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

Mr Speaker, on indulgence: I wish to associate the opposition with the remarks of the Prime Minister and compliment him on his very eloquent address at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the War Memorial. When we look back on the First World War at the scale of the casualties the horror is mind boggling—almost beyond our comprehension. The numbers were staggering in a world, a society, much greater than the country from which those brave fallen men came.

We contemplate an Australia a quarter the size of what it is today in population and then the horror of Fromelles, that most cataclysmic of Australian military campaigns, where 5,533 Australians would die between one nightfall and the next. It was possibly the worst 24 hours in our nation’s history. We think of the mighty struggles undertaken and the thousands of men whose lives were lost to gain a few metres ground, only to lose it again. We think of Villers-Bretonneux, the village where Australian and French forces had to fight literally door-to-door to drive their enemy into retreat. And we think of the 1,200 Anzacs who died to rescue that village, to liberate it, three years to the day after the landing at Gallipoli. Over 320,000 Australians volunteered for the First World War—this from a nation of five million. There were 61,000 killed and 155,000 wounded. ‘There were so many of them but we never saw them,’ wrote Les Carlyon in The Great War, his epic study of the Australian deployment to the Western Front. We never really knew them, or perhaps never knew enough about their lives or deaths. What we have are memories: faded photographs, bits and pieces brought back from the war.

Perhaps the one war relic that is most evocative for me is a German button brought back by my grandfather. He no doubt found it on the battlefield. I remember it has written on it ‘Gott mit uns’: God with us. I wonder sometimes whether that was a proud boast by the aggressor nation saying, ‘God is on our side and not on the side of our opponents,’ or whether it was perhaps just a prayer—a silent prayer every day as that soldier buttoned up his greatcoat, hoping that God was indeed with him in the horror of the trenches and indeed with the men he was fighting against on the other side.

The Prime Minister spoke today about peace, and that of course is what we must never lose sight of. I am reminded too of Psalm 34, where King David wrote, ‘Seek peace and pursue it’. It is not enough just to look for it or be aware of the virtues of peace, to be in favour of peace; we must pursue it. In that passage, in the original Hebrew, ‘pursue’ means relentlessly, tirelessly chasing, with the passion of the hunter. That is the challenge that comes to leaders in every age: not simply to be vigilant, not simply to stand up for peace, not simply to seek it, but to chase after it, to pursue it relentlessly, tirelessly, with all our heart.

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