Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I compliment the member for Reid on his contribution to this debate reminding us of the extraordinary significance of the Gallipoli campaign, a campaign which is part of the foundation story of three young nations: Australia, Turkey and New Zealand. Gallipoli is in a very historic part of the world filled with legends and stories of battles and heroism going back thousands of years. In many ways the myth, the life force, of three nations was founded there on those bloody cliffs and hills.

Why would a nation, any nation, commemorate a terrible defeat? It was a defeat that was not the consequence of the enemy's overwhelming force or superior strategy, a defeat that was utterly mismanaged by our side—the British side—from the conception to the execution. The only flawless part of the Gallipoli campaign was the withdrawal, and there probably is not a lot of glory in that. What is the answer? Why ANZAC Day?

A peaceful and peace-loving people laments war's folly and catastrophe, grieves for the dead, thanks them for their sacrifice but, above all, honours the inspiring courage, love, mateship and selfless heroism of the Anzacs. It is as though our nation, Australia, unlike any other, has cut through the gold braid, the medals, the great guns and ships and planes, has cut through all of that military grandeur, and reached down into the mud of the trenches and found what was really important: a human love, a yearning for peace, but preparedness to die in order to defend it.

It is the humanity of the Anzac story that is timeless and appealing. It is the love of country, the love of comrades and the mateship—that sheer humanity that was the one thing that could not be ground down by the folly of the generals and the horror of the war itself. That is what inspires Australians, and that is why every year more and more people, especially young people, attend the dawn services.

And so it was that this Anzac Day dawn found us among a very young crowd of 10,000 at North Bondi in my electorate for the service at the cenotaph. The North Bondi RSL sub-branch has a heavy concentration of young veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan and those still serving. Their service was in line with their mission of supporting the diggers and veterans of 2015, not just honouring the diggers of 1915. Our modern army's sacrifice in Afghanistan was keenly recalled as the families of Sergeant Brett Till, Sapper Rowan Robinson and Corporal Scott Smith joined the service, three of the 41 Australian soldiers killed in that long war. We heard from the child of a veteran, the partner of a veteran and the parent of a veteran to put the emphasis, in the words of RSL trustee David Sims, on 'those who stay behind and those who serve Australia in a different, intimate, and important way'. I was pleased that we were able to support that North Bondi service and others throughout the electorate through our Anzac Centenary Local Grants Program.

The sub-branch general manager of operations, Kate Cass, who has served in Afghanistan, reflected on finally understanding the trials of her father's service through her own experience. This is part of what she said:

On my most recent deployment to Afghanistan, thinking of him, I pictured two young people from two different eras in conflict overseas looking through the same eyes at the same devastation at our feet and asking the same question: Should we be here?.....but knowing that service to this great country is so very necessary.

It a calling that stirs deep in the soul. It means military people have to, need to, and always will do put service first. I now know that if they don't, who actually will?

I now know now how capable the human mind and body are of adapting to adversity, and how capable the heart is of numbing itself against grief and fear. ANZAC Day for me is now no longer a retrospective concept.

Later in the morning the veterans of the Bondi Junction RSL marched to the Waverley Cenotaph, led by their president, Bill Harrigan. They were an older group, one or two from the Second World War, many from Vietnam and a few from wars of our own time as well. Reminding us that we did not fight Hitler alone, one of our Russian veterans attended, as he always does, in his magnificently medalled Red Navy uniform. He is always complimented by the old Australian diggers, who note that they could not fit into their old uniforms and they are very impressed that he is able to. The boys from Waverley College formed the catafalque party. As I sat there together with the community, I think all of us looked at the boys from Waverley College and looked at the names on the cenotaph and reflected that the names on the cenotaph were of young men who were not much older than the schoolboys at the service.

But perhaps the most idiosyncratically Australian Anzac Day service this year, as every year, was that held down the hill at the Bronte Surf Club. The veterans, their friends and supporters from the local RSL marched along the promenade to the surf club, where a surf reel serves as a cenotaph, and the link of selfless service between the soldiers and the example of Anzac and the surf lifesavers—many of whom served and died in Australia's wars—is remembered and renewed.

Like many of his generation, my grandfather Fred Bligh Turnbull did not talk about the war much. He had been wounded several times and gassed, which left him very short of breath all his life, but that did not stop him serving in the Second World War as well. They were a remarkable generation. Fred enlisted in 1915, a 22-year-old schoolteacher born on his parent's farm on the Macleay River near Euroka. He served in the 2nd Machine Gun Battalion for the last two years of the war, returning home in 1919. I remember Fred as an old man, me as a little boy. He had a sword from the time when he was promoted to an officer in the Second World War, and I always tried to get him to tell me stories about the war. You can imagine—little boys love that kind of thing. Fred did not want to talk about it. It was too horrible, too filled with needless death and mismanagement and poor leadership. Whenever we reflect on the First World War, we are reminded of the follies of war and we are reminded again and again that those Australian soldiers, whether they were at Gallipoli or elsewhere, were lions led by donkeys, until some lions in the form of Australian generals emerged—above all, of course, Sir John Monash.

We have a very strong military history in my electorate. My electorate is a very old electorate. It is the inner city suburbs of Sydney. We have Victoria Barracks, one of the oldest military establishments in Australia. It was a major recruiting centre throughout the First World War and still is a military headquarters. We have two important naval establishments, at HMAS Watson and Garden Island. We have six RSLs. There are constant reminders in my community of our great military tradition. But it is not those landmarks that link the tradition of Anzac to our community; it is, as I said at the outset, the example of love and of mateship and of sacrifice.

We can be proud of so many things as Australians but there is nothing of which we can be more proud than the Anzac tradition and the way in which we have taken a dreadful catastrophe, a shocking defeat, and made it a moment of celebration, of commemoration, of love, of sacrifice, of the most human values. This is really a peace-loving nation and one that respects the humanity that is not lost in the midst of war.

See this speech in context