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Contents.

Aged Care promises!

Australia Zoo visit.

New Plaque for Terry Sheean VC.

POM Military gone mad!

VC - full list.

New plaque honours Teddy Sheean VC.

A new memorial plaque honouring Ordinary Seaman Edward “Teddy” Sheean VC was unveiled in Shropshire Park in the north west Tasmanian town of Ulverstone 79 years after his death.

He is the first and so far the only Royal Australian Navy member to be awarded a VC.

CO Naval Headquarters Tasmania Commander Andrew Wright and CO HMAS Launceston Lieutenant Commander Nicholas Graney at the Teddy Sheean VC memorial in Ulverstone, Tasmania.

Ordinary Seaman Sheean paid the ultimate sacrifice on the 1^st December 1942, while defending his HMAS Armidale shipmates against enemy fighters during WWII. CO Navy HQ Tasmania Commander Andrew Wright represented Chief of Navy Vice Admiral Michael Noonan at the service to rededicate the memorial. Commander Wright said Ordinary Seaman Sheean displayed incredible bravery in the action and was thoroughly deserving of Australia’s highest military honour.

“Once he had helped free a life raft, allowing his shipmates to escape the sinking ship, Sheean then returned to his gun to engage the enemy,” Commander Wright said. “Although wounded in the chest and back, the 18-year-old shot down one bomber and kept the other aircraft at bay as his mates made their escape. He was last seen firing his gun as Armidale slipped below the waves.”

Among the guests at the ceremony were the Tasmanian Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Guy Barnett, and Sheean family representative Garry Ivory. Other guests included members of HMAS Launceston’s ship’s company, Australian Navy Cadets and members of the local RSL sub-branch.

You can see the full list of Australian recipients of the VC HERE.

Aged Care.

Government promised reform, record funding! Here’s what happened.

The final report from the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety was delivered in March 2021.

The stories that came out of the Royal Commission process were horrific and, sadly, unsurprising. It laid bare the terrible emergency that had been ongoing in aged care for decades. It was also an emergency that should never have happened. The Royal Commission also came with a comprehensive set of recommendations to reform the sector and ensure that it didn’t happen again. It was an opportunity to reset aged care and make sure the future was very different to the past.

But in politics there are few words that are more overused than ‘reform’. Reform in the political arena reminds me of the old joke that a classic of literature is a book everyone wants to have read but no-one wants to read. Reform is something that every politician wants to have done but none of them want to do.

With both sides of politics having perfected scare campaigns and enough voters seemingly happy to buy into them to swing elections, reform has become a lot harder. Gone are the reforming eras of the 1970s and `80s. But failing to reform means things just drift along and, as the Royal Commission clearly identified, that creates its own problems. The stories from the Royal Commission did create a powerful groundswell of support for large-scale reform and large-scale reform is what the Royal Commission found was needed. To fully implement all the reforms would cost about $20 billion in extra funding each year. A bare minimum to fix the problems would require more like $10 billion in extra funding each year.

With the release of the May budget, we got the government’s response to the Royal Commission. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced with much fanfare that it would be putting an additional $17.7 billion into the aged care sector. A closer inspection of the numbers revealed that this would be over five years. That amounts to about $3.5 billion per year. Well short of the minimum $10 billion required. The government was quick to counter the criticism that it wasn’t enough by saying that it had to be fiscally responsible. But what is more fiscally responsible – spending an additional $3.5 billion a year and failing to solve the problem or spending $10 billion a year and actually fixing it?

The government also claimed that it was providing record funding for aged care. Whenever you hear a politician say they are providing record funding for something, they’re trying to pull the wool over your eyes with a meaningless statement. Populations and prices go up each year. This means that just to keep up with the current level of care per person, every year would need to be year of record funding.

Worse, it is possible to have a year of record funding where the quality of care per person is falling. If the funding doesn’t keep up with the growth in population and the increase in prices, but is still slightly higher than last year, then it is still a year of record funding. Record funding is a meaningless statement made only by politicians and says nothing about the care provided.

But budgets are about priorities and perhaps the government could simply not find an extra $10 billion a year with all the competing priorities. That is, after all, a lot of money. Of course, in a few years the government will hand out the stage three tax cuts worth $16 billion a year. More than half of those tax cuts go to the top 20 per cent of taxpayers. Budgets are indeed about priorities.

The lack of dollars translates into a lack of care. A good example of this was the waiting list for Home Care Packages (HCP). The government announced an additional 80,000 HCPs, which sounded great – until you realised it would take two years to deliver them and the waiting list at the end 2020 was 97,000. It simply won’t fix the problem. Of most concern since the May Budget announcement has been how things have gone ominously silent. We might think the government is earnestly beavering away in the background, implementing the Royal Commission’s suggested reforms, ensuring that the horrible stories that were uncovered will never happen again.

This would be a reasonable assumption if the government had a track record of achievement after announcements. But the current government has perfected the art of looking busy. It makes lots of announcements without actually following through. I fear that hearing nothing means that nothing is happening.

After all, reform is hard. It requires a plan, and dedication. The Royal Commission provided the government with the plan, but does it have the dedication to follow through?

Australia Zoo.

On the 18th November 2021, what is known as the “Sunshine Coast Veteran’s Day”, the Australia Zoo on Steve Irwin Way at Beerwah, Qld, as a way of saying “Thank you for your Service”, threw open its doors to veterans. Vets, who could bring along 1 guest, only had to show a confirmation of Service, their Veteran Lapel Pin, White or Gold Veteran Card, or other proof of service to get free all-day entry to the Zoo. It had been planned that the Federal Minister for Veterans Affairs, Andrew Gee, would join local service men and women in touring the Zoo on the day but was unable to attend due to Covid.

With up to 15,000 former serving men and women living on the Sunshine Coast, it is one of the largest veterans’ communities in Australia.

Along with the many thousands of other vets, we went along. If you haven’t, we recommend you put the Zoo on your bucket list, the animals, the surroundings and the live show are all first class. A credit to the Irwin family.

Following are some pics from the Zoo. These pics have been crunched to allow the page to open quicker, click each pic to get a better view.

With all the sight-seeing you can get a bit hungry, if so the Crikey Café has you covered where you can order and enjoy pretty well whatever you wish.

Then with meal in hand, you can sit and enjoy it while overlooking the magnificent surroundings and watch the crocs in the open pools..

Then at 1.15pm each day, in the Crocoseum, the Zoo features the Wildlife Warriors Show. Here you see some very colourful and amazingly trained parrots followed by the live crocodile show.

Bloody hell – we have gone mad!!!

UK Armed forces to get new guidance on how to use ‘inclusive language’. HERE is their current guide, it’s obviously not good enough.

The new guide includes more inclusive ways to address disability, race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation and social mobility. The armed forces are to be given new guidance on “inclusive language” after the Defence Secretary said he is “unhappy” with the current advice.

Military personnel from all three services had been told to avoid using phrases such as “crippled with debt” or “blind drunk”.

The MoD said its Inclusive Language Guide 2021 was a “practical toolkit” to help servicemen and women understand why “certain words or use of language is hurtful or non-inclusive”.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin

A senior defence source said: “The Defence Secretary and Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) have been clear that the UK armed forces must modernise to tackle the threats of the future. That includes our approach to our people who are critical to that task. The Defence Secretary is unhappy with the current approach set out in the guide. A revised version will be published in the coming weeks.”

The guide will be taken down from the MoD website while changes are made. The guide, produced by the MoD’s Diversity and Inclusion Directorate, denies being “an attempt to police language” or “restrict your personal style of communication”, but was created to help staff “speak more powerfully, precisely and respectfully”, it recommended avoiding phrases such as “deaf to our pleas” in case it offended the disabled.

The new 30-page pamphlet says the words “woman” and “female” “mean different things but are often used interchangeably”, adding: “Referring to women as females is perceived by many as reducing a woman to her reproductive parts and abilities. “Not all women are biologically female, and the conflation of ‘female’ to ‘woman’ erases gender-nonconforming people and members of the trans community.” “The women in the platoon” is said to be a more inclusive phrase than “the females in the platoon”

.

The guide includes more inclusive ways to address disability, race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation and social mobility. The UK MoD wants personnel to put the “person-first” when speaking to others, only referencing characteristics when they are relevant and doing so in specific ways.

See their video below.

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