Gavin Pearce (Braddon, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health, Aged Care and Indigenous Health Services) Share this | Hansard source

Finally, I guess I should close with some words about our flag and how important that is to me. It's best summed up by a story that I read about following the Great War, when some schoolkids visited a museum and they found an old flag—a ratty and torn flag. They asked the guide from the museum what that old flag was about. He was a veteran and he had his medals on. He said to the kids, 'That isn't exactly a flag; that is called a guidon. A guidon is the battle honours that our Australian Light Horse had'—Andrew Hastie. In the military we have colours, banners, standards and guidons, and they are absolutely sacred. They are the things that the soldiers dress themselves off when they go into battle, that dictate the line of advance and the rate of advance. To lose one's colour or guidon is a fate worse than death. It's a disgrace. And these particular guidons, on 31 October 1917, were in the centre between the 4th and the 12th regiments of the Australian Light Horse, as they charged on those Turkish trenches in a place called Beersheba. They took those trenches and they took those wells and they saved literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers. And the old bloke that was in the museum looked at the kids and he said that it was simply a moth-eaten rag on a worm-eaten pole: 'Now, that does not do much to stir a man's soul. 'Tis the deeds that were done neath the moth-eaten rag, when the pole was a staff and the rag was a flag.'

Look after our flag and all the customs and all the history that it contains, because it will chart a way forward. Protect those real people that I talked about, because they've got real issues. And we shouldn't be frightened to talk about them here.

Finally, I want to say that I am the most humble, the most grateful and the most loyal servant of the greatest electorate of the greatest state of the greatest country in the world. And may it always be the land of the fair go. I want to thank everybody for giving me that opportunity. Thank you.

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