Vikki Campion: Patriotism cannot be relied on to fill our dwindling defence force numbers

Our defence forces are part of the fabric of our nation, but Australia is struggling to attract new recruits willing to fight for our freedoms, writes Vikki Campion.

How can we inspire people to serve when we can’t celebrate Australia Day, when we shame our flag, and force children who did nothing wrong to apologise to people who did not suffer?

Defence bosses struggled to explain their latest blood-for-citizenship policy before Senate estimates this week, admitting they couldn’t “make up for the shortfall”, where, as of May 1, we have only 58,284 people to defend Australia – vastly less than showed up on a Wednesday night to watch the State of Origin.

They couldn’t say exactly why but the answer is obvious.

In a handful of generations, we have gone from a nation of patriots to a nation of picketers, where manufacturers who even dare to make components for the military, such as Rosebank Engineering, are attacked, veterans are called murderers, and anyone who dares to wave the Australian flag is a racist.

About 100 years ago, we had no problem getting people to enlist.

It was World War 1, and 416,000 – nearly one in 10 Australians – had enlisted from our population of 4.4 million.

If that rate was the same now, we’d have more than 2.5 million Australians in the ADF.

Percy Smythe was an electrician and aspiring writer, who served in Gallipoli and on the Western Front in his early 20s, was in and out of hospital, gassed, shelled, survived on bully beef and biscuits, went to bed thirsty after walking 10 miles on a few teaspoons of water, and then opened a Christmas card from his old pal back home, Jack Elliott.

An Australian soldier lies wounded as hundreds of other soldiers move among the dead and wounded on the beach at Anzac Cove on April 25.

Of all the reasons Percy could have been angry – his brother and friends killed, the horrendous conditions he endured – in his diaries now kept in the Australian War Memorial, his visceral anger from 1915 to 1918 is reserved for one, a fellow countryman back home: Jack Elliott.

Jack was justifying his non-participation with faux moralising and mocking of those who were serving.

“Evidently sympathising with those vile dishonourable traitors, who haven’t the manliness of a louse or the patriotism of a snail; who worship the great god of Self, and whose moral code is a system of base and senseless anarchy; the men, so-called, who have prostituted the very name of Nationalism and Justice, and polluted their souls in the filth of treason, while their brothers fight on and die in the dismal charnel-house of France,” the young Smythe, who progressed to Lieutenant, wrote.

“The very thought of these despicable traitors fills me with loathing and disgust, and I deeply regret that a former pal of mine should associate himself with anything so vile and depraved.”

For all the Jack Elliotts of the world, and they existed in 1915-18, sending anti-conscription propaganda to Diggers opening their mail as maggots dripped from dead bodies above them, Australia was thankfully outnumbered by Percys.

TSoldiers recover after the Battle of Long Tan in Vietnam in 1966.

Now, turn on the news today. Who do you hear from? The Percys or the Jacks?

That is the answer to the problem of Defence, where we have 14 per cent of the military we had in 1915 and 22 million more people living here.

We are not in the throes of war right now. But we have more powerful and bigger enemies.

Percy believed service was his duty “as a man, a Christian and a true Australian”.

But the Jacks never believed in those values, and they refused to lift a finger to defend them.

However, they sure enjoyed the benefit of the blood the Smythe brothers spilled.

Percy didn’t go to war for money. He endured loneliness, illness, brutality, hunger, cold, death, fear and indignity because that’s what made him Australian.

When you won’t let kids salute the flag, why would they serve in their defence force? You are saying your nation doesn’t matter from the start.

Many veterans won’t encourage their children to enlist any more. Why would they? They get murder accusations from the Jacks and a 15-year wait for injury compensation.

Defence bosses told Senate Estimates this week our recruitment and retention rate means “we must be very careful in the management of our rate of activity, our scale of activity, and our repetition of activity.” In other words, we are woefully unprepared.

Now, in a nation of Jacks, we will import Percys to bleed for us, dangling citizenship as a prize.

A nation that relies on others to defend it, falls quickly in the face of a foe whose own sons and daughters will fight for it.

LABOR’S HATRED OF FRUIT FARMERS OPENS A CAN OF WORMS

There should be no reason Australian peaches and pears on local shelves are dearer than the imported alternative in the can next to them – but our brilliance has created the perfect recipe for food insecurity.

This week, SPC told growers to mulch nearly half their peach crop and almost two-thirds of their pears because Woollies want fruit for half as much from countries paying slave-labour rates, running on cheap power, with none of the environmental restrictions we burden small family farms with.

It’s cheaper to buy foreign canned fruit than it is to purchase the same product grown in Australia.

Australian-grown and canned SPC peaches cost $5.30 at Woolies yesterday, while the same size can of South African peaches wearing the Woolworths home label cost $2.80. What is it about that 10,000km journey across the Indian Ocean that is cheaper than picking them from a tree in the Goulburn Valley and canning them right here?

As pear growers rip out trees, the cheapest canned pears on the shelf are grown in Argentina, a country suffering a 57 per cent poverty rate, flown to Thailand, a country primarily run on cheap gas and coal, shipped to Australia, trucked to our markets and – after all this travel – is still vastly cheaper than canning our own fruit.

This is the perverse result of a federal Government taking water from irrigators, forcing manufacturers to use expensive part-time power plants (wind and solar), and smothering family farms with red and green tape.

Add to this a major supermarket being distracted as a cheerleader for the Voice instead of delivering affordable groceries, who blames mum at the checkout for prioritising keeping her kids fed over supporting Australian farms.

If the recipe they are cooking up is to destroy our food security, it seems that Labor has the method and measurements just right.