RATS, REJECTS… AND HEROES

Australians often ask the same question: how does a total incompetent, a completely clueless nincompoop, a man with the reverse Midas touch, Chris Bowen, who has been a catastrophic failure in every portfolio he has held, still sit at the Cabinet table under the Albanese regime?

The answer is simple.

Look at the bench behind him. A shallow talent pool of political hacks, toadies, and career operatives with little to no real-world experience.

Exhibit A: Western Australian Labor MP Patrick Gorman.

Right now, Australia faces an oil squeeze. Farmers are short of diesel. Our fuel reserves, meant to sit at 90 days, have been run down. We are in the grip of the worst housing crisis in the nation’s history, driven by mass migration. Inflation is among the highest in the developed world, fuelled by reckless government spending.

And Patrick Gorman’s contribution?

He smears Australians who have joined One Nation, labelling them “rats and rejects.” That’s it. That’s the level of debate. What a genius.

It does not just show how out of touch Labor MPs are. It shows how little they understand history, because we have seen this before.

In 2016, during the US presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton dismissed millions of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” She was ahead in the polls, expected to win. She lost.

Her opponents turned the insult into a badge of honour and used it against her relentlessly. Even Clinton later admitted it hurt her campaign.

You would think that lesson might have landed. Apparently not. Because Patrick Gorman has now reached for the same playbook, only worse.

Because in Australia, calling your opponents “rats” does not just insult them. It reveals ignorance, a staggering ignorance of Australian history.

Those words carry weight. The Rats of Tobruk, a name etched in history, part of our proud legacy, a name that means mateship, courage, and endurance.

In January 1941, the strategically located town and port of Tobruk, 145 kilometres west of the Egyptian border, was held by Mussolini’s Italian 10th Army. They were routed and driven from the town by Australian infantry.

But then the Australians had to hold it.

As Italian forces collapsed across Libya, Mussolini turned to Hitler. The response was swift and deadly. The Deutsches Afrika Korps, under General Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox”, arrived in February 1941.

With Germany’s best troops, latest tanks, and dive bombing Stuka aircraft, Rommel’s forces steamrolled across North Africa, driving the Allies back toward Egypt. One position after another fell.

All but one. Tobruk.

What faced the Australian defenders was the full weight of the seemingly invincible Nazi war machine, a force that had defeated the Netherlands in seven days, crushed Poland in eighteen, and brought France to its knees in six weeks.

The Australians were surrounded. Outnumbered three to one. Outgunned. Facing superior armour, superior weapons, superior training. Behind them, only the sea.

On paper, this lightly trained force of Australian volunteers, farmers, labourers, clerks, and surf lifesavers, was expected to be annihilated.

Rommel knew the truth: as long as Tobruk stood, his advance toward Alexandria and the Suez Canal would remain vulnerable. So he prepared to throw the full might of the Nazi war machine against it.

By early April, German forces had reached the perimeter. The siege had begun.

The Australians were ordered to hold for eight weeks. Most believed six would be the absolute limit.

They held for 231 days.

Day after day. Night after night. Under constant bombardment. Under relentless air attack. With little rest. Little water. They endured the scorching desert heat and choking dust storms. Surgeons worked underground, cutting and stitching, sometimes amputating, without proper tools.

Still, they held.

Until Tobruk, no army had successfully resisted the full force of the German military machine.

What was seen as a weakness, that the Australians were not professional soldiers, became their strength. They were not bound by rigid doctrine. They adapted. Improvised. Fought on their own terms.

They repelled every major assault. Held off tank attacks. Endured relentless Luftwaffe bombing. Maintained control of the harbour, denying Axis forces the ability to supply their advance into Egypt.

They turned defence into attack. Under cover of darkness, they launched aggressive patrols, striking German positions and keeping the enemy off balance.

In doing so, they achieved something no army had yet done: they stopped Hitler’s war machine. The myth of German invincibility was shattered.

In the bleak days of 1941, after Dunkirk, under the shadow of the Blitz, Tobruk became more than a battlefield. It became a beacon.

The Rats of Tobruk proved the German war machine could be resisted. Fought. Beaten.

Winston Churchill himself sent word: “The whole Empire is watching your steadfast and spirited defence… with gratitude and admiration.”

For eight relentless months, the Rats held the line.

And in doing so, they bought the Allies precious time, to reinforce North Africa, regroup, and prepare for the battles that followed, culminating at El Alamein, where the German advance was finally broken.

The history of the Rats of Tobruk should be taught in every Australian school. Australian schoolchildren should also learn how they got their name, because Patrick Gorman’s smear makes it clear he does not.

“Rats of Tobruk” was meant as an insult. The name came from William Joyce. During the siege, the propagandist mocked the Australian soldiers, calling them “rats,” trapped and hiding in their holes. He sneered at them repeatedly as the “Rats of Tobruk.”

But he did not understand the Australian character. He did not understand the Australian spirit.

What was meant as an insult became a badge of honour. The soldiers embraced it. If the enemy called them rats, then rats they would proudly be.

They even made their own unofficial medal: a small rat badge fashioned from the metal of a German bomber they had shot down.

What Joyce intended as ridicule became a symbol of defiance, courage, and mateship.

That is what Patrick Gorman does not understand. Australians do not crumble when they are insulted. They turn it back on you.

Patrick Gorman would do well to learn from history, not only the fate of Hillary Clinton after smearing her political opponents, but also the fate of William Joyce. Because history, as it often does, delivers a fitting irony.

Three weeks after the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, Joyce was on the run, like a rat, hiding among the ruins of the collapsed Third Reich, carrying false papers and trying to escape justice.

Near Flensburg, close to the Danish border, British troops stopped a suspicious man. One soldier recognised the voice instantly, the same voice that had taunted Allied soldiers over the airwaves.

“You wouldn’t be William Joyce, would you?”

As Joyce reached into his pocket for identification, believing he might be drawing a weapon, a British soldier fired. The bullet passed clean through his backside, leaving four neat holes as it entered one cheek and exited the other.

The once boastful voice of Nazi propaganda was now reduced to a pathetic wounded fugitive with four holes in his backside. He was sent back to England, where he was tried and convicted of high treason. On January 3, 1946, he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison, the last civilian executed for treason in the United Kingdom.

No doubt, just like the Rats of Tobruk, One Nation supporters will wear Gorman’s smear of being “rats and rejects” as a badge of honour.

Because if history tells us anything, it is this: Australians do not wear insults as shame. They wear them as armour.

And we have already seen how history dealt with Hillary Clinton and William Joyce.

The question now is simple.

How will history deal with Patrick Gorman?

““My father said the Australian infantry belonged to the best troops on both sides he had seen during his military career. It was due to their professional soldiership that the Germans and Italians could not take Tobruk during the summer of 1941.”
– Manfred Rommel, son of Wehrmacht Field Marshal Erwin Rommel