Is Scott Morrison the Chamberlain of the Culture Wars?

The Labor party in Australia is floundering because it’s forgotten who it is meant to be: but the Liberal party is rapidly following them down the slippery slope of blandness. Labor is facing electoral irrelevance because it’s turned its back on the workers. So is the Liberal party. Working and middle-class Australians voted for the Coalition in droves not least because they are innately conservative.

If only Scott Morrison’s Coalition were, too.

Although the fury of the backlash against the Morrison government’s appalling handling of the Brereton report, alleging war-crimes by Australian soldiers, is largely, rightly, focussing on Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, PM Scott Morrison is hardly blame free.

Although Morrison has, to be fair, handled the diplomatic firestorm unleashed by Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Zhao Lijian, the fact remains that Morrison handed Zhao and his masters a totally unnecessary propaganda free kick.

As a strategy, such propaganda is straight out of the Sun Tzu Art of War playbook, which includes insights such as: ‘The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting’ and ‘The greatest victory is that which requires no battle’.

China’s Foreign Ministry ‘spokesman’ Zhao Lijian is clearly a fan of both Tokyo Rose and Sun Tzu. His phony mocked-up photograph, posted online, of an Australian soldier slitting the throat of an Afghani child is as blatant, grotesque and repellent as it is opportunistic and predictable (as David Flint points out in his column this week). Zhao, apparently known as a ‘wolf warrior’, has pulled off a remarkable hat-trick that will no doubt earn him enormous kudos within the totalitarian and militaristic empire that is Xi Jinping’s Chinese communist regime. He has further crippled the morale of the most elite SAS force on the planet; further damaged the global reputation for integrity of the Australian military; and further humiliated and tarnished Australia’s international standing on human rights, thereby neatly creating a fake moral equivalence with China’s appalling record. Not bad for five minutes work on a Twitter meme that a teenage school-kid could have slapped together on his iPhone.

But no propaganda effort succeeds in a vaccuum. Zhao’s Twitter bombshell only detonated because it had been armed and primed by useful idiots and Quislings on the home front.

No matter how ugly, factually incorrect and obscene Zhao’s doctored image may be, its potency lies in its perceived credibility, and that credibility was handed over on a plate by Prime Minister Scott Morrison and General Angus Campbell when first they announced the tabling of the ‘brutal truths’ within the Brereton Report, followed by collective punishment for anyone remotely close to the alleged atrocities and, in a final obscenity, the pre-emptive stripping (now reversed) of citations from dead soldiers.

Whatever savagery, barbarity or crimes may or may not have taken place in the remote mountains of Afghanistan’s Uruzgun province a decade ago, until a court of law has found individuals guilty of intentional wrongdoing or murder then all of our Australian soldiers, including those named in the report, are to be presumed innocent. Full stop.

But this is where the government’s lamentable addiction to virtue-signalling is exposed as its worst weakness. ‘Scotty from Marketing’ has a bad habit of approaching every political issue like an advertising campaign.

Yet in a classic case of pandering to the virtue-signallers, Prime Minister Morrison, General Campbell and others were visibly tripping over each other to ‘get in front’ of this story. Anyone genuinely concerned with preserving our values as well as our security would have recognised, as countless have before them, that with national security and allegations of military crimes it is best to keep them out of the public eye and for information to be reserved for certain eyes only until the truth has been established in a court of law. All our fighting forces have been betrayed by the ham-fisted bungling of this situation at the highest levels[…]

Alas, this is the same military leadership that places ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’ and other turgid left-wing fads above preserving at all costs the morale and single-minded focus of our deadliest fighting force.

From “General High Heels” David Morrison prancing about in women’s shoes, because, um, patriarchy or something, to General David Hurley, who sacked three-tour veteran Major Bernard Gaynor for questioning why ADF in uniform were participating in the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Australia’s military leadership is as unfit for purpose as a supposedly conservative government.

Scott Morrison has always scoffed at fighting for ‘conservative’ values, settling instead for constant appeasement of the Left’s long march through our institutions, making him the Neville Chamberlain of the Culture Wars. And the Chinese spotted it long ago.

The Spectator

The purpose of the military is to be as effective a fighting force as possible, not pander to ‘progressive’ ideological fads. The purpose of a conservative party is to be…conservative.

Neutered leadership of both risks badly undermining Australia’s defence at a crux in global affairs.

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