 157-8 .
Benson, S. E. The Story of the 42 Aust . Inf. Bn . Sydney, Dymock's Book Arcade for 42nd Battalion Association, 1952 .