Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I rise today to thank the government for the update that the Minister for Veterans' Affairs has provided with regard to the Anzac Centenary. It is, as the minister has said, a commemoration. It is to honour and respect those who have served our nation in both war and peace in the past and in the present. It is actually about the last hundred years of service to our country. And it is about framing that experience of our service men and women and of our nation and of our community in their response to war and about working out how that will influence the way we approach this century in the pursuit of peace.

This centenary event is not a hundred years of glorification of war or any kind of 'reductionist jingoism', as Paul Keating put it once, but in fact it is—and I borrow the name of a play that has currently opened in Sydney—The Long Way Home. I think this centenary is the long way home to our hearts, minds and national story of what the sacrifice has meant to us.

The years 1914 to 2014 has been a bloody, violent century. It was dominated by war, not least because the nature of warfare and the weapons of war became ever more powerful, ever more destructive. We went from the Light Horse, for example, in the First World War through to nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki through to the drones that are used in modern warfare today.

When we think about this Anzac Centenary covering the hundred years of Australian service, we are talking about the first and second world wars, we are talking about Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and we are also talking about Australian service men and women trying to facilitate peace everywhere from Indonesia in 1947 through to Cambodia, Rwanda, Somalia, East Timor, Darfur and so on.

So much has been written of Anzac Day and the sacrifice at Gallipoli in World War I, but I think it is important to put it in the population context of the day. Australia's population at that time was less than five million people, and 416,809 enlisted. For a population of fewer than five million, it is clear why people were so profoundly impacted, because, if you think of a population of that size, you realise that everybody knew someone. In that war, 61,512 died but 156,000 came back wounded, gassed or with the experience of having been taken prisoner. It is why part of the national identity is the small-town memorial. I want to read for a moment from a poem by a Canberra based poet, Geoff Page, Smalltown Memorials:

No matter how small

Every town has one;

Maybe just the obelisk,

A few names inlaid;

More often full-scale granite,

Marble digger (arms reversed),

Long descending lists of dead:

Sometimes not even a town,

A thickening of houses

Or a few unlikely trees

Glimpsed on a back-road

Will have one.

…   …   …

Unveiled;

Then seen each day —

Noticed once a year;

And then not always,

Everywhere.

The next bequeathed us

Parks and pools

But something in that first

Demanded stone.

It is certainly my experience in Tasmania, but also as I move around the country, that every town has their war memorial, and the First World War did demand stone from communities to commemorate the sacrifice.

I did study the First World War at university and travelled in my youth to many of the allied cemeteries on the Western Front, and then in 2005 I visited Gallipoli. I have to say it was a profoundly moving experience, but I was really distressed at the time about the changes that were being made to the site at Gallipoli to facilitate greater numbers of visitation. Bulldozers ripped into the cliff face behind Anzac Cove, spoil was dumped straight over the side onto the beaches, and the result is that you now have a terraced effect at Anzac Cove. You have lost the physical context of the troops arriving and facing those cliffs, as it was when they arrived at Gallipoli on, as we refer to it, Anzac Day. I find it really disturbing that we have lost that physical context, but we have not lost the context of the emotional engagement with our nation or the respect for the bravery, the sacrifice and the human characteristics of mateship, courage and humour and everything else we have come to understand about Australians serving in any war—World War I but other wars as well. They did not fight for some old idea of empire, what they did fight for was the future of our country and the defence of the values which we regard as important as Australians—freedom and our future.

I would like to finish by saying I am pleased the government is saying that this year is not about a glorification of war, but rather it is about recognising the horror, the tragedy, and the waste and futility of war and recognising the bravery and courage of those who follow orders to fight on our behalf. It is in that context that I would say that as parliamentarians we want to make sure that we change the law in this country to ensure that it is only the parliament which can commit young Australians to serve in war, because there is no greater responsibility for a parliament than taking that decision.

I want to end with The Long Way Home. I went to the opening in Sydney on Saturday night and I would encourage all members of parliament to try and see this. It will tour the country. It is a play which is a collaboration between the Defence forces and the Sydney Theatre Company and it is about the experience of the war in Afghanistan. It talks about the trauma of the experience, the difficulty in coping on returning home and the grieving for a military identity that defined the lives of troops at that time. It is an important part of this Centenary of Anzac to look at the experience of our troops in that war and to support them now in every way we can to help with the healing process. The Long Way Home certainly does that.

I want to thank the government for the work they are doing on the Centenary of Anzac, and I am certainly proud of the bravery, courage and humour of the Anzacs. I am grateful for their sacrifice; and I am mindful of the responsibility as a member of parliament to honour that sacrifice but also to move to make sure that in the future it is the parliament that takes that responsibility.