Over the last few years we have grown accustomed to
tory Governments acting more like Soviet apparatchiks,
detaining and even deporting Australian citizens on entirely
spurious grounds, but those human rights abuses pall into
insignificance compared to the conspiracy to assassinate Normie
Row by falsely drafting him and sending him into a war zone
where he faced death.
The last time I can recall someone attempting this was in the
biblical story of King David, who, coveting the wife of
"HE was Australia's most famous Vietnam conscript
but it can now be revealed that pop idol Normie
Rowe was falsely drafted into the army.
And he should never have been sent to war."
- Herald Sun 15/5/2008
"The Department of Veterans' Affairs has this week
confirmed that Rowe's birth date - February 1, 1947
- was never raised in the controversial ballot of
dates that selected which 20-year-old men would be
called up to serve.
Mystery surrounds how the nation's most high-profile
pop singer could have been singled out for conscription.
But the "ballot" that drafted Rowe was one of the last
conducted behind closed doors."
The Holt Government ministers at the time clearly have
a serious case to answer, Allen Fairhall, Minister for
Defence and Leslie Bury, Minister for Labour and
National Service.
The former members of the relevant standing committee
of Cabinet, the Defence Preparations Committee should
also be summonsed before an appropriate Senate or Royal
Commission.
"Later drafts were televised, with no possibility the
process could be manipulated."
In 1967, Rowe had just returned from his second trip to
London, where he was trying for a breakthrough, and had
a string of Australian hits to his credit when he was
told he had been called up for two years' army service.
He faced the news stoically, but it ended his pop dreams,
as he knew it would. Yet even for an ambitious singer,
it was a call to duty."
He, like those Australian citizens who were falsely detained
in Howard's gulags, or deported, should have grounds to sue
for all his lost income, and damages for the unnecessary risks
that he might be killed.
"There were many other young Australians who were apprentices
and tradesmen who'd done the same. I wasn't going to duck out
of national service if my number came up."
So he served a year in Vietnam at the height of his fame.
Years later, a chance encounter with a policeman born the
same day had Rowe wondering if something untoward had happened.
Rowe still does not know how he came to be called up but some
see clues in the terrific publicity generated when Elvis Presley
was enlisted into the US army 10 years earlier."
If that was the case is was not only an act of complete
tory bastardy, but also a criminal matter and an outrageous
abuse of power.
The current government should set up an inquiry to determine who
was responsible and have charges of attempted murder brought
against them.
"Rowe has just finished filming a yet-to-be-screened documentary,
The PM Is Missing, in which he plays the part of Harold Holt, who
disappeared while swimming at Cheviot Beach in December 1967.
Holt, prime minister at the time of Rowe's recruitment to the
army, may have been one of the few people who could have solved
the mystery."
Fortunately there are many more Liberal government ministers
who can be held to account. |