Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At 11 o'clock on the 11th of the 11th we'll have Armistice Day, a commemoration of those who have served our nation. We're only asked to stop for a minute, but I bet there'll be a lot of people who will apparently find a cup of coffee or some other triviality more important than the 416,800 people from Australia who enlisted out of a population of merely five million. Sixty thousand of them were killed, 156,000 were wounded and 30,000 of them died when they got home from injuries sustained through the labours of the First World War—such things as gassing. And a lot of people are just buried in unmarked graves.

We put $3.7 million into finding these graves in order to mark them and treat them with some dignity but, unfortunately, that funding has been cut to $1.5 million. But they have found money for the Environmental Defenders Office, with $10 million, and they have found money for the Environmental Warriors. We should actually be finding money for the people who served our nation. Otherwise, when we say 'Lest we forget,' we don't really mean it. It's obvious that you forget them if you don't want to find their graves.