{"id":8688,"date":"2011-04-07T12:07:33","date_gmt":"2011-04-07T16:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=8688"},"modified":"2011-04-07T10:46:56","modified_gmt":"2011-04-07T14:46:56","slug":"australian-defence-force-in-the-news-not-in-a-good-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/04\/07\/australian-defence-force-in-the-news-not-in-a-good-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Australian Defence Force in the news . . . not in a good way"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australia’s military have a reputation for brashness, but competence in combat. The bureaucratic side of the ADF has problems<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The Australian Defence Force found itself in the headlines for the wrong reasons when a young female member of the ADF Academy went public after having sex with a fellow cadet, only to find out later that he used a webcam and Skype to broadcast the assignation to his mates.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Okay, slimy action on the part of the other cadet. Action by the military braintrust should be some form of discipline against the cadet who violated trust, yes? No:<\/p>\n

\n

The ADF first tried to equivocate, saying that there was nothing it could use to charge the unconscionable bastard who thought the broadcast was a good idea, only to backpedal when Defence Minister Stephen Smith (who is an impressive sight when in full flight and fury) hit the roof.<\/p>\n

Next, the ADF brasshats, in an outbreak of unbelievably insular stupidity, decided to go ahead with a separate charge against the traumatised female, to do with AWOL and drinking. Moreover, these same defence bosses also asked the woman to apologise for going public with her story.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Adding military insult to personal injury, check. The Defence Minister was even more displeased, of course. Richard Chirgwin points out that these actions are merely symptoms of a deeper institutional problem:<\/p>\n

\n

Now, I could write a serious and reasoned column about the chronic social problems of the ADF, which has, for as long as I can remember, acted as if it has institutional autism.<\/p>\n

Or I could observe that the ADF seems entirely unable to instill even the remotest hint of good sense in how its members behave in the presence of computers. It’s less than a fortnight since we found out that Australian soldiers were posting racist messages about Afghanistan nationals on Facebook.<\/p>\n

But I have a different question to ask: why the hell was the ADF permitting unrestricted use of Skype in the Academy?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australia’s military have a reputation for brashness, but competence in combat. The bureaucratic side of the ADF has problems: The Australian Defence Force found itself in the headlines for the wrong reasons when a young female member of the ADF Academy went public after having sex with a fellow cadet, only to find out later […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[331,8,5,683],"tags":[303,593,43],"class_list":["post-8688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-bureaucracy","category-military","category-pacific","tag-sexism","tag-socialmedia","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2g8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8688"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8690,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8688\/revisions\/8690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}