WHEN NOT EVEN GALLIPOLI UNITES US

ISMELL panic now that politicians are promising lots of money to remember the war dead of 100 years ago.

Yes, Armistice Day yesterday should still have meant something to us even now, a century after World War I ended.

Australia had not even 5 million people, yet 60,000 volunteer servicemen were killed.

Would Australians today volunteer for a war that killed one in 80 of us?

Maybe we shouldn’t wish for such sacrifice to be even possible, but what if we faced a war that demanded it?

Imagine, say, an invasion by the Chinese communist dictatorship, or the threat of nuclear-armed Islamism.

Yes, far-fetched. But I think many Australians do wonder: are we united enough to even agree on what’s worth defending?

I suspect that fear is behind these new ideas to honour even more those who did fight for us.

The Morrison Government, for instance, says it will spend another $500 million on the Australian War Memorial, just after we opened the $100 million Sir John Monash Centre on the Western Front.

Victoria’s Labor government promise a weekly Last Post ceremony at the Shrine of Remembrance, and the Liberal Opposition is offering $2 million for RSL clubs and war memorials.

Meanwhile, Virgin Australia suggests honouring veterans who fly on its planes, and the Prime Minister is considering medals for the parents of those who die in battle.

All this suggests an anxiety that we’re fracturing, and no wonder. Australians are increasingly dividing into ethnic or religious ghettos, thanks in part to massive immigration — 240,000 people a year.

Check the new Chinese suburbs such as Melbourne’s Box Hill, where a quarter of residents speak Chinese at home, or Sydney’s Lakemba, where 60 per cent of residents are Muslim.

In fact, nearly 1 million Australians now speak little or no English. If we don’t even share a language, what does unite us?

Well, not even the idea that Australians once died for Australia seems to.

Last week, the ABC reported sympathetically on a TurkishAustralian teacher who wanted her students to observe two minutes for the dead at Gallipoli — one for the Australians, but a second for the Turks.

She called the Turks

“our men”.

No wonder it seems urgent to convince newcomers that Australia’s war dead are what’s truly “ours”.