Originally Posted by
Icarus2001
AerialPerspective, thanks for the polite reply, a surprise on this forum. I cannot disagree with most of what you say. Have you really checked the location of all previous Australian PMs over summer to claim they stayed home? If so I tip my hat to you. It is odd that ScoMo as a marketing person, seems blind to what gets referred to now as the “optics” of a situation. Going on holiday, forced shaking hands etc. Howard had a much better nose for the impact and read the mood well.
As for ScoMo upsetting the French, well, C’est La Vie. A storm in a teacup whipped along by left leaning media. Have we forgotten about the Rainbow Warrior and nuclear testing in Muroroa Atoll? How did the French react to our concerns? So the Australian government put our interests ahead of the French in a wise decision to (finally) go nuclear. Let them eat cake.
No problem Icarus, I haven't checked but there was a program I saw around the time it happened (I should have said all 'recent' PMs, meaning the last 30-40 years) and in the program they went through with someone who had researched it, the PMs that had instead stayed at home or spent their holidays in summer at a favourite holiday spot - I think for Howard, it was Hawkes Nest.
Yes, for someone with that background, it is unfathomable that he would not understand that concept. I just think he is intellectually incapable of seeing the obvious a la 'gee, this could blow up in my/our face(s)' as you state Howard, and I would add; Keating, Hawke, Rudd, even Abbott and Turnbull, etc. all seemed to be able to gauge with a few exceptions as always - e.g. Howard remained silent on the 'actual' situation with the Tampa to let the electorate go with the flow to win the election, then was very careful afterward to manage any mention of it - his government's relentless and disgusting pursuit of Andrew Wilkie who essentially was a whistle blower on the matter is, I believe, one of the real reasons Wilkie was never going to back the LNP in 2010 as it was his opportunity to stick the knife deep into people who had made his life hell for telling the truth.
As for the French, yes, I was just noting that a true statesman(person????) with guts and decency would have said to Macron months ago, this is a sh-t show and we're becoming concerned it's not what we want - rather than, as he always does, never considering the potential mess then trying to avoid it or manage it which I think just means he is essentially lazy minded and gutless. I know this might upset some people, but religion has no special protection from criticism as far as I'm concerned and I would just say, it's not entirely surprising considering that he is too lazy to think past invisible man in the sky stuff and attends a religious institution where people 'speak in tongues' and the like. I don't think you can be a forward thinker if you accept that nonsense without question - and surprisingly for a 'Christian' he seems to have no morality that I can detect.
However, I was just saying to someone the other day - the only power that the French have exercised in the Pacific that I have seen in my lifetime has been to try and avoid for as long as possible the granting of independence to their former colonies, preferring instead to let off nuclear bombs in their backyard and then laughingly claim that Tahiti and New Caledonia, et al are 'part of metropolitan France'....... when question about his specific objection to these tests in Parliament one day I can only echo then PM Paul Keating's response something like "... most other Nations who have nuclear weapons, which we also object to them testing, such as the Chinese, at least have the decency to do it in their own back yard. Then we have this fallacy that it's part of France -
Oh, yes. There are Polynesians all the way down from Aix-en-Provence. They pop out of the woodwork. They are doing Polynesian dances in the back end of the Loire Valley, in the walled city of Carcassone, in the lovely humidity of Aix-en-Provence. There are Polynesians everywhere." Love him or hate him, it was a perfect response to the hypocrisy of the French testing and even more fitting now they are claiming to be a 'Pacific Power'.
Hmmm, I think they were not a Pacific power when the Japanese were rampaging through the Pacific in WWII, when Australians and Americans were dying to stop them in PNG, no French around then - What's that I say "You were fighting off Hitler"....... Yes, and I wonder who was helping you....
So, yeh, very little sympathy for the French who I think were looking to take Australia's ridiculous request of turning a nuclear sub into a diesel-electric and milking it for everything it was worth.
At least, despite the way it was made, the right decision has now been made where we hopefully get some version of the Virginia Class SSN which is years ahead of everyone else. I've seen some reporting that we might not be able to lease subs from the USN but I notice in their inventory, among the Los Angeles Class which are slowly being retired, there are at least two Los Angeles Class SSNs in 'reserve'.