John McLean
Author of A Mission of Honour; the Royal Navy in the Pacific, 1769-1997
So, one of the New Zealand Navy’s few operating vessels, HMNZS Manawanui, valued at more than $100 million, went aground on a clearly charted Samoan reef, in reasonable weather and visibility, then caught on fire and sank – the first of our navy’s ships to go under since World War II.
The captain of the ship was Yvonne Gray and this raises the issue of whether the Navy is over-promoting women beyond their capacity in order to meet gender and sexual orientation goals. This would appear to be the case, as the recently retired chief of Navy, Rear-Admiral David Proctor, is on record as saying, “Having wāhine (women) as commanding officers on more than 60 per cent of our ships, as well as heading up shore units and other important portfolios, is a realisation of that goal [to celebrate the diversity of our personnel].”
To have such a goal shows that Rear-Admiral Proctor did not understand the function of the service he headed. The purpose of the navy is to defend the nation in time of war by fighting the King’s enemies. This is best achieved by promoting people solely on merit and NOT having a woke DEI goal of boosting women just because they are women, in order to ‘celebrate diversity’. When diversity prevails over merit – as appears to be the case in New Zealand’s rapidly diminishing navy – things can only go backwards.
The sunken Manawanui was a survey/research vessel. It was doing survey work in Samoan waters when, under the control of Yvonne Gray, it sank to the bottom of the ocean. Surveying has been an important function of the Royal New Zealand Navy since its creation in World War II. Before that hydrographic surveys were carried out by the Royal Navy, which defended the seas around our coasts until the 1940s. The centuries-old principle of surveying is that the surveying vessel – or ‘mother ship’ if you like – stays out at sea while the inshore surveying is done by the ship’s small boats: that way they can get in and out of shallow waters, reefs and even river mouths. They then return to the survey vessel where the charts are drawn up. So why did Commander Gray take this large and valuable ship so close to the reef?
Her deficient command of the vessel risked the lives of the crew, who fortunately managed to reach the shore on rafts virtually without injury. Their lives had been endangered but, with their good training, they got themselves off safely.
And yet Minister of Defence Judith Collins called this a “triumph”. And she went out of her way to praise Gray. This reaction was part of the feminist movement of which Collins is a fully paid-up member. It was Collins who, as minister of justice, appointed the ill-qualified Susan Devoy to be race-relations commissioner even though she had no knowledge or experience of the issue and made a complete hash of it. But she had the feminist haircut and that was all that seemed to matter. Collins also praised Commander Gray for “saving lives” – lives that wouldn’t have had to be saved had her captaincy not put the vessel on the seabed.
Compare Collins’ effusive praise of her disastrous fellow feminist with the words that the First Lord of the Admiralty Lord George Hamilton used in the House of Commons in 1889 when there were calls for the British Government to bestow some sort of honour on Captain Kane who, with great competence, dexterity and courage, steered HMS Calliope safely out of a hurricane in Apia Harbour that had wrecked two American and three German warships. Lord George Hamilton replied that no honour would be conferred on the captain, because the courage and skill displayed by him, his officers and men “was not rare in the British Navy and did not deserve any special recognition”. And Captain Kane had saved his ship; not sunk it!
In a further demonstration of its political correctness (but not its effectiveness as a fighting force), the navy went out of its way to boast about Yvonne Gray’s lesbianism at the time of her appointment to command HMNZS Manawanui. Her short biography on the Navy’s website makes mention of her ‘wife’, Sharon, which in the interests of good taste would have been better left unsaid. Promotion of lesbianism in any form is not a function of the navy. By pushing it in this way the navy left itself open to the suggestion that that might have been another box to tick to explain Commander Gray’s exceedingly rapid promotion up the ranks.
With great foolishness the navy tried to make her and another female officer, Fiona Jameson, captain of the frigate HMNZS Te Kaha, poster girls for ‘inclusiveness’. And the result? Gray’s ship sank while Jameson crashed Te Kaha into Auckland's Kauri Point ammunition depot, opening a gash of more than half a metre that cost $220,000 to repair. At the time of her appointment to Te Kaha, Jameson gushed, “Now as I take command with three other women [commanding officers], I get...a greater normality around wāhine toa leadership.” The poor thing can’t even speak English properly, let alone steer a ship without hitting a wharf.
The navy boasts that 27.4 per cent of its personnel are now female and 60 per cent of our naval vessels (in March 2023) are commanded by women. Does the nation feel any safer by being told this?
So, with Gray’s Manawanui on the seabed and polluting the nearby waters, and an estimated replacement cost of $130 million, and Jameson’s ship with a $220,000 gash, we have to ask whether women should be allowed to command our expensive warships. As Oscar Wilde wrote in The Importance of Being Earnest, “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.”
In the light of these disasters, should women be given command of taxpayer-funded naval vessels? If one applies the criteria of commonsense and national security, the answer is clearly ‘No’. Men and women are complementary to each other and not alternatives for each other. There are some tasks that women are not cut out for and are better carried out by men, e.g., commanding a warship or flying a fighter jet.
Until 1986 women were not allowed to serve on ships at sea. During World War II, the female WRENS did a wonderful job on land dealing with signals, communications, etc., without which the Royal Navy could not have functioned. They were expert at this kind of work, which helped to win the war. Now the New Zealand Navy REQUIRES them to go to sea. It seems that obliging the passing doctrine of feminism, rather than having WRENS proudly effective on land, is now the navy’s priority.
The top brass of the navy seems obsessed with political correctness. That is not their function and it can only undermine the public’s confidence. Identity politics are toxic wherever they rear their ugly heads and it is time that the navy ceased.
