Scotty gets gong while Cormann tries to crash jet-set

Australians swell with pride; hi-five each other – as they wait patiently to be ripped off at local supermarket duopoly checkouts, Monday – or vastly overcharged for cheap, dirty petrol amongst the worst in the OECD, over news that Abbott fan and Dutton numbers man, Belgian waffler Mathias Cormann zips around Europe in an RAAF Dassault 7X jet schmoozing OECD big-shots in his ridiculous bid to become its Secretary-General.

The jokes – and the jet are on us. At $4305 per hour, no tax-payer or Job-seeker looking forward to starving on forty dollars a day in January, could possibly begrudge the cost. As Nine Newspapers’ Liberal shill, Bevan Shields points out, we’re keeping The Cormannator safe from Covid and bigging up ourselves on the economic stage. He’s also got a staff of eight and a doctor just to ensure he’s not over-stretched or overwhelmed by Covid-19.

“There’s 36,000 Australians currently stranded as a result of border closures; they don’t get this sort of treatment, having an RAAF jet,” Shadow Minister for foreign affairs, Penny Wong objects. Nor do other candidates for international positions, particularly if they happen to be women not in the Liberal Party.

Natasha Stott Despoja is able to successfully run her UN campaign entirely from home via Zoom. She’s recently been appointed to the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, CEDAW.

But could this be yet another stroke of genius from a Morrison government just busting with big ideas? Prepared to think big. Impose our own Australian-Belgian talking points on what neoliberals believe is the “world economic stage.”

We could even be a voice for the Indo-Pacific Region – another Trumpism replacing Asia-Pacific. We don’t even have a PM who can speak for his own party. Or rise above platitude. And you may as well try to nail a jelly to a wall when it comes to getting any accountability out of him but ten countries and 650 million people should be a doddle.

Read all about it in the PMC’s drops to media. What you won’t see is any hint that Scotty is shitting himself that the OECD will impose trade sanctions on Australia because his government won’t get real about climate change.

Luckily, we may not need free trade in future. Be free of trade itself. China’s tariffs put the brakes on, Hockey and Abbott ran our car industry off the road. Farmers can’t pick produce, given a pandemic drought of backpackers and Kanakas 2.0 .

Luckily, as Scotty tells us, we’re transitioning to a service economy. We’ll surge to prosperity on the wave of an economy based on taking in each other’s washing. And dry-cleaning our leaders’ trousers.

No RAAF jet lacks a trouser press but top of Cormann’s CV, must be his role as the one and only – One Nation-Whisperer. Who could forget when, in October 2018, his mis-management of government business in the senate led to a vote in support of Pauline’s motion that it’s OK to be white. Coalition MPs “only mistakenly” supported the motion, Cormann quickly pointed out – and he wasn’t even in the chamber when the racist motion was passed.

Keating’s unrepresentative swill clearly includes government senators who can’t or won’t think for themselves. Cormann, himself, was once just a loud stooge; echoing Tony Abbott’s Labor debt and deficit nonsense.

“For me personally, this is severely embarrassing,” Cormann explained. Happily, Labor agreed to having another vote, which unanimously opposed the motion but with leadership skills like this, Cormann will go far. He’ll need to. Why not a shot at a pro-renewable and climate change woke OECD? All Mathias needs to do to create the perfect CV is to go through and delete all references to anything he’s ever said or done on energy. Or debt and deficit.

The result will look a bit noir; like the stygian pages of Justice Brereton’s redacted report on alleged SAS war crimes and atrocities in the narco-state of Karzai’s kleptocracy of Afghanistan which Morrison repeatedly warns us will be shocking (if we could read it). The print job is likely to use a whole new black toner cartridge but, heck, with a planet to fry and entire species to exterminate, who’s counting the Officeworks budget?

It’s unfair to bring up the hypocrisy in Morrison’s well-rehearsed attack on former AusPost CEO’s Christine Holgate’s profligacy in buying watches for a few executives, although Katharine Murphy does her best against the odds on ABC Insiders which, along with David Speers, is once again well stacked with Liberal shills.

Besides, the Aussie candidate is a top bloke, all the other blokes agree. Advancing his career is a win for all men – and not just another win, win, win for Morrison and his network of alpha mates – or that’s the dominant narrative.

Just as with only a few bad apples to weed out and a culture to re-boot, no-one in uniform appearing in our media to re-work the story of the US invasion of Afghanistan bothers to count the 1,300 civilians, including hundreds of children, who were killed in Afghanistan in the first six months of the year, according to the UN.

Army Chief, Angus Campbell maintains that nineteen years of war has improved outcomes for the Afghan people when in fact, the Taliban has never been more powerful and even its leader admits that US dollars have helped create a hopelessly corrupted nation.

“The US went into Afghanistan in 2001 with the lofty goals of democratizing and modernizing it. Today, neither has been approximated and the goals seem naïve or foolhardy. The effort has failed, though no one in Washington wants to admit it. The political system is hopelessly corrupt, incompetent, and unstable. Ethnic and tribal mistrust is higher than ever,” writes national security analyst Brian Downing.

No-one in Canberra wants to admit it either. Instead the consensus is that our brave lads are beyond reproach. While Campbell has agreed with Brereton that meritorious service citations be stripped from 3000 special forces personnel, the decision has abruptly been taken out of the Chief of Army’s hands by Defence and in the end it will be a matter to be decided by government. By Scott Morrison.

In brief, no action will be taken. There may be a puerile justification along the lines of the injustice of punishing all for the sins of a few but this ducks the issue of Justice Brereton’s finding of a toxic SAS culture in which “blooding”, brutality and inhumanity were allegedly normalised. Canada disbanded their unit for similar reasons.

The war on terror, an unmitigated disaster and a boon only to arms dealers, which the US began in 2001, will have cost six trillion dollars before 2020 ends, calculate Watson Institute researchers at Brown University. 21 million Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Syrian people are war refugees and internally displaced persons, in grossly inadequate conditions. But few deplore the human costs. Heroes, like David McBride, face life in jail for blowing the whistle.

Recommendations in the report of Inspector General of The Australian Defence Force, Justice Brereton’s inquiry, will be furthered stymied by the federal government’s AFP handball – Team Morrison is happy to hand over the task of prosecution to a force which, as Jack Waterford points out in Investigating Murder is not an AFP key Competency is just not up to the task. The force lacks the experience and the resources. Missing from current narratives is any sense of reality. As for Afghanistan, no-one is prepared to admit mission failure.

Certainly not Angus Campbell, current Chief of Army who knows corruption well, having been squeezed uncomfortably into frame whenever Morrison was building his career as boat stopper and refoulment operator as Minister for illegal detention by refusing questions on internment. Or turnbacks. Or anything else falling into an on-water or operational matter – as it does in a war on those seeking our mercy; craving our asylum by sea.

Yet not everyone is wishing Cormann bon voyage. The Monthly’s Paddy Manning is scathing. And spot on.

“… it sticks in the craw that Mathias Cormann – the world’s first and only Finance Minister to abolish a functioning carbon price … who has plumped for the Coalition’s denialist wing in every toxic leadership contest – is now touting his “green recovery” credentials and supporting “net zero emissions as soon as possible”.

Sorry, you don’t get to argue against climate action in Australia for seven years and then jet off at taxpayer expense and say exactly the opposite.”

Manning is a model of economy and restraint but he’s clearly not buying the twenties’ post-fact Trumpian zeitgeist where integrity is a dirty word and public life is filled with charlatans who lie at every conceivable opportunity, boosted by Keith Rupert Murdoch, one of the most toxic oligarchs in the world, whose propaganda machine media empire corrodes democracies with a noxious miasma of alternative facts. Or lies. Where useful idiots, such as Trump, Johnson and Morrison are exalted while Dan Andrews is torn down – relentlessly.

But two cheers for Scotty. Our Panda-poking PM, is not only madly popular at home, but a hero in London. It’s another reason for Aussies to be singing in the aisles of Liquorland although the billionaires who invested in the Chinese wine export market are about to have his guts for garters. Better get used to it. The fossil-fuel lobby driven Coalition is just not good for business. Joe Biden’s incoming administration could also impose trade penalties on climate deniers. But there’s more to Morrison’s trade debacle than a loss of exports.

It’s not just a 200 per cent tariff on wine, it’s the collapse of the million Chinese tourists a year market, the tertiary education student business, the coal, the copper, the lobsters, the sugar, the barley, the timber – all of which add up to six billion dollars in trade per year – because it suited Morrison to suck up to Trump by megaphoning his criticisms of Beijing.

Of course, other factors help alienate our biggest trade partner, our war games with Japan, the Huawei paranoia, the delays instituted by the secret Foreign Investment Review Board, FIRB, under former spook, David Irvine, which Paul Bongiorno reports could stall a Chinese-Australian property investment transaction for twelve months.

“Why are they picking on us,” one Chinese-Australian constituent asks his MP.

More deeply problematic is Frances Adamson, head of DFAT our nation’s top wolf diplomat who warns that China, as a global power cannot “escape scrutiny and debate” and condescendingly warns its government that it is not at the point where it can set the terms of its engagement with the world.” Her comments are on a par with Simon Birmingham’s patronising praise on ABC’s Insiders for China having lifted millions out of poverty.

Even the ABC’s Stan Grant warns that these words may merely further provoke a great power who intends to act like a great power. Expects to be respected as such. Adamson and Birmingham’s rebuke may invite the retaliation they seek to avert. ANU’s Hugh White notes the Trumpist in Morrison’s mis-reading of our relationship with China

“Morrison … seems to think that Australia can set the terms of the relationship unilaterally. Again and again over the past few months, as things have plunged to new lows, he has told Australians that there is simply no choice but to defy Beijing the way he has done. Anything else would betray Australia’s interests and impugn our sovereignty. This absurd oversimplification of such a complex and important issue is … an insult to our intelligence.”

Equally insulting is his brazen public embrace of internationalism and rules based order, which rings both expedient and hollow, given his record in Immigration Minister and the gratuitous secrecy and cruelty layered on top of the inhumanity and abdication of refugee convention that was Operation Sovereign Borders.

“Morrison was willing … to barter with the fate of the most vulnerable simply to get his way,” recalls Shaun Hanns, former public servant in Home Affairs’ refugee assessment. Few forget his pressers in which he indulged his fondness for sophistry and logic-chopping. Whatever his intent, Morrison came across as a sadistic smartarse.

Luckily, Scotty’s flip-flop, weathervane approach to world events and his lusty rendition of Yellow Peril 2.0 is a big hit with that other international contradiction in germs, (like herd immunity) Bozo Boris Johnson and his handlers, the Policy Exchange (PE) who are working extremely hard to make Britain little again as quickly as possible. Johnson, a total failure of a leader of a failing state has nothing better to do than to butter up Morrison at a PE bunfight.

Our PM is given the Grotius Award, something PE fellows dream up to recognise his genius for diplomacy and staunch support of rules-based world order. Is it a terribly tongue in cheek rebuke? Or a lame attempt to let China and America know that the worm has turned. Behold, Scotty 2.0 – a man of the new world order.

What’s escaped the attention of many is that whilst Morrison’s megaphone diplomacy, his bagging of Beijing for allowing festering wet markets to create a coronavirus which has already killed 1.45 million and is destroying the world economy, has not gone down well with President Xi or the mandarins in China’s vast bureaucracy, it’s been brilliant for US farmers and wine-makers who have actually expanded their trade with China at our expense.

Some pundits claim that Morrison is dumb to be suckered by Trump but let’s be fair. Scotty doesn’t hold the wine hose, mate. PVC and rubber hoses are used to transfer liquid around wineries. Wineries that remain in business.

So Scotty’s the first Australian PM since Billy McMahon not to wangle an invitation to Beijing? It may have a bit to do with allowing his team to publicly proclaim that China’s like Nazi Germany. But Morrison doesn’t hold the whip, mate. He’s not the sort of leader to pull handy Andy Hastie or Eric Abetz into line just for Sinophobia.

Why? Few members of our fourth estate bother to ask. On ABC Insiders, Sunday, Trade Minister, Simon Birmingham is clear that we’re the injured party and that if need be, we’ll take our case to the WTO. So there. No-one apart from The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy attempts to even sketch the context of calculated offence.

Morrison does attempt to bullshit things to rights in his UK Policy Exchange waffle but his words serve only to trigger a list of fourteen grievances from the Chinese Ambassador to Australia – almost the day following his naff repositioning. Trade is only a minor – China finds fault in business, media, defence and national security. Its list includes:

• Banning Huawei from the roll-out of 5G over “unfounded” national security concerns
• Foreign interference laws, “viewed as targeting China and in the absence of any evidence”
• Calls for an inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus – “siding with the US’ anti-China campaign”
• Speaking out on the South China Sea
• Speaking out on human rights allegations in Xinjiang, accusing the government of “peddling lies”
• “Thinly veiled” allegations against China on cyber attacks which Beijing says lacks evidence
• And new foreign relations laws which give the federal government power to veto state, or local government agreements with foreign governments.

By incredible coincidence, PE’s council of Conservative old fogeys, toads-in-the-hole and Colonel Blimps is chaired by Alexander (Bunter) Downer, a former Liberal leader and low achiever who won foreign minister, by stepping aside for John Howard to become leader. Scandal-ridden Downer urged his nation to join George W Bush’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, an oil-war in which Howard misled Parliament that he’d gained favourable legal advice.

Downer’s notoriety – which embraces his pledging to repeal Native Title at a League of Rights meeting in the 80s and initially refusing US entreaties, in 1999, to help America prevent Indonesian atrocities against East Timorese- peaked in 2004 when Billy Bunter, as Keating dubbed Downer, ordered the bugging of East Timor’s cabinet during negotiations over how much of its off-shore oil reserves Australia could steal. The move richly benefited Woodside Petroleum, who later employed Downer out of sheer gratitude for his magnanimity and altruism.

Downer’s work helped a Howard government cheat the Timorese out of billions of dollars in oil and gas revenue for years. Naturally, the Morrison government rules out any compensation for the depleted fields that it now concedes belong to East Timor. You get that sort of outcome with a rules-based approach to exploitation.

Awkwardly for Morrison, reports the Human Rights Law Centre, prominent international figures, including former Presidents of Timor, Xanana Gusmao and Jose Ramos Horta, urge him to shut down the outrageous secret prosecution of Witness K and his lawyer Bernard Collaery – two heroes who helped to expose the skullduggery to which Australian Government cowboys stooped to filch Timor’s oil and gas. The petition is stonily ignored.

As is much of Downer’s contributions to statecraft. But not his latest finger-wagging, Sunday in The Australian Financial Review where he notes that the Chinese are famous for playing the long game. Quoting Sun Tzu is bound to be a big hit with Beijing – especially when Bunty proceeds to take the opposite tack himself in an incendiary put-down that can only strengthen the suspicion he’s channelling Trump.

“Banning Australian exports of wine, barley and lobsters as well as disrupting coal exports is an act of real aggression. It needs to be understood for what it is. This is a totally inappropriate way for a sophisticated modern nation to behave. Governments are expected to discuss differences and negotiate outcomes, not engage in brutal aggression of the kind we have seen from China towards Australia over the past few months,” Billy Bunter blusters..

Downer fans still chuckle over his being accused of being a leftist spy by Trump. Now a lame duck, he accused the monarchist and Thatcherite of being a Clinton errand boy after a night on the turps at a Kensington wine bar in 2016. So Alex knocked back a late-night noggin with George Papadopoulos, an oxymoron – a foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign? Luckily Alexander’s able to clear all that up. Some day.

Of course there’d be no Downer diatribe without Morrison. And no Morrison without Murdoch. How good is News Corp’s fearlessly fair and accurate YouGov Galaxy News Poll? Keeps us up to speed with what matters, “who would make a better PM?” Is far more diverting than any two party preferred polling. And even more meaningless.

Naturally, Morrison’s mob wants to give even more money to Murdoch. Kissing-Christian Porter is poised to slip in a News Media and Digital Platforms Bargaining Code into parliament’s last bench-polishing for the year next week. Make big tech pay. AG and party-boy Porter’s proposed Robin Hood law helps the Coalition to steal from the rich and give to those crying poor, especially billionaire victim Murdoch and Nine’s Chairman Pete Costello. Even the ABC stands to benefit – but you can be sure subsequent ABC funding will be reduced accordingly.

Heist hundreds of millions from Google and Facebook to give to News Corp and Nine? Why? News and Nine claim the two tech giants make a mozza out of news content, report Crikey’s Bernard Kean and Glen Dyer. Yet our ACCC has already disproved the claims. Tech giants’ theft of news is not killing newspapers. They’re doing that nicely all by themselves via Domain and real estate.com.au, which have stolen rivers of gold from classified advertising.

Happily help is on its way. The fabulous Paul Fletcher has given ten million to News to do what it likes with it. Even better, Tim Wilson is campaigning to open up super to home-buyers, a move to undermine super funds, outfits Liberal hate because they threaten their power – and transfer wealth to the poor. This will push up home prices but boost advertising in Pete and Rupert’s geese that lay the golden eggs, their online real-estate sections.

Goodness, Grotius Me: Scotty, we learn, wins the inaugural Grotius Award, a novelty door-prize, for his “support” of “the international rules-based order” a concept which – like Morrison himself -is very much a work in progress, from UK Tory sausage-fest The Policy Exchange (PE). Its think kitchen is big on Brexit and knocks up “bonkers” Boris Johnson’s other top ideas. At the moment, it’s Brexit or bust. Or if not bust, just a failed state. Or three.

Boris’ current brainwave is the alliterative Build Back Better, code for dismantling Britain’s planning system and handing over power to private developers. Our local Liberals are up with this game, of course, especially in NSW, where glad-handed Premier Berejiklian and her grifter associates help NSW taxpayers pay ten times its value for western Sydney airport land. All the go this week in the UK, however is A Very British Tilt, which Morrison plugs shamelessly, which is all about Albion keeping the aspidistra flying in a fantasy land called The Indo-Pacific Region.

Naturally, the plan to play war over Asia and the Pacific will gladden the hearts with anyone with shares in arms dealers Thales, BAE and other merchants of death. Britannia may no longer rule the waves but PE believes it can still waive the rules. The rules of logic, common sense as well as international law. As the Barclay Brothers’ Daily Telegraph unkindly points out, the nation of once proud warriors now has rather more hairdressers than soldiers.

All that’s needed is the delusion that the UK can even afford to mount a show of force on the other side of the globe or that China will not retaliate with trade sanctions at the slightest hint of gunboat diplomacy. But let’s not get bogged down in practicalities. Like Gallipoli it’s a brilliant plan. The Panda must be put back in its cage.

“The UK government should expand the deployment of Royal Navy assets, RAF aircraft and Army (including Special Forces)/Royal Marines personnel to achieve uninterrupted, year-round UK military presence in the IPR (both on operational and training missions).”

Britain can talk loudly even if it can carry only a little stick.

PE’s council is a neo-con choir of Tory corporates, a retired First Sea Lord and a former Army Commander. Of course, below the upper crust, a colony of boffins, beaver away giving the Tory party all its inspiring ideas. Imagine our IPA running government. Or our CIS. Menzies Institute? All three? Whilst it pretends to be an “independent, educational charity”, PE was founded in 2002 by Conservative MPs, Francis Maude and Archie Norman. First chaired by Michael Gove, it has provided Conservative governments with personnel and policy ever since.

The election of stand up comedian Boris and the astonishing success of Brexit in tapping British xenophobia to no real purpose save self-destruction are signs it’s a runaway success. But both got a lot of support from the Rupert Murdoch mafia, a political party and a propaganda machine for any Tory twat who boosts the worth of the family’s investment portfolio.

Fizza Turnbull, who against all advice, created Dutton’s monster, Home Affairs, got PE’s Disraeli Prize, in a 2017 visit to Blighty when he waxed lyrical about A Free Society. When Dutton deposes Morrison, it may well be the Molotov. No-one knows who funds the secretive, powerful right-wing lobby group, one of the UK’s largest.

Nor will Policy Exchange divulge who funds its campaigns, for example, who paid for its report labelling Extinction Rebellion (XR) “extremists”. The Gloucestershire-based conservation group was upset to find itself on a list of terror groups shared across government. A spokesman explains,

“It was shocking because our only aim is to make the government tell the truth and act on the climate and ecological crisis. We have never picked a fight with the police, only asking them to respect the right to protest, and to join us because it is not possible to safely police a society that has collapsed because of climate breakdown.”

PE is bound by wealth, privilege and status into a ruthless, uber-capitalist propaganda unit or Thatcherite think-tank lodged in two Tufton Street town houses at the top end of London town. St James Park, Big Ben, The Cenotaph and Westminster Abbey are only minutes away.

PE’s mission is to wrest influence from similar groups and shift power into the PM’s office, a project paralleled by Morrison’s own inner circle, which hack Simon Benson assures The Australian reader represents,

“… an unprecedented dismantling of power bases dominated by ­bureaucratic fiefdoms and the ­political class.” Why? Bundle of laughs, Benson bullshits that it’s to “… to boost productivity and service delivery for Australians.” But it’s really about centralising and expanding a ruthless and controlling Prime Minister’s power.

“To accumulate power,” writes George Monbiot, “a government with authoritarian tendencies must first destroy power. It must reduce rival centres of power – the judiciary, the civil service, academia, broadcasters, local government, civil society – to satellites of its own authority, controlled from the centre, deprived of independent action. But it must do this while claiming to act in the people’s name.”

A pandemic can help greatly, too, as even The Conversation‘s Michelle Grattan cautions, over Morrison’s creation of a national cabinet, which constitutional experts note is not a cabinet at all, but a cabal which helps greatly with “congestion-busting”, code for the Prime Minister getting his own way. PE toffs love strong, secretive leaders.

Founded but eighteen years ago, The Exchange is a parvenu, but you’d never know it from its exclusive location. Or its claims to be a brains trust or moral compass for a venal, vacuous, UK political establishment more interested in power and profit taking than government.

It’s a venue perfectly suited to our Liberal PMs. Or former PMs. Tony Abbott, for example, recently whinged that the media overhypes Coronavirus. Instead of “preserving every life at almost any cost ..” we need to ask many deaths we can live with. Turnbull merely shared with the Exchange his government’s aim to access encrypted data to bring evil-doers to their knees. Now, up pops Tosser Morrison with an astonishing policy U-turn.

Hugo Grotius, an “Arminian” Calvinist, abhorred the notion that God could create justice by absolute decree. He’d find himself completely off-key in Hillsong, or at the Exchange, unlike Morrison, but it’s not his theology or his legal philosophy that interests the fat cats of the exchange – even slightly. Hugo is now a father of international law – a brave new religion which – like Saul on the road to Damascus – Scotty 2.0 is suddenly converted.

Sadly, for all parties, a global coronavirus pandemic stops Tosser from attending in person but via Zoom, the born-again internationalist preaches his new credo. Morrison must forgo the iconic central London landscape and make do, somehow, with the spartan Kirribilli House with its priceless harbour views and an attendant private jet.

We must “make our world more Grotian and less Hobbesian” Morrison tells PE worthies. Put simply: give up the dog-eat-dog, win at all costs, beggar thy neighbour mercantile individualism of Liberal Party foreign policy for the last eight years. Co-operate and respect each other?

Tosser’s sucking up to Biden. But he’s also desperate to crab-walk away from poking the Panda. His megaphone diplomacy demanding an inquiry into who caused the Wuhan flu provokes an irate China to do us slowly. Over 600 ships are stranded at sea; prevented for months now from unloading their Australian coal.

Gone is all sign of the Border enforcer, his boat-stopping, turning back or lock ’em up forever tough-cop persona. It’s a dramatic about face. But Scotty’s face is always a work in progress. A year ago, Morrison told the UN it could butt out; let Australia violate international agreements and human rights with impunity.

Latika Bourke, Julie Bishop’s former Fairfax puffer, bills political weather vane Morrison’s spray as an “olive branch to China”, when it’s clearly a total repudiation of his fan-boy Trumpism.

Rules? Morrison is doing a risky, public back-flip. Only last year, flushed with Trumpism after a visit to his mentor’s Fox-hole in The White House, an already orange-hued Morrison was putting on a show at the Lowy Institute; blow-torching multilateralism. Rubbishing the UN. International institutions were an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” They “demanded conformity rather than independent cooperation on global issues.”

Policy Exchange is part of a flourishing infrastructure of persuasion and the second-hand dealers in ideas who oversold us neoliberalism, who help replace civic power with the power of money. Watchers of ABC’s The Drum, Q&A, or The Leigh Sales Show, would recognise just how regularly our local dealers bob up like turds in the surf off Bronte beach be they IPA, CIS, Menzies any other of forty-six special interest groups which hi-jack public policy.

Rules-based order is top contender for most vacuous nonsense of the decade but it’s up against some stiff competition from our own PM’s virtual atlas of road-maps to claims that a few bad apples in our SAS fell victim to their own culture, as if accidentally poisoned by a tub of yoghurt left uncovered in our national war refrigerator in Canberra, the AWM, which is stacked with Liberals in the government’s mission to own the military.

The AWM also doubles as a pro-war propaganda unit, sponsored by Thales and other top arms manufacturers. Chairman Kerry Stokes will have to modify the SAS display to depict how its Special Forces soldiers’ allegedly would cordon off a whole village, taking men and boys to guesthouses.

“There they would be tied up and tortured by Special Forces, sometimes for days. When the Special Forces left, the men and boys would be found dead: shot in the head or blindfolded and with throats slit,” SAS soldiers tell a military sociologist.

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