Officers and men of the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Australian Navy serving with the United Nations Emergency Forces in Egypt are quartered in pig-sty conditions.

In a long association with the Australian services, I have never seen troops required to live in such disgraceful conditions in peacetime. They would not be tolerated in an Australian jail.

It is a scandal for which the United Nations is responsible and in which the Australian authorities have acquiesced. The Australian Detachment, which is acknowledged to be the most useful and effective unit of the UN force, occupies the four top floors of a squalid, fifth-rate Egyptian hotel in the Suez Canal city of Ismalia. The hotel is misnamed the Sinai Palace.

It is a herring-gutted, grubby,  run down, infinitely depressing old building with an narrow, dark entrance. There are no lifts - to reach the makeshift Australian mess, one has to climb six flights of dingy stairs.

The plumbing is primitive and frequently gives up all together. When when I visited the unit there were buckets of water standing beside the lavatories to flush them.

The rooms in which officers and men have to live a tiny, crude and bear without amenities of any kind except those introduced by their occupants.

The detachment has been there for 3 years and all that time nothing has been done by the Australian government or the Australian Services to have the living conditions improved. The dismal quarters are barely habitable only because officers and men working together have done what they can to make them so.

The story is… or was.. the same at the former RAF airfield Al Gala, now an Egyptian airfield from which the Australian unit operates.

I say was, because the Australians’ own physical efforts have had results. When the Australians arrived, they were put into an old RAF hangar along with a Canadian air transport detachment’

The Australians had no officers, nowhere to do their administrative work.

The Australian airmen set out to scrounge building materials and constructed an office block for themselves outside the hangar, together with an above-ground swimming pool and a barbeque.

Again, officers - to the scandal of the more conventional UN units - took off their shirts and worked beside the men.

This forgotten Australian unit is known as AUSTAIR UNEF.  It consists of four Iroquois helicopters from No 5 Squadron at Fairbairn, Canberra and 46 RAAF officers and men drawn from all over Australia.

Working with it are a handful of RAN air crew and maintenance personnel.

They under the command of an Indonesian general, the senior officer of the UN Emergency Force.

The Australians’ job, along with attachments from Canada, Finland, Ghana, Indonesia, Poland and Sweden, has been to police the 1973 ceasefire line between the Egyptian and Israeli forces in the hot and barren desert country of the Sinai Peninsula.

They have flown daily airborne patrols in support of infantry surveillance operations, the aim being to check any ceasefire infringements.

The Australian Unit also has a medical evacuation role.

With an uneasy peace between Israel and Egypt - and to anyone on the spot, it appears a very uneasy peace - the UNEF has no real role left and will soon be withdrawn.

The Australians will leave their dingy quarters and come home,

But the lesson for the Australian Government remains. It is that, before committing Australian forces to a UN task, the government has a responsibility to see that the conditions of service are reasonable and acceptable. In Egypt, it has inexcusably failed to do so.

What our men have to put up with in Ismailia made one Australian visitor’s blood boil.

But what about all the other Australian visitors, from Foreign Affairs and Defence? Did they think it was good enough for Australian Servicemen?