Retired infantry officer. Conservative by nature and politics; Happily married and father and grandfather of eight. Loves V8 powered Range Rovers, Golden Retrievers, good books and technology and think there should be open season on Greenies. Born in the mid forties and overdue for servicing but most parts still work.

More angst for the Greens

Australia’s environmental legal centres have lost their federal funding in a move that could see the closure of some of the nine offices around the country.

The federal government has immediately cut an estimated $10 million boost over four years quietly given to Environmental Defender’s Offices in the dying days of the former Labor government.

The government is also planning to end a long-standing annual payment – which for all but one office was around $90,000 – from July 1, meaning the legal centres will no longer receive any federal funding from mid-next year.

So, the government is ceasing funding of groups dedicated to stopping development. Seems like a good idea to me.

ALP/Greens vote for Open Slather

IMMIGRATION Minister Scott Morrison has been labelled brutal for banning new permanent protection visas for asylum seekers already in Australia.
Mr Morrison has used his ministerial powers to put an immediate cap on the number of protection visas for people who have arrived by boat. That means the number has been limited to 1650 until at least July next year, when the cap will be reset. Another nail in the coffin of the illegal people smugglers and if the ALP/Greens don’t like it then it will be good for the country. The minister blames Labor and the Greens for playing parliamentary games by combining in the Senate on Monday to scuttle the coalition’s re-introduction of temporary protection visas (TPVs). Greens MP Adam Bandt condemned both Mr Morrison and Prime Minister Tony Abbott for “acting like thugs” and leaving refugees in permanent limbo.

“What a way to treat some of the world’s most vulnerable people who have come here seeking help,” Mr Bandt told reporters.

“This is a government that is revealing its former brutality day by day.”

TPVs allow boat people to work so when ALP/Greens dissallow the reintroduction of TPVs exactly who are the”thugs”?  I reject the Greens definition of boat people as vulnerable as it presumes that they are all fleeing persecution when in fact we know that is not the case. Labor MP Kelvin Thomson disagreed with Mr Morrison’s description of the disallowance motion as an “own goal” for Labor and the Greens, and voiced disappointment the refugee intake will not reach the former Labor government’s 20,000 a year. Different subject Kelvin –  the subject is: How do we fix up the ALPs Open Border Slather policy, regain some sovereignty and take the initiative away from the smugglers? Your mob stuffed it up, the Australian people voted for a solution so listen to them and help us fix it. Otherwise, shut up

Jihadist crackdown

A CRACKDOWN on Australians travelling to Syria to fight with jihadists is set to widen, with police preparing to charge a third suspected extremist currently in jail on attempted murder charges.
After officers from the Australian Federal Police and NSW police yesterday charged two men with an array of foreign-incursion offences – the first such charges to stem from the Syrian conflict – The Australian can reveal a third man has been targeted by investigators and is expected to be charged. Its a start but this worries me;

Some of Mr Alqudsi’s supporters in court refused a request from the NSW Sheriff’s officer to remove their hats inside the courtroom.

“That’s part of the law? It’s not our law,” said one of the men, who declined to give his name.

If you claim to be Australian and take all we offer then it is “your law”.  Another aspect or “your law” is Contempt of Court and I would have liked the judge to say to the Sherrif  ” OK, Sherrif remove them from the court, place them in the cells and let me know when they are prepared to remove their hats and treat “their law” with respect. The NSW laws are a bit wishy washy on Contempt but I can see a case for judges to strive to maintain respect for the courts. I’m not even happy for ordinary people to have dual citizenship so my next step would be to remove citizenship from any immigrant who supports terrorism in any shape or form after a sutiable time in lockup. Bye bye…back home for you – we don’t want your type here.      

Maori Farewell

A video of the passionate haka performed by the comrades of three fallen New Zealand soldiers has gone viral, with tens of thousands of people around the world watching the clip. The 2nd and 1st Battalion Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment performed the moving tribute for Corporal Luke Tamatea, 31, Lance Corporal Jacinda Baker, 26, and Private Richard Harris, 21, at their funeral service at the Burnham Military Camp in Christchurch on Saturday. The trio were killed instantly when a roadside bomb destroyed their Humvee in Afghanistan’s northeast Bamiyan Province on August 18.

ABC Traitors

I have been medically indisposed of late occassioned by dental surgery and all its associated side effects. The surgeons “discomfort” became my “pain” and I become a grumpy version of my old self.  Whilst so incapacitated, unable to defend myself  let alone the realm, my country was attacked by an enemy within. I was beside myself with rage as the ABC took the side of the enemy and told the world our espionage secrets and defended same by saying it was “in the public interest” NO IT WASNT!! The only interest served was that of attempting to destabalize the Abbott government and their attempts to resolve the illegal boat people issue left them by the previous incompetant government .  The ABC’s irrational hatred of Abbott and conservatism generally led to their huge break from protocol. I have some skin in the  Indonesian/Australian relationships where as a young soldier I was hustled off to the RAAF Language School to study Bahasa Indonesia for 12 months as part of defences answer to the problems of Bung Karno announcing he was going to attack Australia on New Years Day and, in fact, was already attacking Malaya/Malaysia over the border between Borneo and Kalimentan.  On graduation most linguists were detailed to Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), then at Albert Park Barracks (now Australian Signals Directorate and at Canberra) whilst some would be sent off with Infantry Battalions to help in the “Confrontasi” campaign. Of course, being an infantryman I was hoping to get a posting to Borneo rather than be sitting in Melbourne with headseats on listening to the Indons. Think about it, I was young, smart and fit and joined the Army for adventure, not to become a spook in a dimly lit room in a mainland city.  I wanted to travel overseas to experience other cultures and, if on learning their culture, found them to be dangerous to the Australian way of life or to our citizens whom I had sworn to defend then yes, I was prepared to take whatever measures necessary to defend my country up to and including killing them. As it happened the Vietnam War overtook events at the time and I did neither and had to quickly adapt to another Asian language although my basic premise of defending my country and its people by extreme means become much more relevant than if I had been sent to Borneo. It was a much bigger war. Few Australians are aware of the Australians involvement in the war against Indonesia.  The Indons called it Konfontasi which translates like you think it would, Politicians and the ever loving media wouldn’t call it a war but my mates who were killed and wounded did. One such mate, Jack, involved in Claret Operations was wounded during an ambush of Indons moving through an Aussie ambush.  He was evacuated and confronted by the media at the airport who questioned him about his wounds and the action he was involved in.  Amongst other things he said it “was liking shooting ducks” The government were furious but maintained the fiction that the ambush happened in Malaysian territory and he got away with his politically incorrect language and went on to serve twice in Vietnam. So with that background you would understand me when I call Scott’s decision to reveal these details as treason and I would suggest his days are numbered.  The hypocracy of him complaining about the leak of Journo’s salaries, claiming the detail were commercial in confidence when the ABC is a public body, when considered in the light of his release of sensitive material that has damaged the country, is breathtaking . Abbott will, I imagine, play the scene quietly and in due course it will fade somewhat but next year, when the Senate make-up changes, if he doesn’t do something about the anti-Australian ABC I will be both surprised and disappointed. The ALP’s handling of the matter needs some work considering they caused the problem in the first place when Rudd authorised the taps on SBY and his wife.  Shorten says he is offering bipartisan support but suggesting Abbott apologise like Obama did to Merkel simply shows his ignorance.  The international rule of diplomacy is “neither confirm nor deny” allegations of spying. Shorten needs to prove his bipartisanship by silencing his court of fools.  Pilbersek cites “missteps from this government from day one”.

“The announcement of the turnback the boats and buy back the boats policies before the government was elected were very troubling for Indonesians,” she said.

“They didn’t like the fact that people in Australia were making plans for what would happen on Indonesian soil and in Indonesian waters without talking to the Indonesians, so the relationship was under strain, and this … kind of pushed it a little bit further along that strained path.”

Actually Abbott had been talking to the Indons until the treasonous ABC pointed out the ALP governments actions. She needs to be careful about fanning the flames of political confusion, where she suggests the Coalition and Abbott were responsibile for stress in the relationship lest a spark be ignited that reminds the public  just who cause the whole furore in the first place. The enemies I have fought were at least honest about their intentions.  The bastards at the ABC claim citizenship and a $ billion a year to attack the very people they are meant to serve. They need to be brought to heel.

Remembrance Day

Terry Sweetman can’t keep ideology out of todays remembrance as he talks of  good  and bad wars in a piece entitled Remembrance day silence a time to contemplate the pointlessness of-war. He starts;

We should think of lives lost, lives shattered, lives squandered, and lives given in service of what good men and women rightly or wrongly believed were good and just causes.

and I respond Your article and the above quote makes me think the value of sacrifice of those who served in “bad”  wars is less than had they died in “good” wars. You question why we served in earlier wars but the Maori Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, the Sudan War, the Boer War and WW1 were all fought during a period when most people in Australia thought of themselves as British Australians who were similar to British Canadians or British South Africans.  It was a case of Britian is at war, we are British, let’s go. Who could argue about the good or bad of WW2.  Who would ever suggest we shouldn’t have contributed to the downfall of Hitler and Tojo. No one surely and the arguement that Japan was never really going to invade Australia was lost on my Father as he endured 64  Japanese bombing raids on Darwin. Korea might be officially still under a truce but the communist regimes of China and North Korea didn’t take over the South and it has flourshed so that’s a win. The Paris Peace Talks ended the Vietnam war in a truce as well.  All beligerants went home but while the West lost interest and political will the communists never did and North Vietnam, rearmed by the USSR, finally invaded.  It took them nearly 15 years to win the hollow invasion and it cost them dearly.  We held them up for all that time and sapped their economies so surely that’s a positive. Korea, Malaya and Vietnam were all battles of the Cold War and that was won in 1990 when the Berlin Wall came down. The more recent “good ” and “bad” wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, are battles of the war against terrorism. Both have given the local populace an inkling of democracy, secular education, better health and education outcomes and some hope of a better future.  Al Qaeda and theTaliban are somewhat depleted, albeit not destroyed, and I think the point is, the whole affair is a generational campaign that will bear fruit in days to come. The battles aren’t done and the war continues. I’m tired of being told I fought in a “bad” war with 7RAR in Vietnam while the later 7RAR troops who fought in Iraq also copped the “bad” war service but the next rotation to Afghanistan of the battalion served in a “good” war.  We don’t see it that way.  The country called and we served under the rising sun, as did our fathers, in an apolitical manner. I would rather the line quoted at the start be;

We should think of lives shattered and lives given in service of what good men and women believed were good and just causes.

Leave the “rightly or wrongly” and “squandered” to the politicians lest the words start appearing on gravestones and memorials. In the meantime I await the news of my mate Percy who yesterday was given 24 hours to live.  Percy served in one of  the “bad” wars in an exemplorary manner and in doing so proved himself a better man than Sweetman ever will be. poppy

Commo MP arrested

Green Commo MP Rhiannon has been detained by the Sri Lankan authorites for visa infringements.

Ms Rhiannon has been in the country studying the Sri Lanka’s human rights record, and says she has seen evidence of extreme government repression.

What the hell is an Australian minor party politician doing in a foreign country calling them to order over anything – let alone their human rights record? Get back you clown and see what you can do to help your electorate. Failing that maybe Sri Lanka could be encouraged to keep her.  It would certainly lift the standards of politicians in Australia. UPDATE:  Damn! She has been released.

Animal Activists

THE live-export industry is mounting a campaign to dismantle government regulation and take back control for policing animal welfare standards, as activists produced fresh allegations of Australian cattle being abused overseas, this time in Mauritius. Labor agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said it was “the worst possible time” to raise self-regulation.

“A debate about greater self-regulation is the last thing the Australian community wants to hear right now, (when) confidence in this important industry has again been undermined.”

Ah…so it’s an important industry now.  Didn’t seem important when Joe Ludwig arbitarily closed it down based on a video shown on the ABC. The hide of Fitzgibbon to say anything about the confidence when it was the ALP/ABC that totaly scrapped any confidence our trading partners had in the industry by their sheer stupidity and hatred of the man on the land. City folk don’t reaslize that Ludwig’s stupidity didn’t just impact on the live export industry but on the entire industry.  With  one stroke of the pen he destabalized cattle prices across the entire country as a surplus of cattle, once intended for Indonesia, suddenly came on the market. Cattle prices plumetted with the glut; mortgages couldn’t be met; truck repayments were missed; staff were let go and it is still in the doldrums.  I noted one “expert” on the ABC say “the live export industry was closed down for only one month!” Bullshit!  Two years later and is is still in trouble. One friend, not involved in the export industry but cattle breeding generally, now has an $8 million  mortgage attributed solely to Joe Ludwig.  Two seasons of rediculously low beef prices where his costs far outweigh prices per kilo paid has left him in trouble. So I’m glad Fitzgibbon now thinks it is an important industry.  Maybe the ALP won’t stand in the way of any remedial work Abbott and Joyce have to do to get it back on track. We’ll see. I find it somewhat strange that  radical animal rights activists can take videos of cattle or sheep being mistreated anywhere in the world, sheet it home to Australia and use it as a base in their program to close down the cattle and sheep industry.   How can the cattle breeder out Chinchilla way be expected to have any impact on what happens to the cattle he sells in far away places like Mauritius? He can’t really and whereas no one likes to see animals treated poorly we can’t be held to account what other cultures do.
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