Air Marshal Stoush regrets the Minister ignoring the Proust Report, tackles the Secretary about the unprecedented tripling of deputy-secretary positions in the Department of Defence and explains how many defence force personnel have been wearing hijabs for years.
One thing never fails to impress me about working on the 5th floor of Building R1 at Russell Offices. I am regularly struck by how widely read the senior officers of the ADF can be. Take for example my boss, Barney (Air Marshal Barney Stoush), the VCDF.
When the Minister tried to sneak the Report of the Defence Management Review, 2007 (the Proust Report) out very late on the Thursday afternoon before the Easter holiday break, Barney swiftly quipped that the whole episode was ‘very Proustian’ in its timing as was the Government’s reaction to the report’s recommendations. ‘All very le temps retrouvé‘ he muttered, obviously to himself as neither the ADC nor I speak French.
The Chief-of-Staff, a much more well-rounded officer, had laughed immediately however, and not out of obsequious 5th floor habit.
When the VCDF left he explained to us both that Barney’s remark was in fact a clever Stoushian allusion, referring to the seventh and final volume (The Past Recaptured) of Marcel Proust’s la recherché du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past).
Since the release of the Proust Report Barney has become quite insouciant and no longer dissembles much about the heresies he harbours.
Being VCDF he is, of course, a principal victim of ever-increasing diarchic mutation, whereby the diarchy at the top does not stay there but keeps grinding away to lower and lower levels each year.
Now Barney, as a fighter pilot and a man of action, holds little truck for amorphous management structures. His ever-firmer conviction that diarchic principles are an anathema to effective command, control and administration of a defence force mean he is now unlikely to ever be considered for promotion to the smaller half of the two top jobs.
His reasonably relaxed resignation at curtailed career paths has only served to sharpen his quippery.
Noting the installation of a much bigger table in the 5th floor conference room – to cater for the half dozen or so new Under-Mandarin positions in the mill – Barney had another Proustian moment. He told the Secretary that the production of deputy secretaries and their equivalents should be formally added to the list of Defence outputs, given that the department now has so many of them.
One of the new Under-Mandarins is to be a sort of super-duper chief-of-staff for the newly formed Office of the CDF and Secretary, or is it Secretary and CDF? Barney fears the worst.
‘The problem will be’, he mused, ‘that a chief-of-staff in a headquarters should be one rank lower than the principal subordinates to the person in charge, otherwise they are prone to believe that they are primus inter pares instead of just a behind-the-scenes facilitator of inter-commander effectiveness’. Demonstrating his command of jointery, he cited the time-tempered examples of brigade majors being one rank lower than unit commanders in a brigade, and the chief-of-staff in a divisional headquarters being one rank lower than the brigade commanders in a division.
But the VCDF has remained philosophical about the latest round of bureaucratic empire building. His Proustian view is that only time will tell.
Noting previous departmental history, he observed that we are now only 18 months or so away anyway from the start of the next review of higher defence management – and that yet again it will undoubtedly be ostensibly intended at fixing all the unintended and ignored faults of current and previous reviews.
But it is hijabs, or rather the perceived lack of them in the defence force, that is now catching the 5th floor by the throat so to speak.
The president of the Lakemba Sports Club is ostensibly encouraging young, hijab-wearing, Muslim women to become ADF reservists. He hopes to change what he fears is the apparent negative image of Muslim-Australians among the wider community.
Barney, of course, was well ahead of debate when tackled by the first of many intrepid SBS and ABC reporters about the proposal.
He calmly noted that our sailors of both genders have been wearing quite fetching hijabs at sea for many years when at action stations. He also cited the custom in downtown Baghdad for our diggers to wear a modest hijab whenever driving their armoured vehicles outside the green zone.
Only the air force, he conceded, might appear at first somewhat culturally insensitive in this regard. Although in their defence, he explained, anti-flash hoods are not much use aboard aircraft or in air-conditioned environments.
Later he regretted the air-conditioning quip, remembering the tendency for the hyper-sensitive to misconstrue any such remark as somehow constituting snide criticism of the air force.
‘Cross-cultural sensitivity is so important’, our Proust-reading VCDF noted to us subsequently.
‘Luckily’, he added, ‘our long experience with integrating the three Services will hold us in good stead. Seeking to convince the good mothers and fathers of Lakemba to let their nubile daughters mix for weeks on end unchaperoned with unbearded, non-Muslim, fellow diggers will be easy’. ‘After all’ he concluded, ‘look at all the long beards in the navy, and if we could eventually get sailors permitted to wear DPCU occasionally – without admirals suffering apoplexy at the sight – we can easily sort out the hijab issue’.
The Chief-of-Staff had again laughed long and hard.
When the ADC and I looked puzzled he told us to go away and look up the original French derivation of chaperone in the dictionary.
Barney, Proustian as ever, had put his finger right on the nub of the issue.
Next week he and I are off to Sydney for exploratory talks on the matter with both admirals and Lakemba locals.