Australia’s diggers are being let down by terrible leadership from bureaucrats, generals and Defence Ministers.
We want warriors in our Defence Force and it shouldn’t be any other way. If the Chief of Defence Force Angus Campbell doesn’t understand that then he should resign.
Transcript
As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia I speak in support of Senator Lambie’s motion of urgency addressing the appalling state of leadership in the Australian Defence Force. It’s important to note that this motion isn’t about our soldiers, our sailors and our aviators. They are among the world’s best and are often the most motivated and disciplined men and women our country has produced. Yet politicians and the Australian Defence Force’s higher leadership have repeatedly let down our Defence Force’s amazing work. Time and time again the generals, the brass, have failed to demonstrate real leadership.
Our current Chief of the Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, wears the Distinguished Service Cross medal. He was awarded this medal supposedly for his command of troops in Afghanistan. There are questions over whether General Campbell was awarded this medal illegally. The criteria used to be that the recipient had to be in action, meaning in direct contact with the enemy. General Campbell spent most of his time in command sitting in an air-conditioned office in Dubai, thousands of kilometres from the battlefield.
Even if his medal was validly given, General Campbell is trying to strip the very same medal from people who were under his command and for whose behaviour he is responsible. It is a frightening exercise in double standards when General Campbell is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his command of the same people who he is now trying to strip it from for alleged wrongdoing.
Leadership means taking responsibility for everything under one’s command. This isn’t an opinion; the Yamashita standard enshrines it in international law. When the Japanese Imperial Army committed untold atrocities, it was the overall commander General Yamashita who was charged with the war crimes that happened under his watch. General Campbell alleges war crimes were committed, including during his time in command. He spits on the idea of command accountability with his actions. When I suggested to General Campbell at Senate estimates that handing back his medals would be the moral thing to do, he responded, ‘That’s very interesting, Senator’—contemptuous. For General Campbell to demonstrate leadership he would hand back his medals and resign today.
On General Campbell’s allegations of war crimes it’s important to note that, eight years after a discredited sociologist first levelled allegations, not a single criminal charge has produced a guilty verdict—not one. Instead of affording soldiers of our elite Special Air Service Regiment procedural fairness, General Campbell may as well have declared them guilty when, at a press conference, he announced the allegations and said sanctions would be applied—not a criminal court, a press conference. It seems General Campbell intends to add ‘judge, jury and executioner’ to his resume.
It’s acquisitions department, the Australian Defence Force’s higher leadership, washed its hands of accountability. Almost every Defence program has failed to meet budget, time or delivery goals. Billions upon billions of dollars are wasted every year in foreseeable project delays, poor project planning and badly defined deliverable goals. Yet everyone involved seems to still be getting promotions. Is the motto on the wall, for the higher brass, at defence headquarters ‘Failing upwards’?
General Campbell even endorsed findings in the Brereton report complaining of a ‘warrior culture in the SASR’. If you don’t want warriors in the most elite fighting unit in this country and among the best special forces units in the world, where the hell do you want them? These issues are the reasons why defence recruitment is in crisis. Good soldiers are leaving because of the double standards flowing down from the top. It’s absolutely demoralising. The entire top brass needs to face a reckoning, for the state of the Australian Defence Force, and I stand in support of Senator Lambie’s calls for exactly that. We get so many calls from veterans and current service men and women asking us to do exactly that.
We say to our enlisted defence personnel: Australians know the good work you do and the effort and dedication you put into training to defend our country. Your job is applying state sanctioned violence, and no-one should shy away from this fact. It is a very difficult job. One Nation supports you all, and we will do everything we can to call for your poor leaders to face accountability for their actions and inactions.
https://img.youtube.com/vi/FnLVKAZRT5A/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Sheenagh Langdonhttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSheenagh Langdon2023-06-20 10:28:462023-06-20 10:44:02Heads must roll in Defence leadership
[Malcolm] Good morning, Marcus. I’m disgusted with that rort I’m bloody annoyed because look, what’s really going on here, mate is it’s not just that he’s got a job that’s being protected. What we’re doing is Mathias Cormann in the Senate, who often answered questions by saying we are fulfilling our global responsibilities.
To hell with the global responsibilities. We have to look after Australian sovereignty. I don’t need him in the OECD bringing back OECD stuff to steal wealth from Australians. I need as Australian parliamentarian to look after Australians.
[Marcus] Yeah, I thought that might have you fired up. And I’m glad I asked the question. You said it much better than what I did. I mean, you, you’ve dealt with this man, and it’s not a personal attack. It’s just the way the system’s set up. And you know, we’ve been talking at length this morning about the disparity, if you like, in opportunities and pay for men and women in our workforce. But I mean, this is just beyond the pail.
It really is and you know, 4,000 odd dollars. Now that’s before staff mind you, up to eight staff, the Prime Minister is apparently providing this former Senator, former Finance Minister with, to try and get him around the world to lobby people. So he gets his prime gig with the OECD, mind you at the same time, he’s going to receive a pretty decent politician salary upon the fact that he’s decided to pull the pin. He’s retired etc. He’s still of working age. I mean, the whole thing is just, it’s a joke.
[Malcolm] Well, it’s actually worse than a joke. It’s theft because the costs that you have just outlined are huge, but Marcus, they are tiny compared to the cost to the Australian people of pushing this globalist agenda. Morrison has appeared to be against the international globalist. But the fact is his behaviours show that he is a globalist.
He said on the 3rd of October, 2019, after we were pushing the fact that the message about the globalist taking over, he came out trying to steal our thunder by saying he is against the unelected, unaccountable, internationalist bureaucrats. He pretended to be against them. He didn’t say the UN, but since then, he’s said that we need to give the World Health Organisation, a UN body increased powers, powers of weapons inspectors, to just go into countries.
He’s just collected an award from Boris Johnson as for fulfilling his global agenda. And Morrison is just pushing policies. I’m tired of the liberal and labour and national parties, pushing policies that are destroying our water in accordance with UN, destroying our energy sector in accordance with the UN Kyoto Protocol, destroying property rights and farmers’ rights to use their own land in accordance with the UN Kyoto Protocol.
Both of these major parties have done that for 30, 40 years. Look at our tariffs look at it that have been smashed and left our companies vulnerable. Look at the taxes that we have paid to the foreigners and multinational companies in this country and 90% of the large companies in this country are owned by foreign owned multinationals, and they paid little or no tax.
[Marcus] That’s right.
[Malcolm] That’s fact. And then we’ve also got people being destroyed in the family law court system, which is a slaughter house of the nation, that’s fact. And that came from the UN as well. We’ve got to start running this country for Australians and let the Australians do the job. Instead of these bustards from overseas, it really fires me up.
[Marcus] Ah, well, I can tell all it’s missing next to the Australian flag behind the Prime Minister is a sign saying, “The Great Reset.”
[Malcolm] Correct. That is what is going on. And it’s just a return to feudalism. We will be surfed, serving the barons and the international barons. We have got one of the wealthiest countries on earth. We are the biggest exporters of energy in that gas and coal in the world, even greater than Middle East countries.
And yet we’re sitting at the crumbs, we’re taking the crumbs off the table now because the wealthy corporations are just taking it. They don’t pay taxes for taking our natural resources. This is ridiculous. They’re stealing it. And we end up poor and we’re taking the crumbs off a rich man’s table when we should be sitting at the bloody table.
[Marcus] All right, the Defence Inquiry has wrapped up the Brereton Report, there’s a whole range of issues. Here, Malcolm, you’d be happy to know that we are speaking to ex-Commando ‘H’ on our programme regularly. He’s outlining things from… And he’s not one of the people who’s been accused of any of the alleged war crimes, but he’s providing us updates on welfare of fellow serving Australians.
And they wanna start a petition to try and get their citations kept rather than taken off them. And also the other issue of course, is the fact that bloody War Memorial now wants to, before anything’s gone through courts before anyone’s been found guilty of anything. The War Memorial is already talking about setting aside a section of that sacred place in IsaLean, Canberra dedicated to the so-called atrocities of war in Afghanistan.
I mean, it’s almost as if these people have been found guilty. Don’t we have a presumption of innocence here, at first?
[Malcolm] Well, of course we do Marcus, and this is really, a really very difficult situation to walk through. You know, our country has a value that you don’t murder people in cold blood. That’s a value that we have to stand up for, whether it’s here or overseas. But we have to be compassionate and understanding that these people were sent overseas, if first of all, they must have a trial and they must have the resources.
Secondly, their generals above them are culpable because there’s no way, if this is true, there’s no way the general did not know this was going on. It’s their responsibility.
And I take it a step further, Marcus, John Howard came back from America, according to Alexander Downer, and when Downer retired, he said that John Howard came back from America after 9/11, and walked into the cabinet and said, “We’re off to Iraq,” no executive council meeting, no cabinet meeting, we’re just doing it on one mans say-so.
And apparently, I don’t know this for a fact, because I’m not educated on this. I haven’t been briefed on it yet, but apparently Afghanistan, we did not declare war. So there were no true terms of engagement. And so what we had, we had women and boys with land mines, with explosive tied to them.
And we also had Afghanis in an American training base and an Australian training base shoot Australians and Americans within. And so this is a war that’s not really a war.
And yet it’s diabolic, a very deceptive. And we went in there, based upon one man and that man later admitted, or his government later admitted, there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, look at what we’re doing with our boys in this country.
So if we can’t uphold murder, but at the same time, you have to be compassionate because we sent these people there, to do our job, and we should have done a better job in looking after them.
[Marcus] Well, well said a lot of people we’ve spoken to, including Commando “H” said that, you know, the situation over there is best described by people who’ve been there rather than armchair critics. And even to be honest, generals who sit in their plush leather chairs in Canberra and direct these men.
Look, the issue obviously is that in relation to the enemy, it’s not an international war as such. It was more a civil war, so war within a country. So whenever they did manage to capture some of these people, Taliban and otherwise, they had to eventually, within a day or two release them, only to be shot at again by the same people that just captured.
I mean, the whole thing really needs a good looking at, and we need to bear in mind that it’s very correct what you say, Malcolm, we don’t condone outright cold-blooded killings, but at the same time, we also need to understand what went on over there, why we were there in the first place.
And the other issue, of course now, comes down to mental health and we know, and we’ve been told by our sources and Commando “H” that, you know, so many men and young women who’ve served overseas and are suffering mental health issues as a result of not only their service, but this inquiry as well.
[Malcolm] Yes, well, very well said. There’s an a Roman general who said that no one who’s been to war can understand what goes on and people who go to war do not come back with the same mental approach. They have enormous burdens mentally and emotionally. So let’s recognise that for start.
So we send them, we bend them, but we don’t mend them very well in this country, but it is good to see that the people have set up a hotline for these servicemen, but, you know, stripping medals from people who have earned that medal through an Act of Valour, it’s just wrong.
These people earned it through an Act of Valour, who knows as a result of the torturous and tough regime of cycling in and out of Afghanistan so quickly and so often, if these people weren’t under enormous pressure and they did something, they shouldn’t have done. That’s if they were guilty, let’s assume some of them were guilty.
Why should we strip the medals of these people when they earned it, earned the medals for doing something to protect other Australians or protect their country, or protect even Afghanistan people? So, and then let us strip them because they’ve cracked under pressure, that’s wrong.
[Marcus] I think so.
[Malcolm] They were given a medal and they deserve to keep it.
[Marcus] All right, let’s talk IR reform, we know March 21 is the date when JobKeeper ends, there are some very big concerns amongst some sectors of our community that as of next, well, March, April, you know, there needs to be an extension of some sort, for JobKeeper what do you make of it all?
[Malcolm] What I make of it is that the Morrison Government would yet, again, fiddle around the edges and not do a good job and make it worse. The Morrison Government is about building facades and not getting on with the job properly. Getting back to basics. We need to rebuild our country. There are several lessons from this COVID–
[Marcus] Pandemic.
[Malcolm] Virus that hit our country. And the primary lesson is that we have destroyed our productive capacity and manufacturing. Even our agricultural sector is being destroyed by unelected international bureaucrats that our governments, labour and liberal had put in place.
That’s the first thing we need to restore manufacturing. Marcus we cannot restore manufacturing and our economic sovereignty, our economic security, unless we address electricity prices. Electricity is the biggest cost, component of manufacturing today, greater than labour.
So we need to do a good job in reforming industrial relations. And I can talk about that in a minute, but we must do it with regard to energy prices, taxation, overregulation from the UN. We must do it with regard to where water and other resources and infrastructure. Without that we’re just playing with this stuff. Now, you know, that I’ve done a lot of work in protecting some miners in the Hunter Valley–
[Marcus] Yes absolutely.
[Malcolm] From exploitation with under the hand of BHP and Chandler MacLeod, but also the CFMEU was involved there because they agreed with the exploitation of workers and enabled it. And I’ve done nothing to protect those workers, which raises an interesting point, could these workers sue the CFMEU because they paid dues to be protected and the CFMEU actually in the Hunter Valley I must add actually did not fulfil their responsibilities?
But look at the corruption of some of the union bosses, the Health Services Union, the AWU, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ union. This shows that our system is wrong. And the Hunter Valley has just brought it home to me just how corrupt our system is, we need to get back to basics because people at work feeling frustrated, hurt, literally crippled, painful, afraid of losing their job.
We are right now got people confused. If someone’s working on the job and wants something clarified, they’ve got to go to a bloody lawyer. It’s actually, that’s some of the advice that the Fair Work Ombudsman has given people. I mean who can afford to go to court our system is completely smashed, I’ve said it before.
People want to know that their job is safe. People want to know that they can be safe at work. People want to know that they’re protected, they’ve got protection for their rights. They want to be supported and be in compliance. They want fairness, they want choice. They want simplicity, understanding.
We’ve got to really rejig the whole of our industrial relations system because it’s not serving the people. It’s serving a few union bosses and a few company bosses, and that’s wrong and it’s serving a hell of a lot of lawyers. We’ve got to completely clean that out and do a good job. Get back to basics, to protect workers and honest employers.
[Marcus] Just finally, Malcolm, you’ve been on fire this morning. Are you gonna get that jab?
[Malcolm] That jab mate, I will get a jab when Alan Joyce takes the jab and I’ll watch him do it.
Look–
[Marcus] He probably will.
[Malcolm] He probably – ridiculous. How do we know the impact–
[Marcus] Well, hang on, just back to that, that comments you’ve just made. You’ll get the job when Alan Joyce does. Well, I believe that Alan Joyce probably will get the jab because of he wants to fly overseas, which you probably will for business on his aircraft. And that’s what he calls them, on my airline.
[Malcolm] Well, he’s become a national test guinea pig by the sound of it then, but maybe that’s his new job. But this is disgraceful because even the International Air Transport Association, IATA has distance itself from Qantas’ compulsory vaccination stance, the Prime Minister has done that too.
It’s certainly how do we know the impact of these viruses, which have been tested in minimal circumstances at the moment, very short term? How do we know the impact on these sort of these vaccines with other drugs, with complimentary medicines? How do we know the long-term impact? This is ridiculous. I’m not gonna take the jab, not until it’s proven.
[Marcus] All right, Malcolm. Great to have you on this morning. You been on fire and I love it. I love the passion and thanks as always. Mate, look after yourself, we’ll chat again soon and all that if you catch up with Mathias, make sure we get the window seat, okay.
[Malcolm] Mate. Yeah, we’ll try and make sure that we stop him bringing his OECD policies into this country. Well, I want Australia to be Australian.
http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/RD1oE4UXxco/maxresdefault.jpg7201280Senator Malcolm Robertshttps://www.malcolmrobertsqld.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/One-Nation-Logo1-300x150.pngSenator Malcolm Roberts2020-11-30 14:42:392020-11-30 14:42:48Matthias Cormann given millions to jet around Europe – 2SM with Marcus Paul
Today I honour those men and women who willingly answering the call to duty.
Lest We Forget.
Transcript
The men and women of our Australian Defence Force have a history of willingly answering the call for duty to protect our freedoms and our sovereignty. They do so sometimes at huge personal sacrifice, whether that be leaving their families and loved ones, or putting themselves in harm’s way to ensure the safety of others.
It’s all in a day’s work for our men and women of the armed forces. Our Defence Force personnel and our Aussie veterans are important and respected people who have committed to the defence of Australia in so many ways, in many ways, whether they have been deployed to active conflict, on peacekeeping operations, or have actually served without being deployed.
For some of our defence force personnel and our veterans, the battle, though, goes on long after they have returned from operational deployment. We must remember this at all times. The veteran death toll by suicide since 2001, by the most conservative of measures, is 10 times greater than our losses in Afghanistan.
Today, and every day, we need to remember these Aussies, and we must join to stop these preventable deaths of our servicemen and servicewomen. So, I hope you join with us in cherishing our armed forces and cherishing days like today, and that on days like today, help our younger generations to remember why our soldiers are being honoured and appreciated.