One of these men has put his life on the line for his country. The other is a desktop warrior
According to Labor, Andrew Hastie – who fought Islamist extremists – should be disqualified from leading the nation’s defence. If Richard Marles’ attack wasn’t so shameful, it would be hilarious.
On one level, seeing Jason Clare declare that Peter Dutton is “not fit to be prime minister” and Richard Marles describe it as “untenable” for Andrew Hastie to be defence minister is to be bored by the banality of partisan politicking. But on a deeper level it goes to the relentless trivialisation of national politics, the smart-arsery of much media coverage and the gaping chasm between the parties when it comes to real-world experience.
Both Marles and Hastie were educated at elite private schools but when Marles was at university he joined the Labor Club while Hastie, stirred by the 9/11 attacks, joined the army.
Before politics Marles worked as a lawyer for a Labor-aligned law firm and trade unions, whereas Hastie commanded a troop of armoured vehicles in Afghanistan, joined a security deployment to Papua New Guinea, fought in Afghanistan again as an SAS officer and was deployed to the Middle East a third time as an intelligence officer countering Islamic State.
Marles is now Defence Minister and says Hastie, his shadow, is not suitable to replace him because Hastie said, seven years ago, “the fighting DNA of a close combat unit is best preserved when it is exclusively male”. Hastie ought to know, he has put his life on the line in combat for his country many times. He has lost comrades.
Marles is a desktop warrior. If his attack on Hastie were not so shameful it would be hilarious.
The way Hastie dealt with this in a media conference in Perth on Wednesday was exceptional, detailing his effort to lift a fellow soldier in live-fire training and referring to his comrade’s battlefield experiences while insisting current policies will remain in place. “I am not going to resile from what I have said in the past,” he retorted firmly to the journalists. “You want honesty and integrity from politicians, I said what I said, but the thing that the Australian people need to know, under a Dutton-led Coalition government, we will have a policy that is open to all Australians for combat roles – nothing is changing.”
Hastie was not going to bend to the media zeitgeist. Like a soldier, he held his ground.
In microcosm, this exchange revealed a nation losing touch with its values. A warrior who has risked all in battle and now offers his service in politics, mocked with gotcha journalism driven by identity politics and partisan posturing.
The following day Peter Dutton faced his daily dose of gotcha questioning by the media pack. The Opposition Leader was pressed on whether he believed trans women were women, and he avoided a direct answer trying to dodge the distraction this sort of smart-arse journalism aims to generate.
Dutton and Anthony Albanese have been in parliament for decades and served as senior cabinet ministers before assuming leadership. They are both from humble backgrounds, but their pre-parliamentary lives differ greatly.
Dutton served as a police officer for a decade, completed a business degree part time, all the while investing in housing and starting a construction company with his father. Albanese worked for about a year at the Commonwealth Bank before going to university, becoming active in hard-left student politics and taking a succession of jobs with the ALP and Labor politicians.
The most senior Coalition woman is deputy leader Sussen Ley who holds a commercial pilot’s licence as well as an economics degree with masters qualifications in taxation law and accounting. Ley has been an agricultural pilot, air traffic controller, run a farm and worked for the Australian Taxation Office.
The most senior Labor woman is Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who was active in hard-left university politics and the National Union of Students. As a lawyer, she then worked for the CFMEU and other unions before entering parliament.
I could go on with life experience comparisons between Labor ministers and Coalition counterparts, such as Angus Taylor in business versus Jim Chalmers in Labor jobs, but you get the drift.
The idea that daleks of the union and labour movements should deride people with careers outside politics as unfit to replace them is laughable yet often sets the tone for a jaundiced and malleable media.
Clare’s verdict that Dutton is unfit to lead the nation, along with the way it has been repackaged in derisory Labor advertisements, invites scrutiny of Albanese’s suitability. Journalists may care to interrogate the Prime Minister’s performance and whether he merits re-election.
Here was a politician who took something as precious as an Indigenous consensus on the route to constitutional recognition, threw it into his election victory speech, investing it with partisan triumphalism, then failed to negotiate a bipartisan compromise and proceeded with a referendum regardless. Albanese’s sabotage of the voice process set back Indigenous reconciliation a generation. A leading light of Labor’s Socialist Left faction, Albanese astutely moderated his public face when he became opposition leader. His 2022 election manifesto was deliberately small target and mainstream: he would retain secure borders, support AUKUS, stand up to China and deliver responsible economic management while cutting electricity bills by $275 a year and pushing down mortgage rates and the cost of living.
Albanese has comprehensively failed on this score, becoming the biggest spending first-term government since Gough Whitlam, and baking in so much recurrent expenditure that budget deficits are forecast for decades to come. This has kept inflation and interest rates higher for longer and passed on an unavoidable burden of fiscal consequences to future governments and younger generations.
Labor’s ideological commitment to an impossible renewables-plus-storage model exacerbates our economic challenges. Without reliable and affordable energy, we lose industries, jobs and opportunities, imposing an internal tariff on all consumers and industries.
So long as global commitments to net zero continue, there is nothing more certain than the emergence of a domestic nuclear energy industry in Australia. There is no other reliable emissions-free alternative and the folly of trying to reverse centuries of evolution from diffuse to dense forms of energy will be revealed – every day we delay this leap into the 21st century the costs of our indolence mount.
Early on there were encouraging signs from the Albanese government on foreign affairs and national security. But while, thankfully, it has maintained a commitment to AUKUS, Labor has kowtowed to China and shown alarming incompetence on border and immigration security.
Albanese has gone from keeping quiet on Chinese transgressions such as a sonar attack on our navy divers to prevent embarrassing Beijing interlocutors to openly making excuses for the PLA Navy after it began live-firing exercises in the Tasman Sea without alerting us. Despite repeated provocations and intimidation, he has yet to offer a stern word against China.
Yet all these failings pale into insignificance for me compared with Albanese’s reckless abrogation of his responsibilities when it comes to social cohesion and anti-Semitism.
While the abandonment of Israel at the UN by Albanese and Wong is shameful, it is the domestic ramifications where the weakness has been damaging and unforgivable. On October 8, 2023, Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun led a Muslim crowd in Sydney’s Lakemba celebrating with “pride” the Hamas atrocities against Israel the previous day as acts of “courage” and “victory”. The following morning on breakfast TV Albanese reacted by saying, “Well, there’s nothing to celebrate by the murder of innocent civilians, going about their day.” That was it. That was as strong as he spoke about perhaps the most disturbing public gathering in this nation in living memory.
Albanese visited the Lakemba mosque that day and spoke about the Indigenous voice referendum without mentioning the Hamas atrocities.
With synagogues firebombed, threatening protests commonplace and Jewish Australians living in fear for more than 18 months now, this is the issue on which Albanese completely lost me. When we have needed real national leadership, we have received only false equivalence and weasel words.
And now Albanese and his Jewish Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus are preferencing the viciously anti-Israel Greens at this election. Political differences and policy debates are one thing, but this dereliction of moral duty should disqualify this Prime Minister from re-election.
Yet according to Labor it is Hastie, a man who has risked his life in mortal combat against Islamist extremists, who should be disqualified from leading the nation’s defence. And it is Dutton, who has spoken up bravely and strongly against the extremists and in support of Israel, who is not fit to be prime minister.
There is plenty the Coalition could do better in this campaign, and there will be time to discuss all of that. But this denigration of their personnel and character by a closed-shop union collective of appeasers is grotesque.
It is beyond belief that we do not see more people calling out these mutations in our public debate. It is so detached from reality that soon they will be telling us Albanese did not fall off that stage.
At the dawn service at North Bondi, two days after Dutton and Hastie announced an extra $21 billion for defence over five years, former Labor defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon, honouring all service personnel, living and dead, including his son Lance Corporal Jack Fitzgibbon killed in training just last year, called for bipartisanship on defence policy, partly because of the enormous expenditure required. Now those are fighting words.
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