Australia's Woeful Leaders.

For a nation that claims pleasure in cutting down 'tall poppies', Oz is very good at growing them. They are like weeds here. And just about as well regarded. Our list of even 'sound' political leaders and military leaders is very short and behind them, underfoot, are huge numbers of 9-5 wannabees all clawing at honours and rank, seeking the sunlight of fame and telling others what to do.

Standing behind the bars here I tend to let the customers express their opinions and perhaps interject my own when asked, and so it was today when several fine fellows went to town on the 'Quality of Leadership' of some of our weasels and toads. I listened and pulled pints and waited until asked.... and then let rip. Hahaha. But as I run the place I will say a few words here right now just to set the scene so to speak for our non-Oz evesdroppers.

We have more Government ministers, assistant ministers, deputy assistants to Chief assistant ministers etc per head of population of any advanced country you care to name. We have Premiers and Guvernors hidden in the bushes waiting to waylay passing journalists and TV news crews even in out of the way places like Wagga Wagga.

Our armed forces could, at a push, arm (but not necessarily defend) a very small nation like Burundi but is top-heavy with Generals of various hues that could fill a parade ground to review one private and a Captain. We have, for instance a head of the Army who holds Lt.General rank. He leads a force that could be barracked on a modest Army base in Northern Ireland or Bermuda. We have an Air Chief Marshal for an Oz Air Force far smaller than the detachment which the RAF based at Akrotiri and had commanded by an Air Commodore. (That, for the unitiated who only watch TV soldier-shows, is Brigadier level).

Our two 'major' Party Politicians are a fine pair of bookends but less useful now that we have Kindles. 

One is noted for knifing his predecessor in the back and the other for knifing two of his. Both seem to have the same policies for ruining the family, getting buggers to marry one another and murdering babies in the womb. 

America has Trump running, who builds major businesses and buildings. We have Shorten who could not build a back yard shed. America has Clinton who can lie far better than any female politician since Lucretia Borgia and has possibly out-killed more people than the Italian murderess. We have Turnbull whose only claim to fame is defending a British ex-spy who wanted to publish a book that no-one wanted to read.

Neither Shorten nor Turnbull could lead a pack of boy scouts into a tavern, although Shorten does have several mates who would, given the chance, lead them into a brothel.

I would, of course, allow them into the Tavern - not that either could find it - for a pint or two of good Grace, in the hope that their hearts might soften a little and their sinews develop a bit of strength, but only with the Bouncer at close hand to throw the bastards out when they poured it down their trousers.

But enough of my views (so the shout went up). Let is hear from the chaps I mentioned. I didn't catch sight of the first fellow as he was behind a paywall (The Australian) and didn't catch his name  either but from the cheering it was clear the others liked what he had to say. The focus was on the military predominantly but the politics was right in the middle of it:

He can fight for his country but cannot display his loyalty and commitment

Our politicians are so intent on pretending away the issue of Islamist extremism that they will not utter its name. Along with our bureaucrats, civic leaders and, incredibly, our military leadership, they tie themselves in knots to avoid offence while others risk their lives combating murderous intolerance.

This failure confounds mainstream voters, undermines the morale of security forces, plays into the victimhood narrative of extremists and exposes the nation to dangerous levels of ignorance and complacency.

For 15 years our defence personnel have battled Islamist extremists in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. They expose themselves to deadly threats, knowing 41 of their colleagues have been killed and 261 wounded. Yet the debate in Australia this week turned to whether these soldiers exhibited enough “cultural sensitivity”.

Australian Defence Force personnel combat Islamist extremists so warped that they launch suicide attacks agbainst women and children. Some of our troops have been killed by terrorists who infiltrated Afghan forces to slaughter their foreign “comrades”.

This is not a war between nation-states or ethnic groups — it is a battle between Islamist extremists and those who are not (including non-extremist Muslims).

We can see how religious perversion is central when we consider that our nation supplies combatants to both sides: the ADF deploys to tackle the terrorists while homegrown Islamist extremists travel to join the jihadists.

The ADF trains our soldiers in “cultural sensitivity”, encouraging them to view Islam as a religion of peace. 

Army research this week found the overwhelming majority (80 per cent) of a sample group believed the “Muslim religion promotes violence and terrorism”.

This was reported breathlessly in the Guardian Australia as showing strong and widespread “anti-Muslim” attitudes in the ADF. Yet it can hardly be surprising given these soldiers have put their lives on the line and seen comrades killed and wounded by an enemy defined by its interpretation of Islam.

Now, I have to say here that I have commanded troops too and always sought to have mine acknowledge the basic humanity of the enemy. But this 'cultural sensitivity' garbage is just not on. We spent much of the 20C dealing with Nazis and Communists and the only ones who considered their 'cultural sensitivities' were toadies and fellow-travellers, traitors and intellectual gibberish mongers. I suspect the same is occurring with the Islam- kow-towing politicians who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the evil of the ideology.

We all understand the need to prevent the tarnishing of all Muslims with the evil deeds of the radical extremists.

Roughly 20% by most accounts. The extremmists that is. 20% of 1,2 Billion is a frigging big number. The 80% 'moderates' do absolutely nothing to counter the evil in their midst. No prize for guessing why.

But we cannot pretend away the religious or cultural dimensions. 

The jihadists have killed us in New York, Bali, London, Madrid, Paris, Parramatta, Oruzgan and Martin Place. They strike in nightclubs, battlefields, public transport and on the street, using weapons as diverse or common as guns, bombs, cars, planes and knives. The one constant is the evil ideology, based on extremist Islamic teachings, and a barbaric, often suicidal, intent.

Andrew Hastie joined the army immediately after the 9/11 attacks because he wanted to actively defend our values from such hideous violence. He deployed to Afghanistan as a troop commander and again as a member of the crack Special Air Service Regiment.

He switched to politics last year at the Canning by-election and this week was sacked from the Army Reserve for refusing to remove a campaign billboard showing him in military uniform.

He can fight and die for his country but cannot display this loyalty and commitment in a campaign poster. Hastie must hide away his military honour and service. 

To the military brass it didn’t seem to matter that he was proud of his uniform and his service, or that others might be. Nor did it seem to matter that many other soldiers had used uniformed pictures in political campaigns.

The army claims it wants to avoid being politicised. Yet this is where its hypocrisy and cultural confusion is exposed.

The ADF allows uniformed personnel to parade at Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, despite its overtly political agenda. 

It allowed former army chief David Morrison to begin his political activism on issues surrounding sexual discrimination and domestic violence while he still in the job.

The ADF stood by the navy’s Muslim affairs adviser Captain Mona Shindy even after she used a navy Twitter account to criticise former prime minister Tony Abbott over Muslim issues.

She also criticised the Australian Liberty Alliance and backed Australia’s Grand Mufti when he made controversial comments after the Paris terrorist attacks that seemed to blame Islamophobia and Western foreign policy. 

Our politicians and security service leaders are sending conflicting messages and don’t seem to realise which values they should be protecting.

This is a kind interpretation. I do not see any 'conflicting' messages. I see cowardice. I see kow-towing to the 'new' ideology that is destroying our society.

Many hours after a radicalised teenager draped in a black robe yelled “Allahu Akbar” before shooting an innocent police worker dead in Parramatta last year, the NSW police were denying any suggestion of terrorism. 

Malcolm Turnbull, Bill Shorten and Mike Baird reacted to the attack without reference to Islamist extremism.

The previous December when an Islamist extremist gunman held innocent people hostage in a Sydney cafe, a social media campaign trumpeted solidarity not with the innocents being held at gunpoint (two were later killed) but with Muslim Australians who some wrongly imagined might suffer a backlash.

Former army chief Peter Leahy has expressed his frustration at the lack of attention paid to national security issues in the election campaign, even though we have personnel deployed. “They’re at war,” he told me on Sky News, “what is the strategy?”

Leahy, now a professor at the University of Canberra’s National Security Institute, says we need to discuss the ideology we are battling at home and abroad.

'Discuss' is the new buzz-word, almost replacing 'Conversation'. The sole private on the parade ground would be told 'Sort It'.

“In these sorts of times when we are at war, we need to be as direct, blunt and factual as we can. So we need to try and understand what the enemy want,” he says.

“(Islamist extremists) don’t want our form of government, they want to replace the forms of government broadly through the Middle East with sharia law and then, in many ways, they have global ambitions.

Now I am pretty happy with the way I live in this country and the form of government that we’ve got and I don’t want sharia law, so we need to discuss that first.”

Australians don’t like being lectured about tolerance and inclusivity when that is their history and nature. 

Most would prefer our leaders better defended these values from extremists seeking to impose intolerance. 

It is cultural cowardice to shame our proud and brave soldiers for parading their service at the same time our politicians and security leaders are too timid to even name the enemy.

Crikey I was pulling pints after that, I can tell you. But there was more to come. Rowan Dean was towed into the bar and set on a stool by Mike Smith, who hushed us all so that Rowan could speak. Rowan was in fine, fighting form with a ball-tearer column on the...

 Wanker of the Year.

LISTEN up guys – and that includes all you ballbreaking sheilas reading this – it’s time to man up and fight back against the gay political correctness garbage infesting our lives.

Last week’s moronic video by the laughably entitled Australian of the Year David Morrison was, for me, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I can no longer sit around passively on my backside, as so many of us have done for decades, while this never-satisfied army of politically correct censors inflict their retarded ideologies on our language and freedom of speech.

Australian of the Year David Morrison is merely a stooge for political correctness in his video Words at Work.

Mr Morrison, get knotted. It is my language and I will use it how I choose.

General Pursed lips.

I love our language. I love its innuendo, its cheekiness, its bawdiness and its sarcasm. I love its variety, its ever-changing colloquialisms and its garden of delightful hidden meanings and wicked word plays.

English, going back to Chaucerian and Shakespearean times, is without a doubt the most fun, inventive and versatile language on the planet.

No other language offers the richness of meaning and subtlety. No other language lives, breathes and constantly adapts itself as does our mother tongue.

And very few other languages have its wealth of rude, crass, hilarious, cutting, insightful and sarcastic means of causing offence and poking fun at ourselves and at others.

And in Australia, courtesy of our mixed Cockney and Irish backgrounds, the Aussie version of English has held its own in terms of inventiveness, coarseness and subversive humour.

So I will no longer be cowed by the quasi-socialists and self-pitying misery brigades of the Left in Australia who endlessly seek to mould how we think and behave by the process of limiting what words, phrases and concepts are deemed to be “appropriate”.

It’s time to hit back with a campaign to encourage politically incorrect thoughts and words: #unPCwithme, or something like that.

Listen to this balderdash (what a great word! No doubt they’ll try and ban it soon, too) from the former Chief of the Army and now Chief Nanny-state Wowser of the Year in his ludicrous video:

“Every day at work, there are hazards that you walk past without realising just how dangerous they are,” was his opening line – accompanied by Hitchcock-style Psycho music to ramp up the fear.

(Note also the deliberate use of “that you walk past” in the script, designed to echo the speech that made Mr Morrison such a leftie hero in the first place).

“Some things are just plain bad for you – I’m talking about the power of words,” he intones, as he stares with a disapproving sneer at … a poster that says “Clean up after yourself. Your mum doesn’t work here!”

The offence, presumably, is to suggest that it is only mums who clean up after messy boys and girls, whereas in our brave new PC world of the Left’s imagining dads must of course do their fair share of the housework too.

Well, Mr Morrison, have I got news for you.

I suspect that in about 90 per cent of normal Aussie households, most of the cleaning up does indeed get done by mum because dad couldn’t be arsed or is too busy watching telly or too hungover to care. It ain’t a perfect world, but at least it’s a tidy one.

I do a fair bit of tidying up, and I am sure most blokes do.  I doubt a lady would see it as tidy enough though whatever was done. Anyway, Morrison would know full well that troops have the tidyiest, shiniest, spit-and-polished workplaces around (until they blow them up, of course).

Mr Morrison then drivels on about other things we dreadful people in the workforce do and say, such as using the word “guys” as a generic term for men and women (Hollywood Valley Girl slang circa the ’80s), or – Shock! Horror! – using the word “girls” to address a group of, er, girls (sorry – self-important, smug, sanctimonious, whingeing workplace Wendys would be a better description of those depicted in the video).

Morrison can call me 'Sir'' - I am a Knight - or better still 'Sire'. 

Oh, and we mustn’t call our female co-workers “feisty” or “ballbreakers”, even when that’s what they are, because we don’t employ the same words to describe our feisty, ballbreaking male co-workers.

True. We tend to use far blunter anglo-saxon words like (children stop reading please) “f--kwit”, “d--khead”, and a certain part of the female anatomy. Give me “ballbreaker” any day. It’s far more imaginative.

As part of #unPCwithme, I encourage universities and workplaces to set up the opposite of the politically correct and nauseating “safe spaces” that have proliferated in recent years, such as the now infamous Oodgeroo Unit at QUT.

Instead, let’s see some specially designated “unPC spaces” or “PC-free time” in which individuals may assemble with the express purpose of nobody giving a rat’s [come along Rowan, say it.... arse] what anybody else says or how they say it.

If you don’t want to hear it, don’t go.

But if you want to be able to crack jokes, says daft things, be sarcastic and poke fun at stereotypes without fear of David Morrison popping up over your shoulder, feel free.

Chaucer and Shakespeare would be the first to rock up.

Morrison is cut from the same gingerbread by the same cutter that has made other smarmy little shytes since time before the written word. 

Oh for a Monash. They don't make generals like they used to.

Have a pint.

Pax