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Your Say!

While the Association does not necessary agree or disagree with everything on this page,

we do respect the right of everyone to have their say.

RAAF Mawson.

Peter Stickland got in touch, he says:  “Re Vol 59, Page 8, an excellent article on RAAF MAWSON.  I was stationed there as a Senior Radio and Comms. Officer in 1980 and the Auster aircraft was still there plus all of the other items mentioned.  I went there after 21 years in the RAAF, enjoyed it very much.  I went back to Antarctica in 1983 to Casey Base.”

Radio Port Stephens FM.

We heard from John Dohnt, he said: “I am a retired RAAFie involved in a local community radio station in Nelson Bay. The station is Port Stephens FM. I have been the technical officer there for the last 6 years and have used several RAAFies to help. Unfortunately, they get posted and I need to find a replacement. It was suggested to contact your association in an effort to seek interest from your readers and members of the potential to help. If you are a retired tech living in the Nelson Bay area, have an interest in radio, some spare time and maybe the desire to become a presenter as well, then please get in touch.

If you are interested, then you can contact John on 0408 536 566 or email support@psrfm.org.au.

You can listen live to the station HERE.  Click HERE to see some of the gear on which you could be working.

Ted Mac sent us this, he says:  "What has the Army turned into… This is a disgrace.”: 

The Army??

ADFA recruits first gender-neutral cadet.

Matthew Benns,

Editor-at-Large,

The Herald Sun

September 21, 2017

THE Australian Army has its first gender-neutral officer-to-be after a cadet at the elite training academy told superiors she was no longer female — and did not want to be male either. The second year-cadet’s decision has Australian Defence Force Academy instructors rewriting the rule books on how to address the cadet. The young trainee, who can no longer be referred to as she or her, has been moved out the female barracks and into mixed accommodation at the Canberra academy. “Everyone is tiptoeing around this cadet in fear of saying or doing the wrong thing,” a defence force source told The Daily Telegraph. “Instructors are correcting everything they say and have to refer to her as ‘officer cadet’ rather than she or he as they do with everyone else.

“Soldiers are not interested in this crap, they want to focus on their real job,” the source added. In the past five years the ADF has spent more than $1 million helping 27 members deal with gender dysmorphia, including paying for 17 to have sex-change surgery.

But the push for political correctness has led to a plunge in morale, with a survey revealing fewer than half of army and navy personnel have any confidence in their leaders or their decisions.

Senator Cory Bernardi said: “The political correctness at defence continues with this gender X trainee raising a raft of questions including which barracks and latrine to use. “It is mind-boggling. I have spoken to several defence force members who feel they are part of a giant social experiment that is being driven from the top down.” A survey of more than a third of personnel in the army, navy and air force found low morale throughout the ranks with civilian staff particularly dissatisfied.”

Senator Skye Kakoschke-Moore requested the survey results through senate estimates and said defence needed to “delve deeper” to find out what has gone wrong. About a quarter of men and women across all three forces reported their own morale as low or very low. Another third said it was only moderate. Less than half of the men and women in the army and navy felt that defence senior leaders made effective strategic decisions or had any confidence in them.

Former Army officer and Australian Conservatives member Bernie Gaynor said: “It’s about time the Defence hierarchy got back to core business and provided that leadership.”

A Defence spokesman said: “Defence currently has personnel who have identified as gender X. Due to privacy, Defence will not comment on individuals.”

“Defence places a high priority on the wellbeing of all personnel and being an employer of choice. Morale is influenced by many factors, including some which are related to work and others that relate to personal and family circumstances.”

Ernie Gimm sent us this: - ring any bells??

How Desert Storm destroyed the US Military.

The US military that won Desert Storm or Gulf War I in 1991 was a spectacular military, a gargantuan industrial age military with high tech weaponry and well-trained personnel, that when called upon, achieved victory with the speed of Patton and the panache of Teddy Roosevelt.

Overlooking the vast eight-mile carnage on the Highway of Death in Kuwait, destruction that was caused by a US Air Force and Navy that bore almost no resemblance to the two services now, a sergeant in the 7^th US Cavalry remarked, “America sure got its money’s worth from those Joes.”

In 44 days, the largest military force assembled by the US and its allies since Normandy, destroyed the world’s fourth largest army in a brilliantly led, fabulously executed air and ground war in the sands of the Middle East.

The ghosts of Vietnam were vanquished by men who had experienced the horrors and strategic errors of that war and who instilled those lessons to the personnel they led.

Both General Colin Powell and the late General Norman Schwarzkopf had both served multiple tours in Vietnam and their experiences there made them highly sceptical of the press and its intentions, therefore, no reporters were embedded with combat units during the war. The world was given a Nintendo video game, sanitized version of a war and while short, had many elements of the nastiness of wars past, but appeared to be nothing more than a high-tech cake walk.

Because there were no journalists in the field, the world never saw H.R McMaster, the President’s National Security Adviser, who was then a captain in the 2^nd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, fighting the Tawakalna Division of the Republican Guard at a now famous grid line dubbed the 73 Easting.

On McMaster’s left flank, the scouts from the 4th Squadron, 7^th Cavalry were also battling the Tawakalna and the ghosts of the Little Big Horn, at a nameless speck of desert landscape known as Phase Line Bullet. Later that night, grunts and tankers from the 1^st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, hit the Guard at Objective Norfolk and before the night was over, found themselves engaged in close quarters fighting with fanatical Guardsmen in a place most of them want to forget, but can’t. Two days before, the Big Red One had spent the opening hours of the war burying Iraqis in the trenches alive with bulldozers.

On G Day +3, the US 1^st Armoured Division hammered the Iraqi Al-Medina Division of the Republican Guard at a place now known as Medina Ridge. The Battle of Medina Ridge was to date the largest tank battle since Kursk in 1943.

On the left flank of Lieutenant General Fred Franks’ VII Corps was the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, which included the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division. The 24th Mech was led by the extremely aggressive, highly competent and definitely non-PC, Major General Barry McCaffrey. The first two days of the ground war, the 24th Mech raced across the Iraqi desert, heading towards its objectives in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. On the 26^th February, 1991, the 24th Mech advanced through the valley and captured Iraqi airfields at Jabbah and Tallil. At the airfields, it encountered entrenched resistance from the Iraqi 37th and 49th Infantry Divisions, as well as the 6th Nebuchadnezzar Mechanized Division of the Iraqi Republican Guard. The 24^th’s Task Force Tusker attacked entrenched Iraqi forces on February 26th to seize battle position 143, effectively severing the Iraqi Euphrates River Valley line of communication to the Kuwait Theater of operation and destroying the major combat elements of the Iraqi Republican Guard Forces Command’s elite 26th Commando Brigade.

Despite some of the most fierce resistance of the war, the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division destroyed the Iraqi formations and captured the two airfields the next day. The 24th then moved east with VII Corps and engaged several Iraqi Republican Guard divisions on the last day of the conflict.

Two days after the Gulf War ended, on March 2, 1991, elements of the 24th Mech were fired on by the Iraqi Hammurabi Division of the Republican Guard, which was retreating north in a five mile long convoy. McCaffrey ordered his division to destroy the Hammurabi and by the end of the day, the 24th Mech had annihilated the division, destroying 187 armoured vehicles, 43 artillery pieces, and over 400 trucks. The Battle of Rumaila Oilfield was a classic showcase of the kind of warrior aggression the US military’s senior leaders used to display, but which, in the era of the perfumed prince with stars has all but disappeared.

Barry McCaffrey would last about five minutes on active duty today, as would Norman Schwarzkopf. McCaffrey and Schwarzkopf are the type of generals who win wars. What do the the generals do now?

Yet, the world saw none of those battles being fought as they saw no Marines storming through Kuwait. There were no journalists; hence no video, no film, no photos; nothing to show the world except a few shots of B Roll of the Iraqi Army surrendering to Marines on the border. To the American public, the Iraqis were surrendering en masse, when in actuality the Republican Guard was going down with the ship. For example, the 10,000 man Tawakalna Division was virtually annihilated, including the division commander who died in an artillery barrage on the night of February 26, 1991.

While General Schwarkopf’s power-point presentations enlightened the world, the soldiers and Marines found themselves in a Dante’s Inferno, with smoldering vehicles, dead Iraqi soldiers strewn over tank turrets in a man-made darkness of oil fires that smothered any sunlight and the vast remnants of an army, which littered the battlefield: rifles, helmets, sundry equipment and arms and legs that were picked at by packs of roving wild dogs.

War is hell…but the American public never knew.

The day Desert Storm ended, the death of the US military commenced. The Pentagon, basking in glory and bowing to pressure from the public and crackpot feminists like Patricia Schroeder, started drinking the Kool Aid and they’ve never stopped. The war was a video game, a clean, quick rout. Modern war was now sanitized, where the bad guys would die at stand-off ranges of a mile or two and explode in little black and white pixels on Pentagon TV screens. In fact, war was now so quick and so easy that women should be allowed to serve in the combat arms and Special Forces.

Victory in Desert Storm became the catalyst for every left wing wacko to hack at the military with a meat cleaver.

Since, 1991, the US military has been slowly coming apart at the seams. Stress cards, open homosexuality, transgenders on active duty, sensitivity training, pregnancy simulators for male troopers, lactation stations in the field, babies born on US ships of war, female graduates of Ranger School, including a 37 year old mother (it’s funny how the women looked so well fed), women in the SEALs, women in Marine infantry units and females in the field artillery (even though most cannot carry a 155mm round) are just some of the insanity that has taken place in the last 26 years, but which snowballed into hell under the Obama administration.

A social revolution engulfed the military, starting with the Tailhook scandal and continuing to this day. Warriors were forced out and feather merchants and PC flag bearers were promoted. Girl power was in and masculinity was out. The warrior culture was buried and a new culture was reborn that resembles corporate America, not the US military of yesteryear.

And, now, with the world in flames, with ISIS blowing up Europe, with Putin pumping weights in the Arctic while he watches his BMP’s on skis roll by, with Kim Jong-Loon on the loose with a toy chest of nukes and missiles and with Iran figuring out that Trump ain’t Barney Fife, the US military needs to be rougher and tougher and more ready for a fight than ever, and, we ain’t. And, that’s the fact, Jack.

Many are waiting for Mad Dog Mattis (left) to stick a pike in the heart of the military’s social engineering forever. We are still waiting…Perhaps, Secretary Mattis is so busy dealing with the thugs on the planet, that he has forgotten that the armed forces that will be engaging the thugs is still in trouble. 

Secretary Mattis must once and for all shut down the feminist fantasy of women in the combat arms. There are thousands of jobs for women in the military where they can serve honourably and be promoted, without, in Mattis’ own words, ‘setting themselves up for failure in combat.’

Mattis also needs to get rid of the perfumed princes and the feckless duds who have infested the senior ranks of the armed forces. I would rather have a sergeant with guts running a division than a two star coward who is more worried about his pension and future job on cable news than the mission and the troops.

The US military is still being led by people who believe that the military is nothing different than working for Google, except that the military has uniforms and weapons. When you eschew the glorious traditions of the military and combine that with ludicrous social engineering, you are setting yourself up for massive failure.

While the US military interpreted the results of Desert Storm incorrectly, the real lessons from that conflict are crystal clear. The US military functioned well in an environment that focused on the mission, not on political correctness, LGBT rights, day care centres on submarines and breastfeeding Rangers.

With our enemies stacking up against us, time is running out to fix the problems which were initially caused by a victory 26 years ago, in a war that has largely been forgotten.

Laverton parts bin.

Dick Cluley says:  “Re Vol 59, Page 14,  Just have a bit of a story to tell about Laverton and the old aircraft parts dump west of the radar and before the tower (near the railway line fence).  Looks like it is outside the new base boundary now but not built over.  In 1987 I fossicked in it and found many interesting bits and pieces including a Beaufort name plate, Spitfire exhaust stubs and parts of the RAAFs only Hurricane. Only spent an hour or so but from memory there was a lot more underground.  There was a small brick building nearby with hundreds of 50mm cannon shell rounds clips scattered everywhere.  It looks like it's gone by the new google earth sat pic.  Will be sad to see the old base go”.

Wind Turbines.

Ernie Gimm sent us this:  The entire rationale for wind turbines is to stop global warming by reducing the amount of CO2 being returned to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels. In the picture at right, recently taken in Sweden, freezing cold weather has caused the rotor blades of a wind turbine to ice up bringing the blades to a complete stop.

To fix the “problem” a helicopter is employed (burning aviation fuel) to spray hot water (which is heated in the frigid temperatures using a truck equipped with a 260 kW oil burner) on the blades of the turbine to de-ice them.

The aviation fuel, the diesel for the truck, and the oil burned to heat the water, could produce more electricity (at the right time to meet demand) than the unfrozen wind turbine could ever produce. (Before it freezes up again). The picture is a metaphor of the complete insanity of the climate change debate. In decades to come this one photo alone will sum up an era of stupidity, when rational thought, logic and common-sense was abandoned and immense wealth and resources needlessly sacrificed.

Pensions.

John Cridland says:  I read this in the Brisbane Courier-Mail earlier this year and while in a grumpy mood I am sending it on. It has been around for a while, but every voter should read and remind their elected representative of their duties.

“THE stigma of charity should be removed from the age pension. It should be an entitlement earned by the person’s personal contribution to the fund,” said a very famous Australian long ago.

You wouldn’t know about it listening to the major parties’ politicians who, echoing former Treasurer Joe Hockey, told the ABC they want Australians to drop their sense of entitlement to the aged pension, which should only be paid to poor people, and receiving it should be “nothing to be proud of”.

Well, no! most pensioners worked and spent a lifetime paying for their pensions. It’s not welfare and, when it was introduced, it was actually meant to be an entitlement. A 7.5 per cent contribution was taken from wages to put into a fund to pay their pensions. Just as workers now have superannuation collected.

What a good idea! Unfortunately (for pensioners) the Labor Party insisted the contributions shouldn’t be kept in individual accounts as in the UK and the US where retirees get the entitlement earned by their contributions. Instead, it all went into one big pot, the National Welfare Fund. And when the pot got really big, the politicians took it.

They won’t talk about the historical facts because these days politicians have developed a new “ending the age of entitlement” narrative while pushing the disingenuous line that younger workers are paying tax to support pensioners. Menzies was opposition leader when then prime minister Ben Chifley announced a National Welfare Fund to pay for pensions, unemployment relief, child endowments, even health care with a 7.5 per cent tax increase.

Menzies insisted that the Compulsory Contribution (levy) should be kept completely separate; that it should be paid straight into a trust account and not mixed with the general revenue. The levy and the National Welfare Fund began on January 1, 1946, and contributions were shown separately on workers’ personal tax assessments for 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949 and 1950, with the money paid straight into the special fund from which claims were paid out.

In 1950 the balance in the fund was almost £100 million or $200 million – in today’s money the equivalent of several trillion dollars.

But the pot was too big for the politicians to leave alone. Menzies, supported by the Australian Labor Party, amended the Acts governing the fund so the compulsory contributions levy was lumped in with people’s income tax and the whole lot paid straight into consolidated revenue. But the compulsory 7.5 per cent “levy” was still collected and spent.

In 1977 Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser transferred the balance left in the welfare fund account (by then almost $500 million, or several trillion in today’s terms) to consolidated revenue. But still the 7.5 per cent was taken out of everyone’s pay packet every week. Then in 1985 the Labor Government repealed Acts No. 39, 40 and 41 of 1945 (The National Welfare Fund Acts) and introduced income and asset testing, thus excluding millions of levy and taxpaying Australians from receiving the pension for which they had paid.

But still the 7.5 per cent levy continued to be collected (while hidden in general income tax revenue.) And to this day it still is collected.

There have been estimates that the trillions of dollars stolen from the fund and the money paid and similarly stolen (sorry, transferred) since 1985 would be enough to pay a non-means-tested pension to every retiree of far more than $500 a week. If it had been invested, like the Future Fund, the pension might be $1000 a week. Small beer compared with the politicians’ pension deals but a huge leap for older Aussies, 420,000 of whom had their age pensions cancelled or reduced from January 1.

Ironically, they are the very pensioners who would have the highest pensions if their personal contribution to the “fund” was the yardstick as in the UK and the US. They probably generally have been Coalition voters. But no more.

Spend time in the RSLs, bowling clubs, voluntary organisations and the like, where these people gather and it is clear they are Liberal-National voters no more. In lieu of an Australian Trump, they see no alternative but One Nation. The Coalition, supported by Labor and the Greens, has turned 180 degrees from Menzies’ view that the age pension is “an entitlement earned by the person’s personal contribution to the fund” and portrays it as charity. For many Australians this alone shows how far the parties they once supported have strayed from principle.

We received this from several sources:

My Australia: Fairwell old friend.

Jennifer Oriel writing in The Australian brings to light all that personifies the ADF of 2017.  She says:  Given Australia rates below countries like Vietnam, Brazil and Thailand in military strength, one might expect the Defence Minister to make vast improvements in combat readiness her sole priority. It takes a long bow to contend that breast jobs and transgender surgery have a direct relationship to military prowess. Yet recently the minister, Marise Payne, justified Defence spending more than $1 million in taxpayer funds on cosmetic surgery for troops (See HERE). All that remains is to ditch ‘Advance Australia Fair’ for ‘I Feel Pretty’.

There is no point in maintaining the fiction that Australia is ready for war. Yet the Prime Minister made the fiction official when he promised war with North Korea if fat boy Kim fires at America. Kim Jong-un is determined to prove that his nuke is bigger than Trump’s, but seems doomed to premature articulation. The only thing worse than North Korea’s missile porn is the possibility that Kim will acquire nuclear power and make the West pay. We had better hope his losing streak lasts because Australia’s military preparedness underwhelms and soft treason is rising through the ranks.

Australia shares more than fiery rhetoric with North Korea. We are neck and neck on global rankings for military capability. On this year’s Global Firepower ranking, Australia is listed 22 and North Korea 23 for military strength. America leads the world but China is rapidly gaining. When Defence isn’t funding nips and tucks for troops, it’s busy banning boys from jobs. The Australian Army banned male recruits in a majority of positions advertised in early August. The Daily Telegraph revealed that 35 of 50 jobs were available only to women. Australian Defence Force recruiters were told that if they did not follow the women-only directive, they would be “re-posted”.

Malcolm Turnbull and Payne are enthusiastic architects of diversity policy in the military. The trickle-down effect seems clear. Last year Chief of Army Lieutenant General Angus Campbell addressed a Defence Force conference on recruitment. He said: “The number one priority I have with respect to recruitment is increasing our diversity, with a focus on women and indigenous Australians.” He emphasised that his “goal of increasing diversity in the army” was urgent and exhorted members to “examine your ‘energy levels’ for this task and see that they are aligned with mine”. Campbell used a shopping study to propose varied approaches to ­recruiting women and men for the army. Apparently, men and women shop differently and Campbell said: “We can reasonably extrapolate these ‘sales’ issues to our ‘sales’ of army careers.”

Once again, I Feel Pretty.

If Australia was the world’s number one military power, the transformation of Defence from a patriotic military to progressivist civil service might seem less problematic. But I suspect the transformation would not occur under a government determined to make its military supreme. President Donald Trump is already seeking to restore US military might by advancing beyond Obama’s queer programs and habitual Islamist appeasement.

Perhaps only one activity is more corrosive to the modern military than systemic social ­engineering. It is soft treason. The latest attacks on Western forces is friendly fire aimed at our elite troops. In Australia and Britain, special forces soldiers are accused of war crimes and the left’s political-media class is producing prime propaganda for our enemies. In 2008, human rights lawyer Phil Shiner accused the British military of war crimes, alleging soldiers mutilated and killed innocent civilians in Iraq. The tax payer funded BBC repeated the allegations. A subsequent multi-million-pound inquiry concluded what many Britons had suspected; the allegations were baseless. Shiner was struck off as a solicitor after he was found guilty of multiple professional misconduct charges, including dishonesty and lack of integrity.

As it turned out, Shiner, who smeared allied troops as war criminals had been the vice-president of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers.

Australia, too, is enduring a protracted period of war crimes allegations directed at our elite troops. The most publicised case involving former SAS commander Andrew Hastie was timed with the Liberal Party’s public endorsement of his candidacy for the federal seat of Canning. Despite the left media’s best efforts to discredit him, Hastie won the by-election and after a two-year investigation, the soldier directly accused of wrongdoing was cleared by the Australian Federal Police.

In July, the ABC chose to publish damning allegations about our elite forces. ABC staff introduced the material thus: “Hundreds of pages of secret defence force documents leaked to the ABC give an unprecedented insight into the clandestine operations of Australia’s elite special forces in Afghanistan, including incidents of troops killing unarmed men and children.” There are two pertinent questions. Does anyone at the ABC understand the meaning of non-state actor, jihadism and asymmetric warfare? Has Defence launched an official investigation into the leaks, given their potential to damage the reputations of Australian troops and compromise operations security?

The SAS is being placed under intense scrutiny over operations against Islamist terrorists. It is difficult to avoid observing that under Marise Payne’s Defence leadership, a culture of complaint has developed that undermines military cohesion, violates the principle of merit and punishes soldiers for courage under fire. Along with the numerous problems plaguing Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne’s submarine program, the Liberals’ traditional role in fortifying national defence appears to be fatally compromised. It should concern any prime minister, but especially one willing to go to war with a paranoid dictator hot for nuclear holocaust.

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