This news from Adelaide Now:
Klan video ‘larrikin irreverence’
Article from: The Advertiser
(MARK KENNY, POLITICAL EDITOR, CANBERRA) August 06, 2007 02:15am
DEFENCE Minister Brendan Nelson has played down an embarrassing video posted on YouTube that showed Australian soldiers in a drunken state and wearing a Ku Klux Klan costume.
The video, set to music, shows soldiers from Darwin’s Robertson Barracks binge drinking and vomiting, with at least one parading in the unmistakable hooded garb of the notorious white supremacist group.
While the Australian Defence Force announced it would conduct investigations into the video, which was apparently made three years ago, Dr Nelson said it may have been a case of people stepping “over the line”.
“Let’s just wait until the Chief of Army and the military investigate the matter before we start jumping to conclusions and start to criticise the men who appear to have been involved,” he said.
Dr Nelson said it may have been a case of “larrikin irreverence,” and “letting off steam”.
“There’s always been a kind of irreverence, I suppose, which has underwritten the core values of our three services and it’s a question of the extent to which at times perhaps some of these things go over the line,” he said.
Brendan, if you don’t understand the risks inherent in this kind of “relaxation” among a group of men whose job it is to go among people of different colours and cultures while armed and often jumpy, then it is time you got out and let somebody with a clue have a go.
The sad thing is, that clue probably resides in nobody on the Coalition front bench.
Protecting the Australian Way Of Life…
(The cartoon character Philippe is borrowed from Chris Onstad’s Achewood webcomic. He is allowed to be naive.)
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