reply by
Pauline
8/7/2002 (17:52) |
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Fellow Australians,
Ours is a great Nation.
Some might say it is not as great as it was, but at least we are not yet at the stage of referring to our country as a 'once great Nation'.
Australia has a proud history of courage, determination and sacrifice, and there is perhaps no better example than that which is embodied in the spirit of ANZAC.
While ANZAC in particular relates to the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who landed at Gallipoli on that terrible and fateful morning of 25 April 1915, we have had a tendency to apply the name ANZAC to all who have served since, because they all carry the spirit and courage of those FIRST ANZACs who carved forever Australia's place in military history.
The knockers have not yet begun to openly ridicule those who fought at Gallipoli but they are waiting their turn so we must be forever vigilant, and prepared to respond, for the destruction of all that Australians hold dear is well advanced.
The time will come when the Internationalists, who are like parasites preying on our heritage, will assault the memory of those who served and those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country.
It is our responsibility to make sure young Australians do not fall for the politically corrected view of history of the Internationalists.
My own grandfather was wounded at Gallipoli and while I was not fortunate enough to know him, it is with a great deal of pride I hear the stories of so many who served.
You can be sure my children will know of their heritage, and the price paid to preserve it.
I will read you some of the words of ANZACs:
'It was midnight, conditions were clear and quiet for Gallipoli. We had just come in from about 8 hours digging. We were tired.
Gallipoli was a sad place for us, and just at that time it seemed weirdly unreal. The everlasting smell of the dead hung over the place.
The acrid smell of cordite drifted across, and nostalgia seemed to well up in our throats as it never did before. We sat down, just done out.'
Private John Kidd, a carpenter from Evansdale Tasmania - 29 May 1915.
Or this:
'In the midst of uninhabited hills we have constructed a 'dug out' city, where everybody lives one above the other.'
Lieutenant Stewart Hansen, an architect from Williamstown Victoria - 7 February 1915.
Ours is a history anyone would be proud of whether they have relatives who fought or not.
Even if you are new to Australia and want to become a citizen, our history would then become yours, our heritage would then become yours, and you would have the right to adopt our past as your own just as you have decided to adopt our country as your own.
Always remember, being truly Australian is a state of mind not a country of origin.
If you are willing to give this country your undivided loyalty and you are willing to fight to preserve our way of life then we welcome you to join us and make the history of this country yours.
We must be certain as the years grow longer since the days that gave birth to the ANZAC legacy, that we do not allow the facts to be tarnished by the desires of those who were not there and seek to damage the image of so many brave Australians to whom we owe so much.
It is particularly fitting I speak of these things now, as yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the Vietnam Veterans' Welcome Home Parade, and never before in our history were our veterans so disgracefully treated as those who served in Vietnam.
That it took fifteen years to properly welcome the diggers home amounts to shame we will always bear.
I only hope they can find it in their hearts to forgive us.
I don't think anyone wants to go to war and certainly Australians do not wish to kill or be killed but when duty has called, Australians have answered that call overwhelmingly.
In World War 1, Australia fielded the only all volunteer army.
In World War 2, the vast majority were volunteers, and when Vietnam came along many who went did so as volunteers, others fulfilled their duty as National Servicemen.
It would be remiss of me not to mention those who fought in Malaya and Borneo or in what has often been called the forgotten war, Korea, where some 300 Australians lost their lives and through the courage of third battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, names like Kapyong were forever etched in our history.
While Korea may have been called the forgotten war Vietnam was certainly the first war where our diggers came home to verbal and physical assault.
The rampant lunatics of the day called them rapists and murderers.
They spat on them and hurled red paint at them and even as I say this now I wonder how those brave Australians could ever forgive their country for the way they were treated.
Perhaps the diggers know the people who treated them like that were not representative of the way Australians think.
They were a rabble of mindless creatures who did not deserve to be called Australians, and not unlike their modern day counterparts who have turned out to attack the decent ordinary Australians who chose to come here and listen today.
You can be certain the various communist groups and their allies in the ACTU have been doing this for a long time.
The movements behind the rabble out front here today honed their skills abusing and assaulting our diggers as they returned to what should have been a heroes' welcome.
Thousands of Australians served in Vietnam, 520 died there.
Maybe they shouldn't have been sent, maybe it wasn't our fight, but even if that is true, it doesn't in any way lessen their suffering, or their sacrifice. They bled the same blood as Australians who fought in the wars that may have seemed more acceptable, or necessary.
Duty does not choose its field of conflict.
Our diggers that fought and died facing terrible odds at Long Tan and other places in Vietnam, deserve our gratitude just as much as their fathers and grandfathers who fought and bled up to their waists in mud in the jungles of New Guinea.
Friends tell me that coming home from Vietnam and the many years that followed were much worse than the time they spent with their lives at risk on active service.
Family members and friends just didn't understand what they were going through.
In some cases even their dads and grandads who had fought in wars before them couldn't relate to why the feeling was so different for their sons and grandsons.
At least in Vietnam they were surrounded by their mates.
The diggers of Vietnam are now mostly in their fifties and they have their own children and grandchildren.
What must they tell them of the war?
No doubt like most who served they have a tendency not to say very much and in their case that is particularly understandable when you consider how much we hurt them.
All our returned servicemen and women are living history and the time will come when they are no longer with us.
Already the FIRST ANZACs are all but gone.
The story must be told, and passed down from generation to generation for the time will come when the Internationalists will wash away the truth of our history and replace it with lies that suit the purpose of destroying our beliefs, our pride and our heritage.
Without the history of the people we have been, there will not be a future for the people we should be.
To have our history taken from us is to have our future taken as well. We cannot allow all that has been done, to in the end, amount to nothing.
We must encourage the teaching of our history, the meaning of our ANZAC spirit and the understanding of the great sacrifice and debt we can only honour and repay by remembering.
Anyone who lives in Australia has a great deal to be grateful for, and it is our responsibility, those of us who truly feel ourselves to be Australians, to ensure we do not lose quietly by stealth, what so many fought so loudly in the open to preserve.
I wonder what those FIRST ANZACs think of the Australia of 1997. How different it is to the small country they sailed away from in the early days of World War 1 - waving their slouch hats at their families and sweethearts on the dock.
Sixty thousand did not return. A further one hundred and fifty thousand were wounded.
World War 2 was not much different - a bit more modern and much of it closer to Australia with the threat of Invasion from the Japanese.
Yes, on that occasion war even touched our shores, with sporadic shelling from submarines, the attack on Sydney Harbour and the devastating raids on Darwin.
The same slouch hats waved, families cheered and mothers and sweethearts cried on the dock.
Forty thousand did not return. A further seventy thousand were wounded.
All the wars that followed tell similar human stories and we must think ourselves lucky that from the Gulf, they all returned.
How much have we forgotten.
How much have we never been taught.
In each and every one of those who served there is the truth of living history.
We must make certain their sacrifice, their deaths, their wounds, their emotional scars and the pain of those who lost them is never forgotten or distorted or allowed to somehow reflect a history of convenient political lies.
What would those who did not return think of the Australia of 1997 - not very much I fear.
They went to war to ensure the safety, security and future of their loved ones, of their un-born children.
They fought to preserve our country and our way of life.
Many would wonder how we could fight so hard and be so victorious in war, only to lay down and be beaten so easily in peace.
Fellow Australians,
Too much of our country has been sold, indeed much of it has been given away.
You may ask what is our government doing?
Well for the last ten days they have tried to score points on each other by each trying to label the other as the bigger thief in the travel rorts scandal.
While I would be the first to acknowledge the need for accountability, that has not been the substance of the debate. Rather it has all focussed on petty political point scoring that has shown both Liberal and Labor for the distracted and self seeking traitors they are.
It is worth noting one Sydney Newspaper's report which cited that while this bullying and bickering was going on, our foreign debt rose 765 million, 540 small businesses went broke, 1500 full-time jobs disappeared, 60 women died of breast cancer and 58 Australians committed suicide.
Ask what the Liberals and Labor are doing.
I can tell you they are doing nothing other than looking after themselves and their pensions.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The government tells us we are lucky to have so much foreign investment because of the jobs the multinationals provide, but is that the future the government approves of for our children - that they will work for the profit of foreigners - will that be all they have?
There is an argument for foreign investment, there is no argument for foreign control.
We have so much in this country, and yet our government trades away our inheritance for a place on the International Stage.
We have nearly a million people unemployed, probably another million under-employed and over seven hundred thousand children living in families where neither parent has a job but despite this and our rising foreign debt, our government can still find 1.4 billion dollars to give away in foreign aid just in this year alone.
We must put Economic Nationalism back on the agenda.
The so called level playing field of free trade cannot be successfully applied between countries with vastly different standards of living.
If the government insists on pursuing these policies of Economic Rationalism our standard of living will continue to fall and unemployment will continue to rise.
Australia cannot compete with cheap foreign workforces.
Australian workers cannot compete with countries whose workers are paid forty cents an hour or a few dollars a day.
Without Nationalistic policies to foster and protect Australian Industry and Manufacturing the Australian worker will be a thing of the past and any suggestion they will be retrained into high technology jobs is a nonsense, those jobs don't exist, and won't exist.
We must come to terms with the fact we need a diversity of industry to provide the types of jobs that will cover the varying levels of skill.
We must acknowledge that not every person will go to university, and if they did, there simply wouldn't be enough tertiary skills related jobs to go around.
The current policy of educating people into jobs doesn't work because the jobs don't exist.
All we are doing is making education a competitive component for jobseekers to contend with, as jobs that were once taken by high school graduates are now the property of those with university degrees.
Many of our unemployed simply do courses that lead to other courses, and nowhere else.
Unemployment is not just a single issue but in fact the issue that causes so much of the stress and strain in our society leading to substance abuse, crime, family breakdown and suicide.
The long term unemployed, young people in particular, are faced with such hopelessness they turn to avenues of escape secure citizens would never consider.
We must re-vitalise apprenticeships and make young Australians understand it is OK to be a carpenter or a mechanic or a plumber or to pursue any trade.
It is OK to be bank teller or a council worker or a bus driver.
The most important thing is to have a job because that is a start.
You must have a start and from there how far you go is up to you, but you must have a start.
The dole will lead nowhere. A job will allow you a base from which to launch your life.
More and more Australian companies are being sold or moving overseas because they can no longer compete.
This has to stop.
Those lost jobs cannot be replaced under current government policies - policies that have devastated our country and ruined countless Australians' lives for at least the last twenty five years.
We must get Australia working again, and we can only do this by re-juvinating industry, manufacturing and the rural sector.
We must get off the level playing field as we are the only ones on it.
The rest of the world is laughing at us as we sell them our land, give them our jobs, and then send them foreign aid.
What fools we have been, what fools we are.
I ask again, what would the FIRST ANZACs think of what we have done.
We must have Australian jobs in Australian companies on Australian soil.
We must reduce the tax burden on ordinary Australians, provide business with tax and infrastructure incentives and have a truly National Bank to provide low interest loans to small business and farmers.
We must re-build and re-vitalise all that is Australian - our wealth, our strength, our patriotism.
We must honour the deeds and memory of those who have given us so much so we would be free by making Australia the proud, successful land of opportunity they loved and fought to preserve.
We must do this for them and for their children and grandchildren and ourselves and our children and grandchildren.
We must do it now.
And at the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.
Lest we forget.
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