Shrine rabble beyond defending
JUST before I say something antagonising like “Tony Abbott should be sacked from the board of the Australian War Memorial”, let me first make a declaration: personally, I like Tony Abbott.
I’ve been in his company a few times, and he even invited me for Christmas drinks at Kirribilli back when he had the keys to the place. Our politics are very different but I get bored being around agreeable people, so I think the presence of Tony Abbott in public life still has merit.
Having got that out of the way, let me now say I think Tony Abbott should be sacked from the board of the Australian War Memorial.
This week, Tony appeared on a podcast hosted by a conservative think tank where he defended the yobs who trashed the Shrine of Remembrance a couple of weekends ago.
We remember them all too well. They were the ones lighting flares, chucking things at police, breaking glass, drinking grog, and urinating on the walls of one of Australia’s most beautiful and important monuments.
Tony started by saying: “People shouldn’t break the law … but …”, and it was after the “but” that things went bad.
He described the shrine crowd as being “simply there to make a point”. He said: “They weren’t being violent, they weren’t being vandalistic, they weren’t being destructive.”
Wrong, wrong and wrong, Tony. They were being all those things. And any “point” they were trying to make got lost when they climbed on the sacred building to use it for play equipment.
In essence, these people are angry because God made them stupid and they like the idea of rioting and assaulting cops. So this was their big chance.
No doubt there were people in the crowd with legitimate fears and grievances against the government, but let’s not make them out to be freedom fighters who would make our Diggers proud. They certainly are not.
And for Tony Abbott to defend them is both ignorant and dangerous.
But the podcast comments then got worse. He described our police force as being like “stormtroopers”. We can only hope he was trying to make some ironic Star Wars reference, because if he was referring to the German Sturmtruppen (Stormtroopers) of World War I, he would know that 60,000 Australians were killed trying to defeat those forces.
This is why we built the shrine in the first place – to honour and remember these fallen.
He then said the police were charging with rubber bullets and tear gas, and described the Victoria Police as being heavy-handed.
Well, perhaps they were, but it was a heavy few days, Tony. The cops didn’t dress in riot gear because they had run out of other uniforms. They were facing a riot. And if your attackers are throwing flares and bottles of frozen water, you need to turn up with something bigger. Otherwise you and your comrades could get killed.
Tony Abbott sits on the council of the Australian War Memorial. It’s an appointment that carries great prestige and pays a lovely $40,000 a year to attend some meetings. The Canberra memorial is another sacred monument – just like Melbourne’s shrine – and Tony is currently one of its paid protectors. Yet, he seems far too quick to defend people who would urinate on it.
I’m not saying he doesn’t care about our war history, but the Australian War Memorial is there for the people, and I think the people have good reason to question Tony Abbott’s judgment. So he should resign. There must be far better people for the job. And we could start with one of the coppers who was there that day to protect the shrine. Or one of our frontline healthcare workers. I think either of them would have a better understanding of why peaceful people sometimes need to go to war.
But if Tony decides to stay on the board – and continues to collect his money – then when the yobs turn up to piss on the Australian War Memorial, he’s the one who should go out with the brush and bucket to clean it off.