Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise to speak on this motion to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli and to join in this debate, which has been characterised by many fine contributions, including the one we have just heard from the member for Herbert.

Every Anzac Day is an opportunity to reflect on the sacrifice and service of so many men and women in the First World War, the Second World War and many other conflicts in which Australians have fought. But as we mark 100 years since the landing on the Gallipoli peninsula, 100 years since the battle which so quickly came to be a defining moment in our national character and identity, it is particularly timely to consider the central role of military service in our history as a successful democratic nation.

There is something of a paradox in the way that a democracy goes to war and in the attitude that we bring to the role of war in our history. For militaristic and fascist nations—like Hitler's Germany or Tojo's Japan—war was to be sought out and celebrated. The nation gloried in its victories, and the disruption to the lives of tens of millions of people, both in the aggressor nation and its victims, was of little consequence.

Democracies, by contrast, go to war reluctantly—more often than not, only when it is necessary to defend themselves against aggression. It is notable that the famous call from opposition leader Andrew Fisher in July 1914 is couched in terms of defence, not attack:

… should the worst happen, after everything has been done that honour will permit, Australians will stand beside the mother country to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.

When democracies go to war they do not abandon their fundamental values. On the contrary, to maintain popular support for the war effort, the government of a democracy must be able to show that the purpose of fighting is to defend and advance those fundamental values.

During World War I, Australia held two successive referendums on the contentious question of conscription. The citizens of this young democracy reserved the right to decide on this fundamental question of how the war effort should be resourced. They twice repudiated the Prime Minister of the day, Billy Hughes, who later became the first member for Bradfield, who was urging that conscription should be adopted.

Similarly, Australians at the front were determined to form their own opinions. Historian Michael McKernan highlights this point in his foreword to a recent edition of Keith Murdoch's famous letter about Gallipoli, saying:

Australian soldiers saw themselves as quite competent to form their own opinions, to think for themselves. They had freely offered their service as soldiers to their country, but they had not surrendered their capacity for independent thinking and judgement.

The wars of the 20th century, particularly the two world wars, were tests of whether soldiers of a democracy could fight effectively. Would they be less disciplined? Would they follow orders less reliably than soldiers who had grown up in a totalitarian state? Or would their upbringing in a democratic nation be a strength, equipping them to display initiative and exercise their own judgement? Would the freedom and the way of life they enjoyed in a democracy translate into a greater determination to fight so as to preserve that way of life?

Writing about D-day, the American historian Stephen Ambrose said:

It was an open question, toward the end of Spring 1944, as to whether a democracy could produce young soldiers capable of fighting effectively against the best that Nazi Germany could produce … when the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought. They were soldiers of democracy.

So too were the Anzacs soldiers of democracy. Indeed, Charles Bean, Australia's official war historian, saw a parallel with soldiers of the ancient Greek democracy of Athens, who had fought in the Dardanelles over 2,000 years earlier. Let me quote from the biography of Bean written recently by Ross Coulthart:

Bean was drawn to the stories of fifth century BC Athens because they fit his mythologising of the Anzacs: just as in ancient Athens, the Australia they were fighting to defend was a new democracy with similarly high minded ideals.

Anzac Day, therefore, marks the anniversary of a campaign which occurred early in the life of Australia in a war we were fighting to defend the ideals embodied in our nation.

If this is one reason why the Gallipoli campaign looms so large in our national consciousness, another is that it forms part of a war in which Australians decisively demonstrated their capacities as effective fighting men. Gallipoli itself was a military failure, but later in World War I Australians were involved in decisive victories, particularly the Battle of Amiens on the Western Front under General Monash. The most successful aspect of the Gallipoli campaign was the way it ended, with an evacuation in December 1915 carried out largely without the enemy realising it.

Perhaps a strength of democracies in war is that it is harder to hide military failures from public opinion and, in turn, the armies of democracies cut their losses more quickly than the armies of totalitarian nations. That is not to say it was at all easy for journalists reporting on the Gallipoli campaign to get the truth out. They faced heavy censorship, but the efforts of Australian journalists like Keith Murdoch and Charles Bean were important to the decision ultimately taken that the campaign should be abandoned. It is hard to imagine such men operating, and their work having a similar effect, inside a totalitarian political system.

The centenary of Anzac, of course, is much more than a commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I. On the contrary, we are recognising over 100 years of service and sacrifice by the men and women of our armed forces. We are also marking the fundamental importance of the wars in which Australians have fought, particularly the two world wars, in shaping Australia as a nation.

The First World War led to a change in Australia's perception of itself and its standing in the world. After the victory, we pushed forward to participate more strongly in world affairs and to express the ideals which had motivated us to fight. Prime Minister Billy Hughes demanded a seat at the table at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and pushed the case for Australia to have independent membership of the League of Nations, despite the reluctance of the United States. On 28 June 1919, Hughes signed the Treaty of Versailles on behalf of Australia, and at the end of the conference Australia was a full member of the League of Nations and, along with the other former British dominions, had achieved a new international standing.

Of course, all of this came at enormous cost to so many ordinary Australians. The impact on the region of Ku-ring-gai, within my electorate of Bradfield, is a good example. Over 1,300 people with a connection to this area served in the First World War, and the ratio of casualties locally, as nationally, was terrible: around one in five did not return.

Every aspect and institution of Australian society was fundamentally affected by the First World War. In the words that Charles Bean used of the Anzacs, adapted from a memorial to the earlier Athenian soldiers:

They gave their shining youth, and raised thereby valour's own monument which cannot die.

If you add up the rolls of honour across schools, across other social institutions and across the cities, towns and villages of Australia you reach dauntingly large numbers. The Australian War Memorial records the names of over 102,000 members of the Australian Armed Forces who have died in war or due to war or warlike service and on certain other operations.

But while we can add up numbers, we can never calculate the true human cost. We can only know that all of us today—citizens of this vibrant, prosperous, successful modern democracy, a country that ranks second in the world on the human development index, a country with standards of education and health care envied around the world, a country of peace and safety and personal security—all of us citizens of this country owe such a profound debt to our soldiers of democracy.

That is, I am sure, why the experience in Bradfield was the same as the experience that members of this House have reported from all around Australia—that attendances at Anzac Day services were up to double, and in some cases more than double, the normal attendance levels. The services that I was privileged to attend in my electorate were at Roseville RSL on Sunday 19 April; at Pymble Ladies' College on Friday 24 April and also at West Pymble Public School on Friday 24 April; the dawn service at Roseville RSL on Anzac Day; the services at Wahroonga and then at Turramurra organised by the National Servicemen's Association; the service at the Kokoda Track Memorial in Wahroonga; the Knox Grammar School service and ceremonial cadet parade on 26 April; the commemoration service at St Martins, Killara, also on 26 April; and the commemorative service at St John's in Gordon—a church with strong associations with the 18th and Second 18th battalions, the first of which is known as the Ku-ring-gai regiment—containing the Battalion Cross from World War I, carved on the battlefield, and the second cross from World War II. At all of these events the attendance was remarkable as Australians in my electorate of Bradfield, as for all around Australia, commemorated this extraordinarily important occasion, the centenary of Anzac.

Debate adjourned.

See this speech in context