The Returned Services League has long prided itself on being non-party-political. So, when its outgoing national president uses his Remembrance Day speech at the Australian War Memorial to blast the government for willfully degrading Australia’s defence capabilities, the PM had better listen, not just squirm in his seat. Especially when he ranks you even worse than Neville Chamberlain.
Retired army major-general and outgoing national RSL president Greg Melick said “even Neville Chamberlain”, the British prime minister who tried to appease Adolf Hitler, belatedly re-armed in the chaotic run-up to World War II.
With the Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles looking on at the Australian War Memorial, Mr Melick stunned an audience studded with top military brass by using the Remembrance Day commemorative address to blast Australia’s defence settings and spending.
Demanding a “grand strategy” to prepare for war, he said the nation’s defence would become a “matter of what we can afford and not what we need” without an integrated response to the deteriorating security situation in the Indo-Pacific.
Remember when we were told that the Pacific security situation is ‘incredibly benign’. Turns out that that’s just Aunty Helen talking through her arse again.
In fact, the Pacific is at its most dangerous juncture in nearly a century. Yet gormless idiots like Anthony Albanese act as if everything’s fine while the Nazi Germany of the 21st century slowly, inexorably grinds the Pacific under its heel.
Referring to the crisis Australia confronted in WWII as Japanese forces surged through southeast Asia, the 76-year-old said: “We should never forget that servicemen and women of my father’s generation commenced their training with broomsticks and won through with sheer courage, initiative and resilience. Sadly, these will not be enough in today’s strategic situation, especially with the ever-increasing technological nature of the battlefield and the vast ranges of modern ordnance and weapons. Australia needed to boost defence spending and significantly increase matériel reserves, especially in fuel and ammunition.”
Back then, too, the Australian government recklessly kept on trading vital warmaking materials with a belligerent Asian power. Even ‘Pig Iron Bob’ Menzies would be aghast at how deep into China’s pockets a succession of Australian governments, Labor most assiduously of all, have sold our country’s interests. But then, Albanese’s is a government for whom the Chinese regime stumped up cash, propaganda and personnel, to get elected.
They’ve got their money’s worth.
Australia hasn’t.
The Australian understands that Mr Melick did not clear his speech with the prime minister’s office, which declined to comment. The commemorative address at the war memorial is typically non-controversial, recognising the sacrifice of the fallen and the service of defence personnel in sombre terms. But that wasn’t the only message Mr Melick delivered on Tuesday in calling out the complacency of Australia in the face of the “most dire” security situation in the Indo-Pacific since the dark days of 1941, when the threat of Japanese invasion loomed.
In an apparent dig at Mr Albanese, he said: “Our defence minister is keenly aware of the issues facing his portfolio, so the challenge before him is to convince his colleagues to rebalance our priorities. Otherwise, in future Remembrance Day ceremonies, we may well regret the conflict we didn’t deter and remember those who we demanded to protect us without the necessary wherewithal.”
In the most pointed dig, Melick unfavourably compared Albanese to Chamberlain.
Mr Albanese will not welcome having his Labor government bracketed with that of Chamberlain before he gave way as wartime leader to Winston Churchill, who had been clear-eyed in recognising the menace of Hitler. Citing Britain’s belated re-armament drive after the Nazis moved on Austria and Czechoslovakia prior to WWII, Mr Melick said: “Even the much-criticised Neville Chamberlain, concerned by the growing power of Nazi Germany, ensured an unfortunately insufficient expansion of Britain’s defence capabilities from 1935, during which she spent increasing amounts on defence, peaking at 55 per cent of GDP in 1943.
“If Churchill’s exhortations had been heeded earlier, Britain might have been in a position, not only to win the Battle for Britain, but also to react to German expansion in time to prevent the takeover of the (Czech) Sudetenland and the ensuing world war.”
And in a rebuke to the Helen Clarks of the region, Melick reminded the feckless politicians that, while they may not be interested in war, war is very interested in them.
In his speech, Mr Melick also quoted then prime minister Alfred Deakin’s 1907 cautioning that the nation, lulled by decades of security, would not be attacked with “kid gloves or after convenient notice, but it will be when and where we least desire it, and with a remorseless fury”.
And it’s other people who’ll have to fight and die to try and correct their idiotic complacency.
