Orchestrated components are coming together to enable the US to recruit Australia in future wars of choice. Our media must begin to ask questions about the crude but successful ways the Australian people are being groomed to provide passive or enthusiastic consent.
A version of the long awaited Defence Strategic Review for public consumption will be released after Anzac Day, along with the government’s response.
The most fundamental purpose of Australia’s Defence forces should be to defend our country.
Its stated mission includes the defence of our economic interests: “to defend Australia and its national interests in order to advance Australia’s security and prosperity”.
Any review of our Defence Strategy to ensure they are ready for this purpose must be conducted by individuals who cannot have a conflict of interest. Here is a case where the primacy of national security concerns should trump all else in order to ensure our sovereignty is not compromised.
Last week, P&I highlighted that in fact the situation is the reverse.
Professor Peter Dean, the principal advisor to the DSR and its principal author, is a Director of the US Studies Centre and concurrently leads two US State Department-funded public diplomacy programs on the US-Australia Alliance.
In a sign of how US influence in Defence policy has been completely normalised, there has been no mainstream media coverage that questions the appropriateness of this appointment at the centre of which is a glaring conflict of interest.
Along with AUKUS and the Recommendations of the War Powers Reform Parliamentary Enquiry, the DSR is one of a three pronged narrative construction, intended to operate in concert, to a specific end – one that will
Australians are being stitched up, with a Duchessing by the mainstream media to manufacture consent. The narrative that this path is the only sensible, realistic, natural course for Australia remains largely unquestioned.
American influence in our Defence policy has been rampant since 2015 – Australian governments have relied on the advice of former senior officers and civilian staff of the US Navy, some of who were simultaneously consulting for US shipbuilders, with one recently having to resign because he was concurrently serving as Chairman of the Board of a U.S. company that builds nuclear-powered submarines.
In addition, some of these former US Navy officials also work as consultants to other foreign governments as well as receiving US pensions – are they able to provide impartial advice and whose interests are they representing?
A culture has developed in Defence and at Ministerial........