this one?
Quote: [quote]A few years ago I had the privilege to walk around the Gallipoli peninsula on the eve of Anzac Day. It’s a place that silences conversation as you try to comprehend the horror that awaited our young diggers as they slipped quietly from their rowing boats in the early dawn light.
There’s many extraordinary moments working for a prime minister but if I had to choose just one in over 16 years in politics, I always return to that day, a little later in the afternoon and just up from the beach, when I stood amongst the headstones in Shrapnel Valley.
By a jacaranda tree in bloom and with tears in my eyes, I read the inscriptions hewn on stone that marked the final resting place of teenagers and young men who believed there are things in life worth fighting for.
Tuesday is Anzac Day, the most solemn moment in our national calendar. It’s the day that we stop and recognise that everything we have as Australians we owe to them, and the successive generations that have fought under our flag. It’s the day we do our best to understand what service means, and reflect on the values that so many gave their lives to protect.
Or at least we should.
Other countries have created days for them to remember their veterans but this is a day that the Australian community has made for itself. From humble beginnings, Anzac Day grows each year.
I’m old enough to remember the controversy that surrounded the involvement of young relatives in Anzac Day marches some years ago. A few RSL leaders were against the move but a groundswell of returned servicemen felt that involving the young was their best hope of ensuring the sacrifice of their mates was remembered as their own numbers declined.
On Anzac Day, there’s always a lot of speeches, and history is recounted. Don’t get me wrong, the remembering is important lest we forget. But of equal importance, must be time spent in quiet contemplation about what each of us can do to preserve what our soldiers fought to protect, and the unique set of Australian values that set this country apart.
We’ve heard a lot about Australian values this week. While I’m still not sure how they’re going to ensure people don’t just tick the right boxes on the new test rather than admit what they really think about women and many other things, I applaud the government for its citizenship reforms.
After yet more months of leadership inertia and not knowing what exactly the Coalition stands for, this is a policy change worth making. To become an Australian citizen is a privilege, not a right. While I hope we’re always a land that welcomes immigrants, new arrivals must come with the understanding that there’s a set of values that underpin this nation and that they’re non-negotiable. Don’t like them? Don’t come.
Watching the Left rail against the phrase “Australian values”, I was reminded of Tony Abbott’s “Team Australia” line which the insider class were quick to mock too; they didn’t get it then and they still don’t get it today.
Ordinary people have generous hearts but sensible heads; they pay taxes to help support new arrivals but expect them to add to what we have here, rather than try and fundamentally change it.
That we even have a debate over what is meant by “Australian values” is a worry. Thinking back to that day in Shrapnel Valley, I wonder what those young men would make of us now?
Here we are having a puerile debate about what constitutes “Australian values” when none of them needed a definition to know what they were fighting for. My great-grandfather on the Western Front, and grandfather in the jungles of New Guinea; neither of them needed a definition either. They both understood, like so many who have followed them in other conflicts, that there are times we’re called to stand up for something bigger than ourselves: no debate needed.
But are we still like that today? I want to think we are but sometimes you’ve got to wonder.
Political correctness and identity politics have infiltrated almost every aspect of modern Australian life. We’re in danger of so overprescribing behaviour that we’ll end up a nation of “me” and not “us”; reliant on rules instead of instinctive values.
We shouldn’t need anti-bullying programs in schools, for instance, because it should be second nature to teachers and fellow classmates that everyone has to be treated with respect; we shouldn’t need anti-domestic violence campaigns because it should be as plain as the nose on your face that real men don’t hit women; and frankly, shouldn’t it be obvious to everyone — including new citizens — that you have to be committed to Australia without the need to take a test?
Look around your community today, how many of us are prepared to stand up for our values let alone fight for them? Is it fair to ask if we even embody them anymore? The mum with five kids to three different dads, all now in care because she’s back with another addict loser? The teenager who breaks into a pensioner’s home and beats him senseless for not much more than spare change? The dad who abuses his three-year-old and shares the sickening images with other perverted minds on the internet? The family who haven’t had a real job in three generations and expects welfare as a right?
Sometimes you’ve got to wonder if those men in Shrapnel Valley were the best of us and we’re no longer made of the same stuff anymore.
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