However one Australian did make the list:

44. David Kilcullen

for writing the book on how America fights small wars.

Counterinsurgency expert | Washington

A gregarious former lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army, Kilcullen had an epiphany as a Ph.D. student in political anthropology. At root, guerrilla movements were motivated not by radical ideals, but by mundane, everyday drives; defeating them requires protecting the population and developing an in-depth knowledge of local social networks. In 2007, as the Iraqi insurgency was reaching its height, Gen. David Petraeus brought him on as a senior advisor, and many credit Kilcullen’s ideas with saving countless lives. Now, the Aussie has begun applying his out-of-the-box thinking to Afghanistan, starting with his book The Accidental Guerrilla. “If I were a Muslim,” Kilcullen told the New Yorker, “I’d probably be a jihadist.… The thing that drives these guys — a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that’s happening now — that’s the same thing that drives me, you know?”

….

Worst idea: The notion that the West can afford to fail in Afghanistan and still have a chance of preventing the collapse and terrorist takeover of Pakistan.

Identity crisis: our cross to bear

These tax-payer funded community consultative processes have become veiled attempts to air the views of the radical left – because they wouldn’t get an airing any other way. You know, Australians are just a bunch of racists and so are our national symbols. Everything from the Union Jack to the Southern Cross. And of course guess who is to blame?

…the Australia Day Council launched a campaign last week to ask which symbols and images best represent our country, opinion-makers and public figures were at odds on how to answer the question – variously describing the Southern Cross as everything from ”beautiful” to ”racist”….

Tim Soutphommasane, a first-generation Australian and author of Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-Building for Australian Progressives, said symbols such as the Southern Cross came to be associated with a new wave of patriotism under the conservative Howard government.

”Many Australians have been content to regard all expressions of national pride as thinly disguised racism,” he said. ”The result has been a surrender of all things patriotic to extreme nationalists.”

It is a bit formulaic – ‘ we are all meant to question our current symbols because clearly they are inadequate, especially after JH’. However if the Australia Day Council wants to promote this tosh they might want to consider that the only people with the identity crisis are those on the PC and radical left.

Australians for Constitutional Monarchy national convener Professor David Flint disagreed, saying critics were out of touch with the Australian people and that it was a ”pity to undermine the great symbols of the nation”.

”The fact [the symbols] have been imported doesn’t make them any less Australian.”

Thirty years on and Mad Max 4: Fury Road is about to restart the local movie industry, being filmed entirely in Sydney and Outback NSW.

Mr Rudd joked that if an operation was required he would allow it to be widely broadcast.

I don’t take that as a joke.

Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan has told Parliament he received a death threat last week.

Senator Heffernan made the revelation while talking about his decision to reject a million dollar bribe offered to him by a Sydney developer last year.

…”There is a cost to not having a price. Last Thursday I got a death threat, I rang the AFP,” he said.

“They actually didn’t have enough people to put anyone on the case

A spokeswoman for Ms Bryce yesterday defended her decision to join the Lyceum Club.

 ”The Governor-General has no issue with men or women-only clubs or organisations,” the spokeswoman said.

This comes on the back of an absurd suggestion by Gillard that she would turn up to a men only club in Melbourne demanding membership.

“I’m sometimes tempted, on days when I am Acting Prime Minister, to go down to the Melbourne Club with our female Governor-General and apply for membership on the spot.

I don’t recall the former GG or Deputy PM, both men, ever threatening to go down to their local Country Women’s Association demanding membership. Childish stuff.

That tattoo doesn’t look too Aboriginal. Tara is typical of so many young Australians. Completely brainwashed by the ABC and the Teachers Union. She embarrassed herself, claiming the Howard government was just full of lies. Sophisticated. As an example of her brainwashing, she just repeated Rudd’s recent line about moving on from the History Wars without realising what a retreat it is for the left. Abbott dealt with her comments in a mature and polite manner:

When you talk about a conservation Tara, don’t exclude the people that don’t agree with you. And don’t think that just because you don’t like John Howard’s politics that John Howard and those that support him ought to be kind of banished from public life.

A good teaching moment for Tara. I could see a light come there for a moment. Then we had a self proclaimed pre-eminent Australian novelist Richard Flanagan – someone I’ve never heard off – who said that he felt deeply ashamed to be called Australian during the Howard years. Well as a conservative, no matter how much I dislike Rudd, I have and never will feel deeply ashamed to call myself Australian because Rudd’s the PM. It was just an irrational and an embarrassing discussion, and once again shows the complete bias of the ABC and the general historical illiteracy of these ridiculous authours who hate their country so much because of historical events that mostly never took place.

It was also revealing that despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from these holier than thou authours about the state of Aborigines, of all the people on the panel the only one to have spent extensive time with genuine Aboriginals was the conservative Tony Abbott. The most hilarious part of the programme was when Tony Jones asked Tara if her first language was English, as if she spoke an Aboriginal dialect! She clearly had no idea about the issues effecting Aboriginals, and for a minute it seemed as if she would break out into a defensive monologue about how she really is Aboriginal, even though she doesn’t look it. Richard Flanagan later admitted that he had never been in an Aboriginal community.

Then the discussion went down an even further notch with a discussion about how Australian troops are supposedly going around killing innocent Afghans, as if that was their mission. And that Coalition forces were not doing any good and were invaders. At this point I started to feel intensely sorry for these authours.