War pigs, the Albanese way

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a nation’s leader being crucified in an ongoing sex scandal must be in want of a good, drawn-out war. It is also a truth universally acknowledged, that an Australian Prime Minister with an historic timidity and inability to make a decision on his own, must be in want of a President to tell them how to support it.

Which is how we arrive at earlier this month, April fool’s day to be exact, when Anthony Albanese interrupted the nation’s evening dinner for an Address to the Nation – and yes, those random capitals are exactly how his comm’s team wrote it, just so we knew it was very important. Frankly, the whole thing could have been an email.

In Albanese’s spectacular three minutes of eye-darting, rambling monologue, where he read from a teleprompter in the type of iambic pentameter reserved for primary school teachers reading Possum Magic aloud, he informed Australians that we are an “optimistic” people and that we shouldn’t be uncertain about a war that Australia is, “not an active participant in.”

Despite nearly being outperformed by his own microphone, Albanese then went on to lecture us on being mindful of farmers and nurses, and something about taking the bus to work instead, (a bit of a task for the farmers I would have thought). He topped it all off by informing us that fuel prices were at an all-time high, something that appears to have taken him and his government completely by surprise but not the Australians queuing at the fuel pumps or paying through the nose for groceries. But that’s probably what happens when you blindly follow a clueless psychopath like Trump, whose knowledge of Iran and its capabilities probably consisted of him checking to see if he’d ever built one of his resorts there.

But let’s get back to that statement Albanese thought he could sneak into his very important speech, so much so that he thought we wouldn’t notice it when we bit into it – ‘Australia is not an active participant in this war.’

Australia has sent an E-7 Wedgetail surveillance aircraft and 85 military crew to the conflict. Australia reportedly sent 40-90 SAS personnel in early April to the region. Australia has military crew embedded on US submarines actively engaged in the region. Australia supplies intelligence support to the United States on Australian soil via Pine Gap and other locations in WA. Australia enthusiastically remains a participant in the AUKUS cartel. And yet Anthony Albanese would like Australians to believe we are “not an active participant” in this war?

We are a participant in this war, regardless of what adjectival semantics Albanese wants to play in his Address to the Nation. Within hours of Trump and his beer-sucking warlord Pete Hegseth – a man who presents like a coked-up gym trainer forced to wear his little brother’s suits – ordering the bombing of 900 separate locations in Iran on February 26, Albanese and his government declared their immediate support for the bombing with the obedience of a trained circus poodle. “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” US media even described the bombings as receiving, “a warm welcome from Australia”.

So keen was Albanese to let Australians and the world know how much he supported the surprise attacks on Iran, that he was the first western world leader to shout his support for Trump’s war, beating all the others out of the starting blocks by several hours. His social media team must have sprained their texting fingers in the rush to get off their WhatsApp conversations and let the world know how happy Australia was to be supporting this war. You could almost hear the cheers. The Albanese government’s response to this was unequivocal – this war was justified and they supported it. 

The rusty naysayers out there who would support Albanese if he set fire to their dog, were already arguing that Australia had no choice but to support the US, that our hands were tied. Even if you accept a scintilla of that statement under the cloak of our national security concerns, why the swiftness? Why the enthusiasm? Why not follow Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s lead, who commented that the war was, “another failure of the international order”, in a well-timed muted, response? What is it about Anthony Albanese that he is so keen to tie himself to the insanity of Trump and the assorted parasitic, adulating yes-men that Trump surrounds himself with?

The absurdity of it all is that Albanese has always been a timid, fence-sitting type of Prime Minister, obsessed with not upsetting the Murdoch mafia or our larger corporate leaders or anybody who might have once criticised an Israeli person in an email. And now he finds himself having to backtrack on some of his support for Trump and face the ire of the Australian public – and it is a problem entirely of his own making. Albanese has been an appeaser and a don’t-rock-the-boat-type of leader for so long that the boat has now become wedged in his own arse.

Let’s face it, Trump decided to go to war based on a con-job pulled on him by Netanyahu and his minions. This is standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell everything. Their plans are always under-developed and reliant on other countries to do their dirty work for them. They knew they needed the USA – all they needed was a useful idiot of a President to believe them.

Within days of Netanyahu visiting Washington, the US had started bombing young schoolgirls in Iran and pleading for the Iranians to take to the streets, something the Iranians appear to have studiously ignored in their thousands. Israel has tried to wage war on Iran with the US as partner, through five successive US Presidents, but they hit pay-dirt when Trump entered the White House. The war in Iran is a result of a hard-sell ploy by Israel to take advantage of the fool in the Oval Office and the naivety of Trump to believe the uneducated, inexperienced minions he surrounds himself with, all of whom convinced him that the USA’s sheer fire power alone would be enough to bring Iran to its knees. The Iranians and the rest of the world, but not our own government it seems, knew otherwise.

No matter that Trump is a demented moron, a man who recently posted a picture of himself as Jesus then said he thought it was a meme of himself as a doctor. No matter that he has zero military experience and has been consistently wrong on every major issue for the last decade or more. No matter that his family and associates appear to be enriching themselves on the futures markets moments before Trump announces his latest shit-for-brains, dumb-as cement take on Iran. No, let’s support him due to some outdated, unwritten code that has long been discarded by Trump, that Australia must always remain in lockstep with the USA. This is the sort of fantasy thinking that has elevated Richard Marles to the Defence Minister’s position instead of his natural resting place of selling investment Ponzi schemes through a suburban accountant’s office. It’s the type of blind, imagination-free, un-daring thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

We should remember that within days of the USA’s attacks on Iran and weeks before Albanese’s Address to the Nation, Australia had joined thirty-four countries in a meeting to discuss opening the Strait of Hormuz – a meeting without the USA present. The Albanese government has known from the start that this war was an oversell from the Israeli government. They knew Iran was not actively attacking or posing an imminent threat to any western nation and yet Albanese, true to form, sat at the feet of the US anyway.

If Albanese is now facing the ire of the Australian public for the pain of a war we had no say in or interest in involving ourselves with, he should blame himself for not understanding the new world order and for being so ignorantly ready to jump to any tune Trump decided to play.