Australian Politics
Government considers poaching defence talent from overseas in major shift
I can see no reason why we should reject applicants from culturally similar nations such as Britain, New Zealand and Canada. British army people in particular would be very likely to come here. ADF procedures are based on British ones so adaptation to Australia would take no time at all
The idea of enlisting people from Pacific nations such as Tonga and Samoa is a little less obvious but it might be noted that the British army has a large contingent of such people
Foreign citizens could be allowed to serve in the Australian military under options being explored by the federal government as it seeks to fix a recruitment and retention crisis.
The government has set an ambitious goal of adding 18,500 uniformed personnel by 2040, a 30 per cent increase on the current level of about 60,000, but the Defence Force is struggling to maintain its current staffing numbers.
Longstanding defence policy states that only Australian citizens can serve in the military, with exemptions granted only in “very rare and exceptional circumstances”.
Defence Personnel Minister Matt Keogh said on Friday that “we are certainly looking at all options that we need to look at in terms of how we can grow our Defence Force and that includes looking at how we might be able to grow it from friendly forces”.
Keogh, who is serving as acting defence minister, told ABC radio the government was looking at “opportunities for people to come to Australia, or who are already in Australia, from other countries to join our Defence Force”.
Asked which foreign nationals could be allowed to serve in the Australian military, Keogh said the government was “looking at the Pacific, but we’re also looking more broadly than that because we recognise the importance of growing our Defence Force”.
A critical shortage of skilled workers has seen the Defence Force offering junior and middle ranks cash bonuses of $50,000 to sign on for another three years.
The idea is a sensitive one, with some senior military figures opposed to foreigners serving in the Defence Force because they believe there should be a direct link between citizenship and military service.
This masthead reported last year that the federal opposition and leading military experts were calling on the Albanese government to consider allowing foreigners to fight under the Australian flag to boost the number of uniformed personnel.
Opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie said at the time that “with immigration about to increase, we should consider opening service in the ADF as an accelerated pathway to citizenship”.
‘This will make us weaker’: Army restructure faces backlash
“If someone is willing to fight and die for our country, we should take them over a $5 million golden visa any day of the week,” he said.
Other nations allow non-citizens to serve in their militaries, most famously the French Foreign Legion and the British Army’s brigade of Nepalese Gurkhas.
Defence experts have said a shortage of navy personnel is probably one of the reasons why Australia last month declined to send a warship to join an international coalition protecting shipping routes through the Red Sea.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did not go into detail on Friday when asked about the proposal to allow foreign fighters, but said the government was seeking to boost interoperability with other nations such as New Zealand.
Retired major-general Mick Ryan said the government should consider creating a Pacific Islands regiment and allowing non-citizens from friendly nations to serve in the Defence Force.
“Why shouldn’t a Japanese citizen be able to join the Australian military if they want to make a contribution to the nation?” Ryan asked.
Peter Jennings, a former deputy secretary for strategy in the Defence Department, said the ADF faced a massive problem with recruitment and bold solutions were needed.
“Just doing another advertising campaign during the cricket is not going to cut it,” he said.
The radical proposal to recruit foreigners to fight for Australia
Keogh said there would be complexities involved in implementing the proposal, and any non-citizens would need to be subject to careful security vetting and consultation with other nations.
With the need for skilled workers widely acknowledged as a significant challenge for the AUKUS security pact, the Royal Australian Navy has launched a major recruitment drive to find hundreds of personnel to support the shift to nuclear-powered submarines and make more staff available to train with the United States and Britain.
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Australian gays hostile to Israel
Supreme idiocy. In Gaza they would be thrown fron a high building, as Mohammed commanded in the Hadiths. They are hostile to the one place in the Middle East where they would be safe. There are obviously some queers whose brains are as dysfunctional as their sexuality
Veteran gay rights campaigners Kerryn Phelps and Jackie Stricker-Phelps have joined a chorus of members of the LGBTIQA+ Jewish community expressing dismay at an open letter on the Israel-Hamas war issued by the chief executive of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
The couple, who led the marriage equality movement in Australia, say the conduct of Mardi Gras leadership has made them feel marginalised, after Dayenu – a key body representing Sydney’s gay Jewish community on Thursday warned that it was reconsidering participating in this year’s famous event due to concerns over the safety of its members.
Dr Phelps, a GP and former AMA president and independent federal MP, said she had contacted Mardi Gras organisers after chief executive Gil Beckwith last month released an open letter to Anthony Albanese calling for “an immediate and enduring ceasefire in Gaza.”
“I was really not satisfied with the response,” said Dr Phelps, who converted to Reform Judaism more than 20 years ago after committing to her relationship with now wife Ms Stricker-Phelps, who was born Jewish and had many family members killed in the Holocaust.
“The statement was silent on the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, and its impact on Israel, and on the Australian Jewish community. They only spoke of violence in Gaza.
“There was no statement about Hamas, or the treatment of the LGBT+ community in Gaza, or in Palestinian culture.
“I have yet to see a statement from Sydney Mardi Gras about life for LGBTIQ people in Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or Yemen or Afghanistan.
“Where are the statements about other conflicts, and where are the statements about countries where the LGBT+ community risks the death penalty, persecution, and violence?
“The best that can be said about this statement is that it is well-meaning but highly selective. As a humanitarian, I understand the distress about all people affected by the October 7 attacks and its aftermath. Realistically, there can be no lasting ceasefire unless all hostages are safely returned, and Hamas is disarmed.”
Ms Stricker-Phelps said the letter mentioned violence only in Gaza, making no mention of the October 7 attack on Israel.
“They are advocating for a culture where they would not last five minutes as an out and proud gay or lesbian person. The Israeli gay and lesbian community, by contrast, has the support of their government and culture, so it is a false equivalence,” she said.
“I have fought hard for equality for the LGBT+ community for over 20 years, and am shocked at the statement by Mardi Gras, which further marginalises the Jewish gay and lesbian community. It is at best misguided, and at worst reckless.”
Mardi Gras organisers did not respond to a request for comment.
Queer Israeli woman Ofra Ronen, who has lived in Australia since 2003, founded new national group “Jewish-Israeli Pride Australia” late last year, “out of the need to counter the threats and exclusions that LGBTQI Jews face in online and offline spaces, especially from those who deny Israel’s right to exist”.
“It is in my opinion a much bigger issue than do we feel safe to go to Mardi Gras,” Ms Ronen said. “We haven’t felt safe since October.”
Ms Ronen, of Sydney, said she had been working with the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies on ways to ensure the safety and wellbeing of queer Jews during Mardi Gras celebrations in February and March, as well as in the LGBTIQA+ community more broadly.
She said a Melbourne cell of JIPA was working with Victoria’s Pride Centre to discuss concerns over the safety of Jewish community members at the upcoming Midsumma festival.
Fellow Jewish gay man Joshua Roth lives across from Sydney’s Hyde Park, which has become home to anti-Israel protests since October.
“For almost three months, at least once a week, I have had to sit in my apartment and hear genocidal calls for the end of Israel and the Jewish people,” he said.
“I will not be boycotting Mardi Gras this year just because I am deeply ashamed of the organisation. I will be boycotting it because I am scared. The hatred for Jews and Israel has trickled into every corner of society, and organisations like Mardi Gras are to blame by endorsing this behaviour.
“Instead, as this year’s parade proceeds below my apartment, I will fly my Israeli flags and sadly not my rainbow flag. The Mardi Gras organisers have forced me to choose between two sides of my identity – how is that in line with what they claim to represent?”
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Republic on ice after Indigenous voice referendum failure
Labor has junked plans to hold a republic referendum in the next term of parliament, with the Albanese government vowing to keep its focus on the cost of living after losing public support during the voice debate.
Assistant Minister for the Republic Matt Thistlethwaite said the failure of the voice had made it “a lot harder” to hold a referendum on the republic if the government won a second term, as was initially planned.
“It’s not a priority at the moment,” Mr Thistlethwaite told The Weekend Australian. “The priority for the government at the moment is obviously dealing with cost-of-living pressure and assisting households and businesses to get through this difficult time.”
But Mr Thistlethwaite said an Australian republic remained Labor policy “for the longer term” and it was something that should be discussed with the public “at some stage”.
The government’s delay on pursuing a republic comes as Anthony Albanese this week confirmed King Charles would visit Australia this year.
Monarchists have accused Mr Thistlethwaite of showing disrespect to Queen Elizabeth, after documents obtained under freedom of information showed he met senior bureaucrats to discuss referendums just six days after the former monarch died.
Mr Thistlethwaite said the meeting with senior officials from the Attorney-General’s Department on September 14, 2022, had been planned before the queen died and they decided during discussions it was the wrong time to pursue a republic referendum.
“This was a longstanding meeting that had been organised, prior to the queen’s passing, with departmental representatives,” he said. “It was the first meeting I’d organised with the secretary of the department and other representatives, and it was mainly to discuss resources (and the role) I would play in the voice referendum.
“In terms of the republic, given that the queen had just passed, we agreed that it wasn’t the appropriate time to discuss the republic and that the priority for the government was the voice referendum.”
A briefing paper prepared ahead of Mr Thistlethwaite’s meeting, obtained via a FOI request by former Liberal MP Nicolle Flint, showed he discussions were supposed to focus on the “process, authorities, timing and other matters of relevance to referendums and plebiscites”.
The briefing note – cleared by Attorney-General’s Department secretary Katherine Jones, who also attended the meeting – said progressing a republic would “require strong support from the government, particularly the Prime Minister and the Attorney-General”.
The department also prepared advice on holding plebiscites, which Mr Thistlethwaite had considered using to choose a republican model that could be put to a referendum.
Ms Flint said it sounded “fanciful” that the timing of the meeting was coincidental.
“I find it astounding that a new minister in a new government would wait 3½ months – from 1 June, 2022, until 14 September, 2022 – to receive preliminary briefing on their portfolio,” she said. “If this was in fact a coincidence … why didn’t the assistant minister postpone the meeting out of respect?”
Australian Monarchist League chairman Eric Abetz said he did not believe Mr Thistlethwaite used the meeting to talk about the voice referendum rather than the republic. “That explanation seems completely and utterly implausible,” he said.
Mr Thistlethwaite conceded he held “general” discussions with officials about the rules of plebiscites, despite this never being proposed as part of the voice referendum process.
The assistant minister said he was entitled to speak to department officials about the voice, given his formal title was the Parliamentary Secretary to the Attorney-General.
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Hateful Clementine Ford
Leftism mainlines on hate so Clemmie makes a good thing out of her extreme misanthropy
In a brilliant column recently published in The Australian, Henry Ergas summed up 2023 as “the year of living angrily.” Describing the successive waves of outrage and hatred dominating the year’s public discourse, he made the point that the Greeks believed rage differed fundamentally from ordinary anger: “anger had a defined focus; rage, a sign of fury at the world, was labile, readily shifting from one object to another.”
“Characteristic of personal immaturity, it was by its nature opportunistic, rushing to the target of the moment, like a child rushing to a new toy,” he explained.
One of Australia’s greatest haters has a new toy. For nearly two decades, feminist Clementine Ford has been spewing out her hatred of men. Now she has revealed herself to be also a zealous anti-Zionist who is stirring up her quarter of a million followers to attack Jewish women on social media.
She started her man-hating campaign in media appearances back in 2007 but attracted widespread public attention in 2015 due to this infamous tweet:
From then on, she was regularly promoting outrage with her anti-male views. In 2017, she signed a fan’s book with the words, “Have you killed any men today? And if not, why not?”
In 2020, complaints were made about a funding grant she was receiving from the Melbourne City Council after she posted the following tweet:
The Melbourne City Council continued to fund her.
During a public address made when her only child was a newborn, she introduced the following comment with loud gagging noises: “Euch. I have a male baby and it’s just, all the time: Feed me! Pay attention to me! Engage me!” she said, before gagging again. “Euch. So boring.”
In a review of Ford’s new book, “I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage,” Antonella Gambotto-Burke sums up this whole history by concluding that Ford “displays a deep, sustained, and ugly rage against men, which she justifies as an appropriate reaction to misogyny.”
Gambotto-Burke skewers Ford’s claim that her writings are based on rigorous, fair-minded scholarship by quoting this typical statement from her recent book: “How dare any modern man compare the long-overdue and still-not-far-enough uprising of women against the rapists, abusers and misogynists who have terrorised us for millennia as a witch-hunt. F —k them all to hell.”
“The degree of disgust she expresses for men is more than disturbing: it should be illegal,” concludes Gambotto-Burke.
Of course, Ford is a provocateur, deliberately posting outrageous comments to attract more followers. But the real worry is that Ford already attracts a massive audience, with her vile attacks on men clearly appealing to the young women indoctrinated in our anti-male school and university systems. She’s been offered a steady stream of media jobs, regular public appearances, all manner of prestigious and lucrative gigs.
There has been the odd set-back, with periodic suspensions of her social media accounts. In 2018 we managed to get nearly 15,000 people to sign a petition objecting to her appearance at a Lifeline event to raise money for suicide awareness. In the end, Lifeline wimped out – instead of ditching Ford they cancelled the whole event.
But now that Ford has stirred up a real hornet’s nest with her foul attacks on Jewish women, let’s hope this time she has bitten off more than she can chew.
Like many prominent feminists across the world, Ford was utterly silent about the October 7 attacks by Hamas, despite plenty of evidence of rape, including mass rape so brutal that they broke the pelvises of their victims - including elderly women and children.
This week the New York Times published the results of an intensive investigation of the pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality of women in the attack on Israel – containing truly horrifying revelations.
As Janice Fiamengo pointed out in her October 27 Substack article, most prominent feminists failed to respond to the immediate evidence of rape shown in the blood stained trousers of young women being paraded through the streets by Hamas.
Fiamengo: “After 50 years of feminist theorizing in which the rape of women has been the single most definitive target of pity and rage, suddenly the insistence on holding rapists accountable, naming the violence, and believing victims has been replaced by circumspection and attention to moral complexity.”
Having posted not one word about the October 7 rapes, Ford’s unique “moral complexity” was revealed when she started posting anti-Israel rants, including a bizarre missive to “Zionist women” where she attacked them for being upset that their “bloodlust” against Hamas wasn’t being supported. “I don’t care that you felt betrayed or let down, and I especially don’t care that you want to have a big crybaby rant ... You’re pathetic, you disgust me, and I pity you for being so basic and gross that you think others should cheer on the murder of thousands just to make you feel better”.
She calls them “enthusiastic supporters of a murderous regime that has been killing children for over 70 years because YOU want to believe YOUR colonising is somehow different.”
The fact that Ford spent much of her childhood in Oman may have something to do with her biased view of Middle Eastern history, but her ignorant attacks are most bizarre. Like accusing Jewish women of being white: “Honestly you actually can’t get f..king whiter than that. You are not the victims, especially not when you live in Australia and are globbing on to some kind of bizarre pretence that you are being harmed here,” she said.
Ford’s very public attacks on Australian Jewish women come at a time when the world has been stunned by the pro-Palestinian crowd chanting “Gas the Jews” at the Opera House, and Israel has issued travel warnings for Israeli citizens visiting Australia due to rising levels of antisemitism.
But Ford has simply doubled down. After a petition calling on Ford’s publisher to sever ties with the author attracted over 3,000 signatures, Ford responded by publishing the names of some of the signatories on her social media which meant they came under ferocious attack from Ford’s fans - their businesses were targeted, they received worrying personal attacks, including threats to their children.
Yet the publisher, Allen and Unwin, continues to support Ford, despite claiming that “as publishers, we refuse to publish material that is hate-based, antisemitic or in breach of Australia’s racial discrimination laws.” Huh, both Jew and male hatred somehow slips through the cracks here.
There’s been one recent win – Nova Radio has just cancelled Ford’s Dear Clementine podcast after two years with the network, so that’s something.
Yet last week she announced she’d received funding from the government-funded ScreenNSW for her new TV project, 'Smile B**ch' – a “dark comedy about one woman executing her revenge against the men who have wronged her.” Just what we need to promote harmony between the sexes in 2024.
I hope I can inspire many of you to start the New Year by helping to rein in this woman’s divisive bile. Send a brief note to ScreenNSW objecting to the use of tax-payers money for her latest male-bashing exercise. Anyone attacked by her on social media needs to report her to the platform and then follow up with a complaint to the eSafety Commission, which is required to tackle online hate relating to race, religion or gender – both her antisemitic and male-hating posts should fall into their bailiwick.
Finally, two welcome items of good news to usher in the New Year. Amazingly, Erin Pizzey has been awarded an honour by the UK government. After setting up Britain’s first women’s refuge, the 84-year-old spent the last half century denouncing feminist lies which deny women’s role in family violence. She’s an absolute hero.
Secondly, the Coalition has just announced they will repeal the Albanese’s changes to the family law act, which remove children’s right to care from both parents after divorce. Wow! Now, that’s a real vote winner – but they’ll need to do a lot more to convince former supporters that if they are returned to power, they won’t follow in the wimpish Morrison’s footsteps by pandering to female activists controlling social media.
Still, these glad tidings bring a glimmer of hope that 2024 might just see some slippage in the icy grip of feminism on Western society. There’s the growing sense that ordinary folk have realised what’s going on here and have had enough.
Let’s work together for real change. Wishing you all the best for real gender equity in this New Year.
https://bettinaarndt.substack.com/p/hateful-clementine-ford
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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