Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That this House:

(1) acknowledge that the 25th April 2015 marked 100 years since Australian and New Zealand troops landed at Gallipoli;

(2) pay its respects to the 60,000 Australians who fought in the Gallipoli campaign, the nearly 9,000 who died, the 20,000 who were wounded and the thousands more who carried the unseen scars for the rest of their lives;

(3) remember the brave soldiers of Great Britain, France, India and Newfoundland who fought alongside the ANZACS 100 years ago;

(4) note that on the 25th of April, solemn services of remembrance were conducted at Anzac Cove and at Lone Pine in Turkey, attended by some 8,000 Australians, including the widows of Australian veterans;

(5) extend its thanks to the people and the government of Turkey for their support of the centenary commemorations and their ongoing and faithful care of the Gallipoli battlefields; and

(6) note that on Anzac Day, millions of our fellow Australians gathered to remember the ANZACs and all those who have worn our uniform and served in the name of Australia, and that the people of every electorate represented in this parliament have honoured this milestone, the centenary of the landings at Gallipoli.

On Anzac Day, the Leader of the Opposition and I stood together with thousands of Australians and New Zealanders on the distant shores of Gallipoli, together with representatives from New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Greece, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Canada. And, together with representatives from Germany, Hungary and Turkey—the foes we now count as friends—we paid our respects to the Anzacs whose spirit has moved our people for a century. We went to honour the generation of young men who rallied to serve our country when our country called and who were faithful even unto death.

At dawn at Anzac Cove and later at Lone Pine, these places of peace that were once battlefields, we remembered the original Anzacs. This parliament was only 13 years old when the Great War broke out. This parliament still sat in Melbourne. Nine sitting MPs served in the Great War. In all, some 120 members of the Commonwealth parliament served in World War I. On behalf of all members, I pay my respects to them. I honour all the men and women who have come to this parliament after service in our armed forces. This parliament should always count amongst its number men and women who have served our crown and worn our uniform.

One that we should especially remember on the Centenary of Anzac is our eighth Prime Minister, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, Military Cross, who was wounded at Suvla Bay serving with the British Army. It would have been easy, even natural, for a man like Bruce to be full of hatred for the enemy who had wounded him and killed so many of his mates. But this man—this former Prime Minister of ours, who in 1915 had fought to seize control of the Dardanelles for the allies—in 1936 chaired a conference in the Swiss town of Montreux which restored the Dardanelles to full Turkish control. He forged a lifelong admiration for Mustafa Kemal. He had great respect for Ataturk, the general turned statesman, whose famous words of consolation to the grieving mothers of Australia, that their sons were lying in the soil of a friendly country, stand in stone on the Gallipoli Peninsula and are carved on the Kemal Ataturk Memorial here in Canberra. Ataturk's words and Bruce's example challenge all of us who seek to build a better world, to be greater than our fears and to serve the true interests of the people we represent.

Wherever we find ourselves on Anzac Day, Australians at home and abroad pause to remember all who have served our country. On this centenary, Australians gathered in numbers not seen in decades to acknowledge a poignant milestone. On 19 April in your electorate, Madam Speaker, adjoining my own, thousands of people lined Pittwater Road, Warriewood, to watch over 2½ thousand people march to Pittwater Rugby Park in honour of the centenary of the Gallipoli landings. It was a great crowd, as you know. You and I joined with the Governor of New South Wales to remember the men of the 1st Australian Imperial Force from Warringah and Mackellar and to acknowledge their service and sacrifice.

There were record numbers at all the annual services in our electorates as there were in most electorates right around our country. At schools around our nation, students paid their respects at special ceremonies before and after Anzac Day. To give one example, the South Curl Curl Surf Life Saving Club organised the 100 Years 100 Hundred Boats Anzac Beach Memorial. Hundreds were expected to attend but, instead, thousands lined the beach to watch the boats come in with more than 450 rowers from Australia and New Zealand and one Turkish crew. As well, groups across our country participated in the Centenary of Anzac grants program, restoring memorials and honour boards to demonstrate that we are a country that really does remember. I acknowledge my own Centenary of Anzac committee headed by Colonel John Platt. I am sure all members would want to acknowledge their own Centenary of Anzac committees.

Here in our nation's capital some 50,000 people were expected to attend the dawn service at the Australian War Memorial but doubled that and at least 100,000 people showed up in the cold and dark to pay their respects. This has obviously been a momentous time for the Australian War Memorial—the shrine and the museum which has served us so well. It has been a momentous time for its director, our former colleague Dr Brendan Nelson, with the opening of the new First World War galleries and the launch of the Spirit of Anzac Centenary Experience, which will begin touring our nation later this year. The War Memorial has well and truly kept faith with the spirit of Charles Bean, the official historian of the Great War.

At Gallipoli, at Villers-Bretonneux, in Belgium, in Israel and at other points around the globe, as well as here at home in Australia, the work of appropriately marking the centenary of the Gallipoli landings has been exacting. The Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Senator Ronaldson, and his department have well earned our respect for the meticulous planning and the reverent touch that they brought to all these commemorations. I thank—and I am sure I do so on behalf of all members of parliament—all the arms of government that have been involved in the centenary commemorations: Foreign Affairs and Trade, Attorney-Generals, Defence, the Australia Federal Police and also the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. I thank the government and the people of Turkey for their support of these commemorations and for their hospitality to Australian pilgrims this year and every year as well as for their faithful care of the battlefields where our soldiers lie still. I acknowledge the Office of Australian War Graves and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission that protect the last resting places of Australian service men and women all around the world. You cannot visit one of these cemeteries and not be moved. As you look at the headstones and read the epitaphs you can hear the voices of an earlier generation of Australians. Their love, their suffering and their loss do not diminish with time.

On Anzac Day we remembered the original Anzacs and the legacy of all who have followed in this path. We honoured all who have served in the Second World War, Korea, Malaya, Borneo, Vietnam, Iraq and, our longest war, Afghanistan as well as those who have served in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. We especially remember those serving today in the Middle East and elsewhere defending the values that we hold dear.

Our nation is not just a place on a map or a mass of people who happen to live somewhere. Our nation is shaped by our collective memory, by the compact between the dead, the living and the yet to be born. On Anzac Day this year and every year the pact between the past and the present is renewed for the future for all those who seek to understand what it means to be an Australian.

On every Anzac Day, the phrase echoes around our services: 'Lest we forget'. But we have not forgotten and we will not forget. Planning is well underway for commemorative events marking the 100th anniversaries of other key events of the Great War—the battles in Palestine and on the Western Front. In 2018, we will open the Sir John Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneux to honour the life of Australia's finest general in our greatest war. We will never forget the 400,000 who volunteered from a population of nearly four million, the 330,000 who served overseas, the 155,000 who were wounded or the 61,000 who never returned. We will never forget the long funereal pall that the Great War cast over our country and our world. We will never forget the magnificent defeat at Gallipoli or the terrible victory on the Western Front. We will never forget the suffering of those men, and we will never forget the just cause for which they fought.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent the honourable the Leader of the Opposition speaking to the Prime Minister’s motion for a period not exceeding 12 minutes.

Question agreed to.

Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the Prime Minister for his words. Like the Prime Minister, like thousands of Australians and, in particular, like those amazing widows of the First World War veterans, I had the honour of attending the commemorations at Gallipoli last month. I wish to congratulate all who have worked so hard to commemorate the centenary of the Gallipoli landings. The Anzac Centenary Advisory Committee, chaired by Sir Angus Houston, worked in partnership with the former Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Warren Snowden, and the current minister, Senator Ronaldson, in setting up and implementing the architecture for commemorating the Centenary of Anzac as well as the program to commemorate the period of the Great War until Armistice Day 2018 centenary.

I think it is also important, as the Prime Minister has done, to recognise and thank the role of all the departments of government, including the Department of Veterans' Affairs in undertaking on our behalf to ensure that the Anzac commemoration events were so well organised.

I pay tribute to the hundreds of thousands of Australians who attended events commemorating the event of the Anzac landings at Gallipoli. I also acknowledge the work of Lindsay Fox and his committee to raise a quarter of a billion dollars to ensure that the celebrations could be done in the best possible way.

I wish to pay tribute to the staff of the Australian embassy in Turkey who were so helpful to so many of our people. I can assure those listening of the absolute professionalism of that organisation—the experience for Australians to commemorate this most important event in Australian history. It was done to a level which would satisfy all. It was a massive logistical effort. It was a vivid, dignified and very Australian experience that allowed us to see and imagine the history made there a century ago.

Like many Australians, I have read a lot about the landing over the years. But, like every Australian who has ever visited Anzac Cove, I found that nothing prepares you for surveying the span of Anzac Cove and those very steep cliffs. You see for yourself the sheer rocky impossibility of scaling and seizing not one, not two, but three ridge lines. You imagine the prospect that confronted our young men so far from home in the chill dawn of 25 April 1915. And seeing and realising that reminds you that, in some part of their being, those first Anzacs must have known this too—the difficulty of their mission. There can be no courage without a fear to conquer. As they grasped the task before them, in their heart of hearts, these volunteers—these citizen soldiers determined to do their duty—must have clamped down their fear and charged on, despite that ferocious enfilade fire from a determined opponent fighting to defend their homeland.

When Patsy Adam-Smith was researching her famous history of Gallipoli, The Anzacs, she said the worst part of reading soldiers' diaries was 'all those empty pages'. A string of entries full of humour, understated bravery, loyalty for mates, love for those left behind—then, as she wrote:

And there is no more. You turn the pages quickly: perhaps he's only wounded, he'll write when he gets to hospital. But you are on to the back cover before you see his hand again: 'In the event of my death I wish this book to be sent to my Dear Wife to let her know that my last thoughts were of her and Essie my darling daughter …

Australia bore these empty pages for a generation. In his book Farewell, Dear People, Ross McMullin writes of the exceptional Australians lost in the carnage and chaos of the Gallipoli campaign. At 31, Clunes Mathison was already an internationally acclaimed researcher. The director of the Lister Institute in London remarked, 'No man I have ever known possesses the genius for research so highly as Mathison'. At the time, one British professor wrote, 'For the science of medicine throughout the world, the loss is irreparable.

Robert Bage survived Douglas Mawson's expedition to Antarctica, leading a 300-mile sledge expedition in the windiest place on earth, the home of the blizzard. One scientist in the party said of Bage, 'He is the best liked man on the expedition, and personally I think he is the best man we have.' Bage too was killed in the first fortnight of Gallipoli. Their bodies still lie there, alongside thousands more; empty pages and lives of potential and possibility cut short or left unfulfilled.

In one of those twists of families that we all know well, the last Sunday before I left for the commemorations, I was chatting with an older member of my family tree at a christening—as one does. I told him I was visiting Gallipoli. He revealed to me that he had two uncles who were killed there: Private William Burgess who was killed on 28 April 1915, and his younger brother Nathaniel, 21, who was killed at the end of November, barely two weeks before the evacuation. He is buried at Embarkation Pier cemetery. As Uncle Brian explained, the family never recovered: the family broke up and the father left, leaving a mother wracked by grief. The two younger sisters—the youngest being Brian's mother—were placed in foster care. The family was literally wrecked. For those two split seconds in seven months on the other side of the world, he said, his family was damaged for two generations.

When I visited the cemetery at Lone Pine, I saw the wall which records the names of over 3,000 Anzacs whose bodies have never been recovered. I found the name of William Burgess, 16th Battalion, AIF. Placing a poppy next to these letters, mutely carved in stone, moved me in a way that I could never have expected. And the Burgess story is just one amongst 60,000. In that first war, 60,000 young men were lost to an even younger nation. It was a generation of children who never knew their parents; young widows who grew old with grief; and hundreds of thousands more who came home but were never whole again. They were forever changed by the hardship they had faced and overcome; the wounded, unable to return to the jobs they left behind; soldier settlers stretched by a hard land they battled to tame.

There were all those who carried the hidden scars of trauma: the husbands and fathers who could never find the words to tell the people they loved why things could never be the same again. Parents, wives and children welcomed home a different person to the one they had farewelled. We all know country towns and coastal towns where the lists of names etched into the weathered white stone seems impossibly long. I think we have all paused in front of honour roles in local halls where the surnames come not in ones but in twos and threes—the brothers who could not be separated; strapping sons lost to their families, sometimes in the same hour or day of the same chaos.

When we try to think of the trauma, the heartache and the inexplicable, unknowable horrors of this war, it is small wonder that for some Anzac Day is a time of mixed emotions. There have been some who felt the need to rage against Anzac Day, to repudiate the tragedy of war. But I prefer to believe that we have as a people embraced the true lesson of Anzac Day—not glorifying war but celebrating peace; acknowledging the waste and the futility of lost lives but paying respect to the resilience, courage, resolve and loyalty of those who risked and lost their lives for the mates they served beside and for the home that they loved. There is no-one left amongst us who knew firsthand the courage and chaos of 25 April 1915. Those left to grow old have gone too. Yet the Anzac story will always be part of the Australian story. The Anzacs will always speak to us for who we are and for who we wish to be.

I add my support to the former Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer's campaign to honour General John Monash, an exceptional leader who, unlike so many others, learned the right lessons from Gallipoli; a leader who amongst his many proud accomplishments included the observation that he spent more time preparing for his battles than fighting his battles. In the coming years of commemorations, I would encourage all Australians to honour the memory of those who served by looking up into the branches of your family trees. Try to discover, if you can, the history of your family's service to find new personal meaning in the Anzac story—a legend, in the words of Keating, at the heart of our War Memorial:

It is a legend not of sweeping military victories so much as triumphs against the odds, of courage and ingenuity in adversity. It is a legend of free and independent spirits whose discipline derived less from military formalities and customs than from the bonds of mateship and the demands of necessity.

Learn and tell the story of ordinary people who found the courage to do the truly extraordinary. Learn and tell the story of our military sacrifice from this conflict through to the Second World War, Korea, Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam, the peacekeeping roles in Iraq and Afghanistan and right now to our men and women serving in the Middle East. As a new generation, let's use the Centenary of Anzac to give new meaning to our most solemn national promise. Lest we forget.

Debate adjourned