Right Pulse

The ALP is considering using Defence base housing to accommodate illegal immigrants. The government is trying to walk  – or run – away from the idea now, but only after the memo was leaked to the Australian newspaper. Given the ALP preference deal with the Greens and the disdain Rudd had for the National Security Cabinet by letting his 31 year chief of staff run the meetings, it is clear the ALP cares very little for the Defence Forces.

Interview here.

Good luck to him, just keep him away from environment portfolios:

Mr Turnbull last night told senior colleagues he had decided to stay after considering joining the state Liberals, but had determined that the federal Liberal Party could win the next election.

I don’t mine that he is arrogant. Great leaders are a bit. But now that the emissions trading scheme is dead there is less standing between him and the rest of the party room since he crossed the floor to vote for it.

Fairfax is back on its anti-Defence hobby horse. The latest article scrutinises defence contracts and finds that, shock horror, Defence spends money on fitness equipment, sport, leadership training and travel!!!!! But wait there’s more.

….two biggest beneficiaries of the Defence budget were the US government’s foreign military sales program and Australian Aerospace, a subsidiary of the European Aeronautic, Defence and Space Company.

Insight. Most of our equipment is of US origin, making Boeing Australia the biggest Boeing subsidiary outside the USA by employment numbers, and Australian Aerospace assembles helicopters in Brisbane. Then there are these lies:

…raising questions about the accounting rigour within the $26-billion-a-year agency

It’s not an agency but a Department – very different funding arrangements entail.

This is despite review after review warning that the department’s spending was out of control.

Government exercises control over Defence’s budget. The Department continually under achieves its budget.

…the Herald’s examination raises new questions about the accountability of a department that has become the single biggest spender of taxpayer dollars.

Not really true. The biggest spender of tax-payer dollars remains by far and away welfare, or whatever the government is calling it these days – a government-dependency class and guilt industry complex.

Looks like the Argentine government in an attempt to bully its way into potential oil revenues from the Falklands, is going to punish any company with Argentine operations involved with Falklands oil exploration:

The Argentine government is looking into the British oil companies involved in the Falkland Islands exploratory drilling operation checking on their possible links to interests in Argentina (and if so the infringement of legislation of Argentine legislation), according to reports in the Buenos Aires press….

Falkland Oil & Gas Ltd’s associate Anglo-Australian BHP Billiton is one of the world’s leading mining companies and is also involved in copper exploratory mining in the north of Argentina….

However it is not clear yet how the Argentine government could “intimidate” major corporations or financial institutions without further deteriorating its international image in business affairs when it is trying a comeback to world money markets.

The Argentine President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, doesn’t give a damn about money markets, financial obligations or private property rights and so would probably just nationalise BHP assets. This latest move would come on top of an effective blockade of the Falklands, with Argentina basically banning shipping between the two territories, hampering the re-supply of oil exploration operations.

Kevin Rudd should pull in the Argentine ambassador with a ‘please explain’. Failing that, working up plans to send an expeditionary air and naval task force would be a prudent response to the current situation. How the task force would get to the Falklands would be another matter. It would need Chile’s co-operation and we probably wouldn’t be ready until early 2011.

I’m thinking 12 x F/A-18F with JSOW, 12 x F/A-18 HUG with JASSM, 3 x AP-3C, 2 x KC-30a, 2 x Wedgetail, 1 x C-17, 2 x C-130J, 1 x FFG UP, 2 x FFH ASMD, 1 x SSK, 1 x MHC, 1 x LPA with a detachment of S-70s, RBS-70, CDT, SAS, etc….and any ancillary nuclear bombs that may be laying around in Kevin’s basement. I know, dream on….

…but not Kevin Rudd, in Foreign Policy’s ‘top 100 global thinkers’.  If I recall correctly FP rejected Rudd’s silly neo-liberalism essay for publication last year. The fact that Gordon Brown made the list, given the abysmal state of the UK, is a little strange . So Rudd misses out. It really is rather funny to see Rudd – who was meant to be a foreign policy guru – flounder on foreign policy from day one. He’s managed to annoy the Japanese, Chinese, Indians and Indonesians for no reason other than clumsy diplomacy. Is there anyone else in the region he wants to annoy?

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.

Government spending is all about priorities, and according to Rudd spending $6 billion on pink batts and billions more on school halls parents don’t want is more important than national security:

…the planned acquisition (F-35) has slipped by at least two years, with the air force not due to get its first operational squadron until 2018-19 at the earliest.

The initial squadron could be trimmed to as few as 14 aircraft as Defence planners struggle to find further savings in the $27bn defence budget.

This typical of how ALP defence policy always works. Promise high deliver low.

Rudd is building a reputation for authoritative intervention. Criticise him and he’ll call his mates in the AFP to go heavy on you. First we had the Greich affair, now this:

According to an article in The Sydney Morning Herald, the Rudd Government has long known of problems with the Maritime Security Identity Card program but still hasn’t addressed the issue of preventing criminals convicted of terrorism-related crimes holding sensitive jobs in the nation’s ports.

According to the report, the MSIC scheme does not detect a “range of offences and behaviours that are known to have linkages with terrorist activity and the unlawful interferences with maritime transport and offshore facilities”.

The report comes as the union representing airport workers has gone in to bat for former Sydney Airport customs officer Allan Kessing, convicted of leaking a confidential report on airport security in 2005. Union officials say Kessing should not be penalised for taking responsibility for safeguarding people’s lives.

So go after the people that care about real security and ignore the criminals attempting to kill people. The government is avoiding an inquiry though, gee I wonder why:

The Rudd government has no plans to hold an inquiry into new claims by whistleblower Allan Kessing that implicate Cabinet minister Anthony Albanese.

And the government is distancing itself from suggestions the Australian Labor Party (ALP) recommended lawyers for Mr Kessing, who was charged after the information he tried to give Mr Albanese was leaked to a newspaper.

Mr Kessing has now revealed that he approached Mr Albanese’s office in early 2005 with a suppressed report that the former Customs officer had written two years earlier outlining security shortcomings at Sydney airport.

Mr Albanese, now transport minister, was an opposition frontbencher at the time. He took no further action following the approach.

So make veiled threats through the media to set the AFP on the official, but don’t call an inquiry for fear of being exposed.

Readers may recall a Yes Prime Minister episode entitled ‘A victory for Democracy’ in which Jim Hacker does battle with the civil service to ensure the continuation of democracy on the island of St George (a fictitious island). The civil service do their best to stop Jim Hacker intervening in the affair to defeat a group of Marxist agitators intent on overthrowing the democratic government. The Foreign Office have drawn up their own policy position and they are intent on ignoring the will of government. The position on St George’s can best be summed up be these classic lines:

…every support, short of help.

I was reminded of this episode when reading a Paul Kelly article on the East Timor intervention, with reference to the great mandarin and apologist for corrupt regimes, former civil servant Hugh White:

Defence Department deputy secretary Hugh White, the leading strategist, defined what he believed were Australia’s objectives. They were: having East Timor remain part of Indonesia; ensuring ties with Jakarta were put before the fate of East Timor; retaining Australia’s military ties with Indonesia; and avoiding any Australian Defence Force deployment, if possible.

In other words, ‘every support, short of help.’ Another case of Canberra civil servants pretending to be politicians. However:

These were White’s principles guiding the Defence Department; each of them was trashed before the end of the year, proof of the violation of policy orthodoxy that Howard and Downer would entertain.

The whole Paul Kelly article is worth a read. I disagree though with one point; that the success of the mission was only due to Indonesia deciding not to challenge the intervention. As if the ADF did nothing at all to contribute to the mission’s success – it just happened by itself. This is typical left-wing historical defeatist revisionism at work.

The story of East Timor’s independence is pretty remarkable for the speed in which it took place and the people Howard and Downer convinced (Habibie, Clinton) or pushed out of the way (Hugh White) to make it happen.

A WSJ snippet:

Now that the Iraq war is going well, media coverage in America has all but vanished. So we thought you might like to know that the month that ended yesterday saw the fewest deaths from terrorist violence in that country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Same in Australia.

SBS has obtained and published what they claim are some of the photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq that Obama has been trying to suppress for fear of a back lash against US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The images emerged from Australia yesterday where they were originally obtained by the channel SBS in 2006 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. They were not distributed around the world at the time but are now believed to be among those the president is trying to block.

Mr Obama previously committed to allowing thousands of images to be published but changed his mind after senior generals warned that their publication could place US troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan in greater danger.

The president’s change of heart brought bitter criticism from the left wingers and the American Civil Liberties Union, which had brought a freedom of information case against the US government applying to see the pictures.

It is not clear that the photos are what SBS purports them to be. Nevertheless, SBS’s intent is clear. By the time the news reaches the Middle East, real or not, the photos will increase the danger of US troops in Afghanistan and therefore increase the risk to Australian troops that are serving next to US forces. And Australian tax-payers are forced to hand over their hard earned money to SBS for the privilege.