Foxy wrote ""The Australian government committed troops to the
Vietnam War in 1965. This was driven by a fear of
communist expansion in Asia as well as the government's
desire to align itself with its ally - the United States."

Let’s look at things in context. Vietnam had been a colony of France and the Vietnamese in general wanted to be independent. The drive for Vietnamese independence was part of the post-WW2 drive of the European colonies to free themselves from foreign domination. I had a cousin who was an air force pilot in Vietnam during that war. He realized at some point that the US was just taking the place of the French, and most of the people didn’t want us there. While he was there a washerwoman came on base with grenades under her skirt. They were detected before she could do any damage. He could not resign as he was in there for the duration. However, he could refuse promotion. If you are in grade as an officer and refuse promotion for a certain length of time you are discharged. Although he had planned to make the air force a career he refused promotion and eventually got out.

Communist expansion? Nonsense! The Vietnamese wanted independence and fear of communist expansion was the false justification for denying them independence.

Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (gmu.edu)

The following is excerpted from that:

Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

For the people of Vietnam, who were just beginning to recover from five years of ruthless economic exploitation by the Japanese, the end of World War II promised to bring eighty years of French control to a close. As the League for the Independence of Vietnam (Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi), better known as the Viet Minh, Vietnamese nationalists had fought against the Japanese invaders as well as the defeated French colonial authorities. With the support of rich and poor peasants, workers, businessmen, landlords, students, and intellectuals, the Viet Minh (led by Ho Chi Minh) had expanded throughout northern Vietnam where it established new local governments, redistributed some lands, and opened granaries to alleviate the famine. On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh square. The first lines of his speech repeated verbatim the famous second paragraph of America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence.

Ho Chi Minh was a communist, but he was influenced by the US struggle for independence from England as shown by his extract from the US Declaration of Independence. Had the US chosen to do so they might have made Ho an ally rather than an enemy. Vietnam was no friend of China and fought them in 1979.

With all due respect - the Prime Minister
John Howard has stated that he still
supports Australia's controversial involvement
in the Vietnam War.

It was what he believed at that time.

According to
him, nothing has altered his views on the
assessments he was given, and the decisions he made
then.

If you want to discuss the topic of wars -
perhaps a new discussion can be made on
that subject?

Also, the Australian War Memorial has more
information on the reasons for Australia's
involvement in the Vietnam War 1962-75.
All you have to do is Google it.

Foxy,

Rather than discussing War, I would like to see someone open up a discussion on the current status of the actions to tackle global warming given the great leap forward that has been made by Joe Biden over the past week.

This is a real game changer and a real slap in the face to the AGW denialists who have just had their world turned upset down.