"I will be the troubleshooter, I will be the fixer," Molan told The Daily Telegraph in September last year. The Coalition has a penchant for using retired military officers for government business, and accordingly Abbott appointed retired general Jim Molan to be his "fixer" in Jakarta days before the election. ''And the fact our soldiers are prepared to shoulder that burden for the nation is a massive responsibility that I think we sometimes understate.'' "We all do it for a really good cause - a democracy like Australia,'' he said. While in Afghanistan, Gilmore ramped up the use of "capture-kill raids" - or as he put it in a 2011 interview with The Age, "deliberate detentions" that sometimes result in lethal force. He was a favourite of John Howard, who commended him personally in Parliament after the Tampa affair, decorated him on behalf of the SAS upon his return from Afghanistan in 2002, and promoted him in 2003 to the National Security Division of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet on secondment for 18 months.
His CV is impressive, but he should be best remembered as the commander of the SAS raid on the Tampa in 2001 that was, at the time, condemned as piracy. His replacement as Deputy Chief of Army, and reportedly also the 2IC of Operation Sovereign Borders, is Major General Peter "Gus" Gilmore, a highly decorated veteran of special forces command. Campbell said earlier this month that he wouldn't be able to give an honest assessment of the operation's success before March. Campbell was given his new pips in a slap-up office ceremony not long after the Coalition took power, but has steadily been pushed out of the Operation Sovereign Borders spotlight as Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has restricted media access to the details of border protection. Now that Peter Cosgrove has taken the office of Governor-General, Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell is no longer Abbott's top military appointment. Today we're looking at what went unnoticed during the strange case of the submarines and Sophie Mirabella, and the just rewards for loyal service during the War on Terror. The Coalition have long memories, and service during the Howard years has been rewarded accordingly. Business figures, industrial relations ideologues, and military personnel are at the top of the pile under the new regime. Earlier this month we put out the call: who has won big under the new Coalition Government? The results were unsurprising.
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