Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—On Monday at the Australian War Memorial, the Leader of the Opposition and I stood with many of our parliamentary colleagues alongside serving sailors, soldiers and airmen, veterans of conflicts past, and their families at a solemn ceremony in the Canberra twilight. On the eve of the 45th Parliament, we reflected on the most solemn responsibility conferred on us as our nation's leaders: the decision to send the men and women of the Australian Defence Force into harm's way.

The Anzac First World War Centenary of 2014 to 2018 is a powerful reminder of the cost of war as well, as the bravery, sacrifice and service of all who served and whose legacy is the freedom and the liberty we enjoy today. The centenary honours our original Anzacs and generations of service men and women who have worn the Australian uniform—in wars, conflicts and peacekeeping and peace-monitoring operations—throughout a Century of Service. The milestones we have remembered and will continue to remember over the Anzac Centenary will sometimes mark defeat and at other times victory. That crimson thread that binds them all is the selflessness and the courage of our service men and women, and their commitment to upholding our values and our freedoms.

Our commemorations are not a triumph of arms. We commemorate the triumph of the human spirit, the courage and the resolve of those men and women who 100 years ago, and ever since, and even as we speak here today, put their lives on the line to keep us safe and free, to defend us and our values.

The Anzac Centenary is not just about the immense tapestry of our military history; it is about each thread in that tapestry. So we remember the battles, the campaigns—those where we won, those where we lost. But we also remember each soldier in the trenches about to go over the top to certain death.

We honour those young men, not much more than boys, mown down as they ran towards the gunfire and those who lay in no-man's-land fatally wounded—thoughts only of family and home as their life ebbed away in an alien world of mud, barbed wire and death. We honour the courageous who, in their martial spirit, were heedless of fear, and we honour those who, almost numb with terror, nonetheless pressed on to do their duty. We honour those who fell from the sky and those whose resting place is the bottom of the ocean. We honour all those whose homes were changed forever, whose families were changed forever by lives lost or broken by war.

This year has already seen the 25th anniversary of the end of the First Gulf War, the 75th anniversary of the Siege of Tobruk, the 75th anniversary of the battles of Greece and Crete, the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Kapyong and the 50th anniversary of the end of the Indonesian Malaysian confrontation. But on Anzac Day in April, we looked to the Western front with 2016 marking 100 years since soldiers of our first Australian Imperial Force commenced operations there in the First World War. This theatre of war was a place of extraordinary courage and hard-fought victory, but it was also a place of unimaginable suffering and loss. In the Battle of the Somme alone, more than one million allied and enemy troops became casualties—dead, wounded or missing.

Of the almost 417,000 Australians who volunteered for service in the First World War, more than 60,000 died—some 46,000 of them on the Western Front. The horror and the massive loss of life on the Western Front had no precedent in the history of war. It was carnage on an industrial scale. Day after day, thousands of men were, in Charles Bean's words:

… turned in there as into some ghastly giant mincing machine.

The technology of killing had outstripped the competence of the generals who directed it. So many lions led to their death by donkeys. The generation of the trenches, of whom my grandfather Fred Turnbull was one, would never forget the horror and never forgive the folly.

Last month, 19 July marked 100 years since the Battle of Fromelles. In what has been described as the worst 24 hours in Australia's military history, the Australian 5th Division suffered more than 5½ thousand casualties—almost 2,000 were killed, died of wounds or were declared missing, and almost 500 became prisoners of war. They were the heaviest battle casualties incurred by a single Australian division in 24 hours during the First World War.

Just days later, Australian troops entered into the Battle of Pozieres. There, in darkness on 23 July, the 1st Australian Division took Pozieres in hard and intense fighting; the Germans responded by pounding the area with artillery. The capture of the town was a significant achievement, but in five bloody days the division lost 5,000 men. Sergeant Archie Barwick wrote in his diary:

Heavy fighting—simply murder—men falling everywhere … expecting death at every second. Dead and dying everywhere. Some men simply blown to pieces. Tired and sore at heart.

Just two weeks ago we also commemorated a more recent event in our military history: the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan. This battle was the most costly single engagement for our Australian forces during the Vietnam War: 18 Australians were killed and 24 were wounded. On 18 August 1966, in monsoonal rain, the 105 Australian soldiers of Delta Company, 6th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, together with three New Zealand soldiers of their artillery forward observer party, faced an enemy at least 10 times greater in number.

It is to the great credit of our veterans who have travelled back to Vietnam year after year to remember that battle that they honour the many more Vietnamese who died and that they have made friends with their former foes—just as the veterans of Gallipoli made friends with their former Turkish foes in the years that followed those battles.

On Vietnam Veterans Day this year, we recalled the courage of our troops on the ground; the skill of our pilots flying missions in support of the ground operations; the distinction with which our sailors served; and all the personnel who supported the troops. At the time, as we have reflected—both the Leader of the Opposition and I have reflected—they did not receive the gratitude they deserved. But their bravery and determination is now rightly acknowledged in our national story. They have inspired—and continue to inspire—the service men and women who followed and still follow in their footsteps.

Australians do not glorify war, let alone gloat about victories. Our commemorations honour the human spirit, the sacrifice of friend and foe. And 'Lest we forget' points to many truths: lest we forget those whose sacrifice secured our freedom; lest we forget the veterans and their families; lest we forget our obligation as leaders to resolve conflicts peacefully wherever possible; and lest we forget never to commit our troops to conflict unless they are well led, well armed and equipped with all of the means to secure their objectives and, fighting done, return home.

Serving our country has a long-term impact on those who serve and on their families and it is important we acknowledge that reality here today too. Some soldiers, like Lance Corporal Robert Alex Bolton-Wood, who died near Pozieres 100 years ago and whom we honoured at the Last Post ceremony at the Australian War Memorial last night, remain missing. Lance Corporal Bolton-Wood is just one of some 18,000 Australians who died on the Western Front who have no known graves.

Tens of thousands more died on foreign soil and were buried there in military cemeteries, as was the case with some of our soldiers who served in the Vietnam War and on Thai-Malay border operations. On 2 June this year, the remains of 32 Australian servicemen and dependants made their final journey home from the Terendak Military Cemetery in Malaysia and Kranji cemetery in Singapore.

June this year also saw celebrations of the Returned Services League of Australia, of its 100th anniversary. The organisation's motto, 'The price of liberty is eternal vigilance', is a reminder that the fight to protect our freedoms comes at a cost and that our national interests must always be guarded as the supreme responsibility of government. This House and the nation are united in our respect for the RSL and its century of service to veterans and their families and for the care and support it will continue to provide.

This week is Legacy Week and we are reminded of the support they provide for some 80,000 widows and 1,800 children, with services including counselling, special housing, medical, advocacy and social support. We recall the words of Corporal Fred Muller, who, burying one of our own in the soil of Pozieres and with tears running down his cheeks, said: 'Never worry, my friend, I'll look after your family.' His legacy is our legacy as well.

The 29th of July marked another milestone with the 50th anniversary of Lavarack Barracks in Townsville. The barracks is home to 3rd Australian Brigade. This 102-year-old military formation has a proud history which includes Gallipoli, the Somme, the Third Battle of Ypres, Bullecourt and the Hindenburg Line. Since the Lavarack Barracks opened, its soldiers have deployed to locations including Vietnam, Malaysia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Townsville is, as its former member Peter Lindsay used to say, a garrison city, and recently also remembered a tragic event which took place nearby. On 12 June 1996, soldiers from the Special Air Service Regiment were conducting counter-terrorist training with 5 Aviation Regiment in the high range area, just outside Townsville. During night insertion exercises, two Black Hawk helicopters collided. We remember the three Army aircrew and fifteen SAS Regiment personnel who were killed in this, Australia's worst peacetime military aviation disaster.

As we look forward this year we will also remember the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Maryang San. Australian soldiers, fighting for the first time within a United Nations coalition, had already proved their value at Kapyong, helping to stem the massive Chinese Spring Offensive and advance towards Seoul. Thirty-two Australians were killed, 59 wounded and three taken prisoner but allied forces inflicted heavy casualties on the Chinese.

Captain Reg Saunders, the Indigenous Australian commanding officer of C Company, 3rd Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, wrote of the Battle of Kapyong, 'At last I feel like an Anzac and I imagine there were 600 others like me.' Then, in early October 1951, at Maryang San came another fiercely-fought battle against superior enemy numbers. Following two unsuccessful attempts by US forces to take the hills around Maryang San, the men of 3RAR and their allies secured that strategically important feature. In October this year, we will recall the taking of hills 317 and 355 and the tenacity of the soldiers of the 28th British Commonwealth Brigade.

We remember these events in our military history for good reason. And all too often, it can be uncomfortable to turn the pages of those histories and reflect on the similarities between those times and our own today. They paint a picture of where we have come from as a nation. They remind us of what it is that we fight for: not to conquer but to uphold and resist threats to liberty and rights—our own and those of others.

Australian men and women are currently deployed in the Middle East area of operations and many other parts of the world in this quest. For more than a century, remarkable men and women have given themselves and their service for us, our freedoms and our nation's determination, always to build a better world. They deserve our thanks, they deserve our remembrance and they deserve our support, as do their families. And, above all, they deserve our wise leadership.

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

It is fitting to begin this sitting day by respectfully commemorating the centenary of the battles of Fromelles and Pozieres and the 50th-year anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan. The Australians we remember today risked and lost their lives so that we might live ours in peace. In this parliament, where conflict can be trivial and even contrived, we all honour those who face real danger, who put themselves in harm's way and, in some cases, make the supreme sacrifice in Australia's name.

At about 6 pm on 19 July 1916, men of the 5th Australian Division clambered out of their trenches and advanced on the German position. In the hours beforehand, as they waited for the final command, while shells split the sky above, many of those young men undoubtedly would have been afraid. Yet when the word came they advanced as one, reminding us that true courage is found not in the absence of fear but in facing it. The seven hours of preparatory bombardment deprived the Australians and their British comrades of the element of surprise but, sadly, barely dented the well-entrenched German forces. The machine-gun fire was fierce, the carnage unimaginable. By 8 am the following morning the Battle of Fromelles was over and more than 5½ thousand Australians lay wounded or dead. This was a dreadful toll, but Fromelles was only the beginning.

A few days later, a few miles away, more than 5,000 Australians from the 1st Division would be injured or killed at Pozieres. In the words of Sergeant Barwick, who was quoted earlier:

It was something awful, for we were out in the open and unprotected and men fell fast as rain.

When the 2nd Division came to relieve the first, they sustained more than 6,800 casualties before the first week of August was over.

In a few hours in a few weeks on the other side of the world tens of thousands of Australian lives were fractured forever. For some families, simple village names such as Fromelles and Pozieres spoke of a knock at the door or a War Office telegram; tears in the night and an empty chair at every Christmas thereafter. Then there were the young Australians who came home old before their time, changed beyond understanding by what they had seen and endured.

It is important that we honour the Centenary of Anzac, because back 100 years ago in only the second decade of Federation, we suffered the greatest tragedy in our nation's modern history. Two out of every five Australian men aged 18 to 44 in our young nation enlisted. From a population of 4.9 million people 61,000 died, 8,000 were taken prisoner, 16,000 were gassed, 37,000 were horribly disfigured—referring to themselves ever after as 'the broken gargoyles'—4,000 lost more than one limb and then there were tens of thousands permanently bearing the invisible scars of trauma. And there were so many whose lives were shorter and harder than they would otherwise have been.

Nor can the loss be measured in just one generation. In my own family two sons went to war; neither returned. The parents broke up and the two surviving daughters were fostered out. I was speaking to one of my relatives, and he said it was two generations of family scarred by this conflict—and there are many other examples. Even our very landscape still wears the toll of memory. Seedlings planted to commemorate the fallen have grown into magnificent avenues of honour. Those humble white stone monuments form focal points in country towns and coastal villages. When you read these lists now in so many places, the list of names seems just impossibly long. When you look at these country towns and you try to imagine taking all of these young men out of that population, it makes you shake your head. Of course even now there is that flash of recognition, the echo of old pain, when you see two or three of the same surname grouped together on the list—brothers lost to their mother, sometimes in same awful hour.

A century on, there is no-one amongst us who can speak firsthand of Fromelles or Pozieres. Even those left to grow old have left us. Yet today in this House we declare again that age has not wearied their sacrifice; their deaths were not in vain and the memory of their courage and lives still lives with us. A full 50 years later, after these dreadful battles and 12,000 kilometres away in the red mud and monsoonal rain, a new generation of Anzacs clashed with North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces amidst the straight lines of the Long Tan rubber plantation.

Most of the nashos were barely 20 or 21, fresh from training at Puckapunyal. The regulars enlisted at 19. The commanding officer of Delta Company, Harry Smith, himself was just 33. Long Tan was a feat of arms achieved against overwhelming odds. D Company inflicted more than a thousand enemy casualties as wave after wave crashed against their professional, determined, unbroken defensive fire. When reinforcements came and victory was won, it probably did not occur to any of these men that they were heroes in the finest tradition of our first Anzacs. After all, how could what they achieved possibly sink in, with half of their mates either dead, wounded or in hospital? How could they feel like the heroes that they in fact were? And then, bare weeks and months after these young Australians had fought for their lives, many found themselves back home in Australia—off the boat, handing in their rifles and their pay books at Enoggera.

Now, in Brisbane the record reflects there was a parade, but there was no subsequent counselling, no rehabilitation, no attempt to help reconcile the experience of war with a return to the suburbs. How could they explain to the people they returned to what they had been doing barely weeks earlier? Instead, our servicemen were left to adjust to a life in a country shamefully and, in too many cases, deliberately ignorant of their service, their suffering and their sacrifice.

For those of us too young to remember the temperature of those times, the stories of those who were there echo across the years. One veteran I had the privilege of meeting at a commemoration ceremony in Darwin earlier this month, told me of a friend who had been called up, fought, sent home and demobilised before the age of 21. The following weekend he went to a party with some of his mates from uni. A girl there asked him what he had been up to. He told her where he had been. In front of the whole party she slapped him across the face. With the passage of time, I can understand the political disagreement of the war and, indeed, the conscription, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand blaming the soldiers in the conflict.

The hard truth of those times is that far too many Australians sent into the jungle dark of Vietnam were shunned on their return. There are some haunting words of returned service people inscribed on the Vietnam Memorial on Anzac Parade, but one in particular stands out to me. It goes: 'I don't seem to have many friends since I came home. If you weren't there, you cannot understand.' Not only did Australia fail to understand; with a few noble exceptions, we failed to try.

For too long our nation closed its eyes and its heart. Thankfully, from the return home parade of 1987 and onwards, the failure has been gradually corrected. The wrong is on its way to being righted, and in a time when so many old certainties and old loyalties have faded, the story of the Vietnam War and the Anzac legend, as a whole, has only grown in resonance and in meaning.

It should be the source of tremendous pride to all the veterans and their families, and to all Australians, that our commemorations, here and overseas, are overwhelmingly led and supported by our young people. It should be, perhaps, the source of pride to our veterans that every member of parliament who serves in the parliament regards the attendance at these memorial events as possibly the best part of the job. But no words we say today can truly draw out the details of the battles long ago.

Our obligation as leaders, as legislators, is to be practical rather than sentimental. Uncomfortable as it may be, we should acknowledge that as a nation we have been better at honouring the memory of our dead than offering decent support for the living. We have not always fulfilled the duty we owe to those who have done theirs. For all the national local monuments that instruct us to remember, there are no memorials, no walls covered in poppies for the veterans who take their own lives, yet their loss is no less, the sadness of their passing no harder for those who love them.

Despite its prevalence, post-traumatic stress disorder remains poorly understood, inadequately measured. One in 10 of our fellow Australians who are homeless is a veteran. We have to do better than this. When people are prepared to pay the ultimate price for our country, none of us has the right to say that we cannot afford to care for them. Right now with a new generation of service men and women coming home from Australia's longest war, we owe our veterans more than the respect of history or a solemn tribute to honoured memory; more than a poppy, a sprig of rosemary or a rising sun badge on the lapel, more than a few coins in the Legacy tin. Saying 'Lest we forget' must be matched with practical help, a caring arm and a helping hand for those who come home, and better support for their families. This is a place of many promises: some are good and some are even honoured. But, today, let us vow to give new, tangible meaning to Australia's oldest promise: 'We will remember them. Lest we to forget.'

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—My great-grandfather, who was also great-grandfather of Christian Porter in this place, tossed a coin with his brother to see who would go and who would stay. My great-grandfather lost, so his brother went to Gallipoli. He will always be at Gallipoli. There is a wonderful movie called Saving Private Ryan, which has the most moving scene I have ever seen in a movie. It is when the cameras are behind the mother, when the two men in black come up the driveway and hand her the telegram, and every single thing that is in that woman's body that keeps her upright just crumples as she falls into the floor knowing that her three sons are dead. Well, my great-great-grandmother stood in the doorway and received that telegram, and my great-grandmother also stood in the doorway and received that telegram. In a terrible piece of irony, Bert Henley, some years after he returned from Changi prison, died prematurely.

Having said those things, it was my generation that went to Vietnam, and I was lucky enough to not have to go. I was one of the lucky ones. But of those that went, and the sacrifices they made—I think the Leader of the Opposition told a very moving story at the university. The governor of Queensland and I were presidents of university colleges in those days, and she became the ambassador of China. I said to her, 'Was Mao Zedong as bad as people made him out to be—28 million dead?' She said, 'No, it wasn't 28 million.' I said, 'How many was it?' She said, 'It was 48 million,' and the last three books I read said 48 million.

We lived in a period where the communists were taking a country, on average, every two years, and Stalin, as the history books tell you, was responsible for 28 million deaths. The monstrosities of communism in those two countries accounted for 100 million deaths. Every two years they were taking a country until they hit Vietnam, and the Governor-General of Australia, on this day last year, said it was the final battle. Never again did the communists take another country. The history books are now written, and we know that those people who were unlucky enough—and I think the word is 'unlucky'—to have been balloted or been sent to Vietnam are the heroes who turned back the monstrosity that, just in two countries, had murdered 100 million people. And, if we pay a tribute, I finish by reciting a wonderful country music song which centres upon the Battle of Beersheba. It concludes by saying:

Now the angel of death with his knock at the door.

The crumpled up telegram falls to the floor.

Her reason for livin is livin no more, as she cries for the pride of Australia.

Thank you.

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

I move:

That the House take note of the document presented by the Prime Minister.

Debate adjourned.