Labour Leader Phil Goff ANZAC Day Address      
Embargoed Until Delivery

Anzac Day Address
Mt Albert War Memorial Hall
9.30am
       

This day 94 years ago, New Zealand soldiers first landed at Anzac Cove Gallipoli during the First World War.

It was to be a bloody and bitter campaign, the suffering and the casualties are still etched into our consciousness generations later.

Of 8556 New Zealand soldiers who served on the Gallipoli peninsula, 2221 died and 4752 were wounded, a casualty rate close to 90%

For a small country with a population in 1915 of only one million, this was a human tragedy on an unprecedented scale which affected almost every family, every street and every community in New Zealand.

The men who died there were young, with all the promise of life before them. Those who survived endured inhuman conditions. They were short of food and water, deafened by the noise of bombardment, and forced to live without sanitation and surrounded by the unbearable stench of death.

We do not gather on Anzac Day to glorify war. That is not what those who suffered at Gallipoli would want.

Rather we come here to pay tribute to those in all of the wars in which New Zealand has been involved who served their country to allow us today to enjoy peace and freedom.

We celebrate the courage of those who risked their lives and faced death rather than let their mates down.

We remember that it was at Gallipoli that New Zealanders first stood shoulder to shoulder with their Australian cousins, beginning a strong Anzac tradition which continues today.

It was from the experience at Gallipoli too that New Zealanders for the first time began to think of themselves as a nation with its own distinct identity. Those who went to fight for England and the Empire left thinking of themselves as New Zealanders.

And we can celebrate that out of the bloody horror of the fighting at Gallipoli came reconciliation rather than bitterness, immortalised in words of Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish Commander at Gallipoli and later President of Turkey:

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives …you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.

Therefore rest in peace.  There is no difference between the Johnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours.  You the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears.  Your sons are now in our bosom and are in peace.  Having lost their lives in this land they have become our sons as well”

Today many of us will be thinking of family members who never returned from war to raise families and enjoy the peace that they had helped secure.

In my family, we remember the great uncles who died in the battles of the First World War and my father’s younger brother killed in the Pacific in 1944 aged just 19.  We remember too my nephew Matt killed in action just 18 months ago in Afghanistan, serving with the United States Army.

We pray that their lives were not lost in vain, and we commit ourselves to strive for a world in which we, our children and all people can live free from the threat of violence and suffering.

This year, as every year, we come here to remember what happened at Gallipoli, to pay tribute to those who have served and to pledge our commitment to achieving a more just and peaceful world without war.

ends

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