Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

On indulgence, we associate ourselves with the sentiments of the Prime Minister in his very moving remarks on the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War. It was a war to end all wars. Of course, history tells us that in many ways it laid the seed for the next one, a war in some respects just as terrible. When you travel around Australia, as all of us have done, and look at the war memorials in the cities or country towns that bear silent witness to the carnage of the First World War and contemplate the scale of the casualties Australia offered in that war—over 60,000 dead from a population that was less than a quarter the size it is today—you realise it was a titanic struggle and it is one the Prime Minister reminds us, and I agree with him, has not faded away into history. It will be with us forever because it was the first global conflict that our nation engaged in. It was one in which our young men went to the other end of the world, often seeking adventure, heedless of danger, and encountered horrors they could not imagine in their worst nightmares.

Many of us have grandparents who served in that war. Many of us have had grandparents like my own grandfather, who could barely bring himself to talk about it until he came close to his own last days. The horror had been too great. We remember those men and women who sacrificed everything for Australia in that terrible conflict and we recall their valour and their loyalty and, above all, that in wearing Australia’s uniform they served this nation and helped establish the freedoms, the liberties and the way of life that we enjoy today.

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