Bruce Haigh, former diplomat and now commentator, wrote about Prime Minister Abbott’s speech at the Albany commemorative event. Haigh was critical of the speech for its inadequate grasp of history but also for its attempt, as he saw it, to link events at Gallipoli to today’s politics.
The story of war, particularly the Great War [Haigh concluded], should be told as it was and not as part of a propaganda exercise to get the Australian public to accept, yet again, the deployment of Australian forces to war on the sole discretion and authority of a prime minister who does not have the courage to send Australians overseas to fight Ebola in case they return with the disease and threaten his comfort zone.
5 November 2014
