Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to refer to the first part of the bill, which sets out the title, the commencement and the definition. I want to draw the minister’s attention to the explanatory memorandum and his comments during his summing up that a national memorial is the same as a military memorial of national significance and that this debate has merely been a semantic debate. I reject that right from the outset and I would direct him to the outline and financial impact statement in the explanatory memorandum. I do so in this context. We as legislators have an obligation always to make the law clear, and definition sections of bills, the explanatory memorandum and the second reading speech—which are source material for courts, which may subsequently use them to make a decision—are most important. The outline says:

The Bill will provide a mechanism to honour the Government’s election commitment to declare the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat, to be a national memorial.

It then says why it needs a mechanism:

National memorials are recognised under the National Memorials Ordinance 1928 and are restricted to memorials within the Australian Capital Territory. This Bill will recognise the national significance of the Australian Ex-Prisoners of War Memorial in Ballarat and will enable, in the future, other memorials that meet specified criteria, to be recognised as a Military Memorial of National Significance.

It makes it quite clear that this is a new category of memorial. I accept that the minister said that this is the way to go forward. I agree with that. This is the way to go forward. I said in my speech in the second reading debate, and I will go on saying, that this is a magnificent memorial of enormous importance that needs to be recognised. The minister conceded that a change in law was required, as the previous Minister for Veterans’ Affairs always said, and that the spurious legal opinion going around was not worth the paper it was written on. The point is this: another way that this could have been done would have been to simply have a special piece of legislation to declare the Ballarat memorial a military memorial of national significance. It could have provided ongoing finance. Although the minister said in summing up that there is nothing in the ordinance that says funding for national memorials comes from the Commonwealth, the fact of the matter is that it does.

There are other aspects in this legislation relating to the question of funding that I want to go through during consideration in detail. I notice there was a line item in the budget for further funding for this particular memorial—to which the former Howard government had already given $500,000. We did that because we believed in the significance of the memorial. Here the government and the opposition are in fact in unison. It needed to be recognised. But I heard the parliamentary secretary rise in the House last week and say they were declaring a national memorial. That just is not true: it is a new category, it is important and it matters. To simply have semantic arguments when we are dealing with legislation and when there is the need to be precise simply will not do. We moved the amendment to put it on the record. In no way did we ever want to deny this bill passage, as I made quite clear all along. The Ballarat memorial for ex-prisoners of war is enormously important in our heritage. There are some other significant points in the bill I want to raise with the minister, but I would like to give him the opportunity now to reply to the points I have made.

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