Page 5047 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 26 October 2010
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incredible sacrifice. What greater sacrifice can you ask of someone than that they lay down their lives for their brothers? There is nothing, in my view, more significant than that sacrifice.
Each and every person who dons the uniform of this country walks in the company of those heroes and they walk in the footsteps of those heroes. People who have either never been in the services or have come out of the services ought to reflect that we now walk in the footsteps of those people. They, for me, are giants.
Mr Coe and Mr Hanson spoke quite eloquently about the contribution of returned servicemen, but we also need to recognise that there are some people who are not returned servicemen but who also put themselves forward to do that sort of role. Many people who join the armed forces are quite prepared to go overseas and fight if necessary, if that is what the people of the country want, and, fortuitously for them, they have not been called upon to do it. That does not mean to say that their families have not gone through the horrors because of the expectation that they may go. The saying “they also serve who only stand and wait” applies to the soldiers who are prepared to go but do not and also to their families who are terrified, particularly, I know, mothers. I will come to that a little bit later.
When we talk about the returned servicemen that my colleagues have spoken about, we need to remember, and we do remember, the contribution that they make to the life of not only Canberra but Australia. We recognise that and we respect it and we honour it, but not in all conflicts. We respect the Anzac tradition; we respect the efforts during World War II and the Korean War. I am not so sure we are real good at it with the Iraq war and the Afghan theatre. I am not so sure we have done it in other theatres which do not really necessarily have a massive war hue about them, like Timor and the Solomons and some of those smaller conflicts in the grand scheme of things. I am not so sure with the Vietnam War—the American War, as the Vietnamese call it—whether we particularly have as a society come to grips with that properly yet.
I know I still bear a lot of the scars from that particular era. There are many, many returned servicemen from that conflict who remember the antipathy. We do not necessarily praise and honour and respect them. Mr Coe made the point that we are moving rapidly towards that, and I congratulate him for bringing that on. I do not think we are moving quickly enough. I think we should get there. We should be respecting them. We should be honouring them. We should not blame our servicemen for political decisions taken by the government of the day. We should be saying to them, “Thank God you’re doing what you do, because if you don’t do it, I’m going to have to do it.” Most of the people I know would not put themselves in those people’s shoes.
In terms of those others, we need to recognise that this country has people who were engaged in the theatre not only in New Guinea and that sort of thing during the war, but what about those people in Darwin and Broome and Rockhampton and Newcastle? All were visited by enemy aircraft. Some lost their lives on Australian soil no less, and so we need to remember those people. I would like to add my voice to the list of organisations that Mr Coe and Mr Hanson read out: National Servicemen and Combined Forces Association, which is fairly new and of which I am a member.
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