Vikki Campion: I’m still looking for the conflict where Private Albanese came under fire
If Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wants Aussie boots on the ground in Ukraine for ‘peacekeeping’, let the first be his, writes Vikki Campion.
Analysis
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When he wasn’t attacking prime minister John Howard’s eyebrows or his age (60), a young Anthony Albanese was ranting against a war he believed was none of our business.
He accused Mr Howard of using the Iraq War “to present yourself as a strong wartime leader” using “our servicemen and women to help get him re-elected, straight from the neo-con playbook”.
So, on the eve of the 2025 election, what did our 61-year-old Prime Minister Albanese do?
He trumped Mr Howard by proposing to commit us to the most ferocious war of this century against one of the biggest armies on the planet, much further away than Iraq.
On Tuesday, Mr Albanese said he was “open to sending Australian troops to Ukraine”, despite making it clear since 2022 that “no ADF personnel will enter Ukraine”.
If he is open to sending our troops, he has to inform us that Russia would be open to reprisals in Australia, and if this is warranted, it needs a vastly more fulsome discussion, as he asked of Howard during Iraq.
Mums of veterans are in distress at the thought of their sons being called back under the call of a leader who couldn’t even send a ship to the Middle East area of operations or conduct surveillance on the Chinese flotilla currently circumnavigating the country.
Mr Albanese may call them peacekeepers, but it is what Russia calls them that matters.
After all, Iraq, he said in 2004, should have been solved with a “political solution”.
“Mr Howard has never fought in a war but never misses a photo opportunity to be seen with those who bravely serve our nation,” Mr Albanese said in 2003.
You don’t have to Google too hard to find Albo posing with the troops in disruptive pattern combat uniforms, yet I’m still looking for the conflict where Private Albanese came under fire.
Back then, Mr Albanese berated Mr Howard as a wimp looking to show off to his old school: “This commitment to war includes the SAS, navy frigates, FA18 Hornets, Chinook troop lift helicopters, C130 Hercules transport aircraft, mine clearance teams and much more,” Mr Albanese ranted.
“John Howard is going to show all his peers at Canterbury High School that he was not a wimp after all.”
How does Mr Albanese reconcile the weapons for Ukraine, including 49 M1A1 Abrams tanks, which the government announced last October and still aren’t there, and probably won’t get there until this October? Is this a 2025 reflection of the PM’s machismo?
Supplying equipment is one thing, but it is a massive step to start supplying Australian lives.
Remember, the Coalition script from 2004, committed to “helping the Iraqi people, through humanitarian assistance, to build a new Iraq at peace with itself and its neighbours”.
If that was enough for young Mr Albanese to declare Mr Howard’s government a “warmongering” one, in which “the prime minister has no exit strategy”, what is our exit strategy out of this deployment if hostilities ignite? Retreat? Or go to war against Russia?
If Iraq was dangerous, and it was, why is he open to sending troops to where 700,000 Russians have been killed or injured, and 400,000 Ukrainians killed or injured, and 48,000 Russians and 35,000 Ukrainians are currently missing?
This leaves Iraq in the shade. Meanwhile we are hardly bubbling over with defence personnel. This is not a nation ready to engage in the most bitter war of this century.
Mr Albanese accused Mr Howard of redefining us in the eyes of the world as willing backers of US militarism. Now when the US is trying not to be involved in the war, Albo apparently wants us to fly in on a call the British are yet to make. He railed that the war in the Middle East was “the biggest foreign policy failure since the Vietnam War”, even repeating Shakespeare in speeches.
Yet now, on a whim, with no parliamentary debate, no cabinet submission, Mr Albanese declares he is open to deploying troops for “peacekeeping”.
We should have learnt from history where this ends up. If Albo wants boots on the ground in Ukraine, let the first be his.
MONEY WASTED ON RENEWABLES GRIFTING WOULD COME IN HANDY NOW
You are told to be afraid of the weather – with billions of tax dollars squandered on the climate grift, such as the perpetually collapsing quest to commercialise green hydrogen – but given a miserly budget to prepare for worse storms.
Imagine if those billions blown on subsidising intermittent energy grifters, – funded whether they can keep an iPhone on under the Capacity Investment Scheme, or putting 75 per cent of the public service into electric vehicles – had instead paid for infrastructure that could withstand a strong wind, the basic requirement for every new build in northern Australia since the 1980s.
There is never a second thought on the billions squandered in the climate change bureaucracy, which never reduced the price of power by $275 as Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen promised, but upgrading the leaky old caretaker cottage at back of Shores Bay, where the bulk of command work during the 2022 floods happened in a space the size of a wardrobe, into a fit for purpose SES HQ for about $6m is, apparently, too much to ask.
When they should have been preparing the community for evacuation, Ballina SES volunteers were warned they could be one of the first to go. You don’t need a long memory to recall water gushing up Ballina’s main street, the flooded police station, or the old, creaky SES roof threatening to peel up.
“Fixing these gaps would not have taken a great deal of money,” Ballina mayor Sharon Cadwallader said.
See, the grift only works if you are scared of the weather, so the government will allow carte blanche spending on all kinds of treats for green company CEOs.
But if you believe in steeling communities through extremes, be it droughts, floods or cyclones, building towns that can withstand the worst, there is no fund to find.
You need to be scared of the climate, not prepared for it.
LIFTER
The Oval Office for the most entertaining press conference in living memory. Love it or hate it, you can’t take your eyes off it.
LEANER
It’s a tight race between Health Minister Mark Butler approving the biggest increase to health insurance premiums in seven years, Anthony Albanese claiming to fully fund schools when the fine print has that down for 2034, or Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approving the environmental decimation of the Hills of Gold at Nundle for the Engie wind factory.
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