Friday, January 14, 2011

“DO OUR POLITICIANS WANT AUSTRALIANS INVOLVED IN DEFENCE INDUSTRY”

No pretty pikkies this time.

Note - Some urls in the copied document may have expired.

The great master of deceit himself, John Howard, appointed Gillian Marks as the one stop shop for Australian defence industry complaints – that is for officially lodging complaints made by civilians in industry about misconduct, unfair dealing and skullduggery within the procurement regime.

Just about the first thing Ms Marks did on the job was to drive a coach and eight horses through the procurement process by giving several million dollars worth of shinyarse work to her pals in the legal profession without any application of the legally required tender process whatsoever.
The next thing she did, once that act of callous malfeasance was discovered was to go on fully paid sick leave for a couple of years – as some suggest, in order to avoid prosecution.

A new regime and new defence ministry seemed unable to deal with MS Marks.
They claimed that she couldn’t be sacked while on sick leave and couldn’t be prosecuted while still employed by the corporatised procurement agency, DMO.

A parallel scenario, reductio ad absurdum –
That means a pissed truck driver can’t be booked for DD ‘cos he’s sick and employed by, say, Toll Corporation.

I reckon both truckies and Toll Corporation would go ballistic if such a stupidity were sustained. In self interest most truckers would avoid a colleague exhibiting such dangerous behaviour while their employers would be justifiably concerned about cargo loss and their safety reputation.

So where does that leave the morality of our governments and the crop of outstandingly narrow minded dolts who continue to win that rigged raffle that we blinkered punters pretend to be a democratic electoral process?

De we really have to keep accepting two sets of rules – one for peasants and truckies and another for the self-promoted elite?

To look at that the document copied below was sent in good faith to yet another defence minister who shortly after was dismissed for malfeasance himself.

Like the recent floods in Queensland and the comment of the overworked radio announcer one rainy night – “it might be easier to tell you which roads are still open rather than those that are closed – since there are definitely more closed than remain open.”

The big question is therefore –
Who, anymore, from top to bottom in these quasi-government organizations and within government itself is innocent of malfeasance or able to conduct their allotted activity without fear or favour in an environment such as has been exposed as corrupted beyond recall?

Hey; Fitzgibbon said it himself. Keep reading -


The hon. Joel Fitzgibbon
Minister for Defence

Dear Joel Fitzgibbon,
1 - I have recently spoken (pm 25/7/08) with Michael Crossman, Chris Condon and others by phone about a matter I believe you should study.
They all advise me to write to you, the Defence Minister, ‘outlining my concerns’ in detail, on one or two pages. An impossible constraint, hence the brevity of this document.
2 - We, my family, established **** Defence in order to contribute our skills towards the common good of and for Australia. We offered those services to help out with industry replacement in our sorry region - a DOTARS recognized – UNSUSTAINABLE REGION – for the duration of the last administration. We stupidly believed we were doing the right THING.
3 - The following extracts demonstrate that ‘The Minister’ has spoken plainly, in the public domain, about these topics. This statement aligns your concerns and ours both in the political arena and the public forum. We agree with the Minister with regard to these matters. We shouldn’t need to preach to you, the converted.
   Your quote, its provenance -
“Mr Fitzgibbon said the duplication, inefficiencies, buck passing and blame shifting cost the economy billions. He said the Business Council of Australia put the cost at $9 billion a year.”
The “obstruction, interference, buck passing and blame” the Minister toys with as an abstract concept, but is a reality my family has had to endure since we first made a decision to begin work in defence industry after formalising our business in Queensland. You are right – but we remind you the wrong is endemic federally too.
4 - The letter from Davina Langton of 2 June 08, your office, when read by us and referenced, displays such attributes as you publicly condemn.
That letter repeated what I already knew; then invited me to waste more time writing more novels for initiatives and reviews (e.g. Mortimer, DPS review, closing 6/6/08) that were at their closure date when I received the letter on  6/6/08.  This sort of thing only mirrors similar from the past.      
I trust the Minister is himself otherwise being provided relevant and timely advice.

5 - For some reason (perhaps connected with that letter) I was contacted by Colleen Milliken of DSTO some weeks ago. She asked me to detail our negative experience as ‘defence suppliers’ and to provide evidence of malfeasance.
Colleen is –
 Colleen Milliken  Office Manager, and  Manager Unsolicited Innovative Proposals Capability & Technology Demonstrator Program F2-1-099 Fairbairn ACT 2600  Ph: 02 612 86497 : Colleen.milliken@dsto.defence.gov.au
That project has taken a fair amount of my time from 10 June 2008 to the present including some 19 attachment rich communications.
I have been advised the purpose of this is for Colleen to ‘oversee’ the forwarding of my documents of evidence along to ‘defence legal’. Recently I’ve been trying to discover the address of ‘Defence Legal from a database of numerous agencies generically termed ‘defence legal’. While doing this today I accidentally found an 1800 647 946 number and an answering machine message that sounded amazingly like our Colleen?
While Colleen’s contact is appreciated I find it incomprehensible that once the documents have been passed from her office to some ephemeral, unidentifiable ‘Defence Legal’ the ‘pathway’ becomes ‘opaque’ and denies us the means to corroborate or further detail our submission about what amounts to the theft of 20 years of our life.
6 - I would remind the Minister that we have been here before. The last ‘Defence legal’ dedicated to solving industry issues was Gillian Marks. Need I say more?
At a recent meeting with a senior company man, the Australian (Defence) minister purportedly said: “Look mate, don’t f— us around. If there’s something wrong with this plane then tell us now.” clubwah.wordpress.com/2008/06/
.I submit that it is clear that we, myself and family, have equally been ‘fooled around’ (I assume that’s what ‘f— us around’ means, above) by a succession of ministerial predecessors who, for reasons known only to themselves, refused to play by rule.
The DPPM is the primary reference document for Defence procurement. The DPPM must comply with Commonwealth legislation and policy, as well as a range of internal Defence guidance. - http://www.defence.gov.au/dmo/gc/contracting/dppi/PRO06_08.pdf
(Reasonable people in similar situations might come to suspect that they didn’t have enough cash to pay the bribes)
I submit that if the Hon. Joel Fitzgibbon, even Mr. Fitzgibbon, citizen, was subject to the sort of chronic obfuscation and subsequently applied malfeasance we’ve related to Colleen by way of evidentiary document that he would have ‘spat the dummy’ himself  in real style years ago.
There is a principle at law of ‘reasonable anger’.

Joel Fitzgibbon, ‘reportedly’, expressed his wrath in ‘reasonable terms’ above. I am expressing that same sentiment now.


theft of –
·          1 incident involving a complete F88 Steyr rifle lost in East Timor (including its magazine containing 30 rounds)
·          F88 Steyr parts (trigger mechanisms and bolt assemblies)
·          an incomplete F88 Steyr rifle (trigger mechanism was not lost)
·          a complete 7.62mm sniper rifle
·          a complete .50in calibre sniper rifle
·          an (innocuous) .303in calibre rifle
·          a 1884 vintage Enfield pistol
·          a replica pistol
two M203 Grenade launchers; four pistols namely: a Browning .32, a 9mm Tokarev, a Colt, and a Webley; one 5.56mm M16 Armalite; four AK47 assault rifles; four AKS/AKM assault rifles; seven other rifles namely: a 7.62mm, a 7.62mm G3, a 7.62mm HMD, a Carl Gustav M5, and three PPSH 43s; two 9mm Austen SMG; and one PPSH 41 rifle

www.aph.gov.au/Hansard/senate/commttee/S10645.pdf  - search terms “weapons security”


My contact details –  supplied at original

No comments:

Post a Comment