Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in support of my friend the member for Spence, who is also a veteran, and we will rise together to condemn the graffiti on our war memorials that we saw in the previous few days. Why do we do that? When you go to our war memorials, you will notice a simple thing: just their name. There's no rank. There are no honours. There's no party politics, race or religion. It is their name. We remember and honour their name because if we don't what they did will be forgotten.

When I made my first speech in this place, I spoke of a friend of mine—the brother of one of the 103,000 killed whose names are on our War Memorial. He said, 'Wherever you can, say his name.' So when people graffiti those war memorials and write things like 'complicit in genocide' or 'from the river to the sea', they dishonour not only their names but what they fought for and who we are as a nation. We are seeing far too much division. We're seeing a narrative that displays us as heroes or villains, when the true places for heroes are those war memorials. And they dishonoured them. We need to find ways to unite us as a nation, and the most important way to do that is to honour the people who fought and died for it. We utterly condemn the graffiti that was put on those war memorials.