The RSL Should Not be a Complaints Desk for Liberal Frontbenchers!
The Returned and Services League has decided that a One Nation cartoon about Andrew Hastie is "an attack on every veteran's service." That is not stewardship of the dead. That is a political organisation using the slouch hat as a veto. Pauline Hanson does not owe Canberra a retraction for that. Even if you grant every syllable of the complaint, the leap from "this MP was roasted" to "all who served were spat on" is the real insult. It treats veterans as a single nervous system. They are not.
One Nation posted a satirical animation. Cartoon Hastie is the punchline: he tells Anthony Albanese that people online call him a traitor, and the gag ties that to his evidence against Ben Roberts-Smith and to speech laws Hanson opposes. Hastie says the word appears eight times. Hanson says she did not stand at a lectern and brand him a traitor; it is a cartoon, and he is making a mountain out of a molehill. Barnaby Joyce has already mumbled an apology for "umbrage." Hanson has not pulled the pin. The political class, Labor included, has formed a circle. The RSL joined it.
That is a fight about a sitting member of parliament. Hastie is not a private soldier on operations. He is a Liberal frontbencher who chose to give evidence under subpoena, who campaigns, who declared "war" on One Nation months ago, and who now wants the cartoon treated as a national blasphemy. You can think the cartoon is crude. You can think he should have been left alone. You can think Hastie did his duty. None of those views converts a political lampoon into a war crime against the Returned.
The defence of Hanson starts with a distinction the RSL erased. Service earns respect for the uniform and the oath. It does not buy a lifetime exemption from satire once you enter the House and pick sides in the ugliest civil fight the SAS has had in a generation.
Hastie framed the cartoon as a slur on "veterans around the country" who think soldiers should meet high standards. That is clever politics. It is also a category error. The cartoon is aimed at him: his choices, his alliances, his evidence, not at the bloke who did National Service in 1967 or the woman who came home from Tarin Kot and wants nothing to do with either camp. If twenty-plus SAS witnesses were called, they are not a chorus. Some backed the papers. Some backed Roberts-Smith. Some still will not speak. Collapsing them into Hastie's honour is how parties talk. It is not how units work.
Hanson's denial matters less than the principle. Even if you take Hastie's count as gospel: "traitor" on the soundtrack eight times, the word in Australian politics is cheap ammunition. MPs have been called traitors over boats, over China, over Voice, over Iraq. The RSL did not put out a national statement every time a Left activist called a veteran a baby-killer. Selective solemnity is not principle. It is a press release timed to a Liberal who needed cover.
The RSL's sentence is the one that should be thrown out: throw "traitor" at a man who wore the uniform and you have attacked every veteran. That is institutional vanity. Veterans are not a protected class with a single ear. Plenty of them think Roberts-Smith was fitted up. Plenty think Hastie put the regiment through a wringer for the quality press. Plenty think both men should shut up and let the courts finish. A cartoon that offends Hastie and Lambie does not conscript the rest.
If the test is "could a veteran find this ugly," the test is worthless. A veteran can find Anzac Day speeches ugly. A veteran can find the Defence Minister's talking points ugly. Offence is not a jurisdiction.
What is corrosive is the claim that once you have deployed, your subsequent political acts are fused to the whole tribe. That is how you get a priesthood. It is also how you get silence. If every hard word about a former officer in parliament is "an attack on every veteran's service," then the only safe speech is the RSL's.
Bruce Ruxton did not run a sensitivity shop. He fought governments, the ABC, and anyone he thought was rewriting the war. He was rude, tribal, and uninterested in making Liberal leadership hopefuls feel held. He would have understood a brawl over a VC and a courtroom. He would not have mistaken a YouTube roast of a shadow minister for a desecration of the King and Empire.
The modern RSL has chosen the opposite register: the language of HR and "corrosive messages." That may be how you keep corporate partners. It is not how Ruxton's league talked when the country still assumed diggers could cop a joke and give one back.
A league that once existed to look after the blokes who came home now exists, in this episode, to adjudicate a preference war between One Nation and the Liberal right. Veterans who wanted a welfare and mateship outfit did not vote for a media unit that decides which cartoon is un-Australian.
Hastie can sue, delete, or campaign. Hanson can leave the video up. Joyce can apologise until the cows come home. None of that requires the RSL to announce that one MP's reputation is the reputation of the entire returned community.
If Hanson called Hastie a traitor as a man and a member, that is a political charge. Answer it with facts about the trial, the subpoena, and the regiment. Do not launder it through "every veteran." That move does not protect the widow at the dawn service. It protects a faction and a brand.
Hanson does not need to be sainted. She needs the ordinary right to belt a politician who declared war on her party without the national veterans' body pretending the belt hit every slouch hat in the country. Ruxton would have recognised the difference. The current statement does not. That is the story, not the cartoon.
