By Denis Hay
Description
Are we truly honouring ANZAC values? Explore how Australia is failing its people – and how we can reclaim justice in their name.
Honouring the Spirit of ANZAC: A Call for Justice at Home
Introduction – More Than a Day of Remembrance
Location: Dawn service, suburban Australia. The air is still. The bugle sounds. Lest We Forget.
Picture this: A retired veteran stands in the cold, hand on heart, remembering fallen mates. Not just their sacrifice, but what they believed they were fighting for – freedom, fairness, mateship, a fair go for all.
Now picture his granddaughter. She’s in her 30s, working two jobs, unable to afford rent, healthcare, or childcare. “Is this the Australia they died for?” she wonders.
This article explores how ANZAC values are not relics of the past but a call to justice in the present.
Lest We Forget: What About the Battles Australians Face Today?
Australia today is a country where many face daily battles:
• Housing crisis: Over 122,000 Australians are homeless (ABS 2021).
• Healthcare inequality: Regional Australians still struggle for access.
• Cost of living: Families can’t keep up with grocery and energy bills.
• Veterans’ welfare: 1 in 3 veterans experience mental health issues, yet support is often underfunded or delayed.
• Indigenous Australians: Life expectancy is still 8 years lower than the national average.
These modern struggles are often sidelined in political discourse. But if ANZACs fought for a better Australia, these are battles that demand attention.
Internal Thought: “How did we let it get this bad?” a nurse quietly asks, reviewing her monthly expenses that don’t add up.
The Meaning of Mateship in a Fractured Society
Mateship wasn’t just camaraderie in the trenches. It was a national ethos: helping each other out, especially in tough times.
Today, mateship is being replaced by:
• Individualism and blame: The poor are blamed for being poor.
• Privatisation: Public assets sold off to corporations.
• Welfare shaming: Support is seen as weakness, not a hand-up.
Real-world example: During COVID, millions relied on JobKeeper. That was modern mateship. But once the crisis faded, support was withdrawn, leaving many vulnerable.
Emotional Response: “We’re told to stand on our own feet, but the ground keeps shifting beneath us,” says a single mum from Logan.
From Gallipoli to Today: Are We Still Building a Fair Australia?
The ANZACs didn’t die for greed. They believed in building a better nation.
But today:
• Education is a debt trap with HECS.
• Healthcare is increasingly privatised.
• Public housing is sold off.
Contrast this with the post-WWII government, which built the Snowy Hydro Scheme, funded public education, and expanded housing.
Historical Reference: After WWII, the Curtin and Chifley governments used Australia’s monetary sovereignty to rebuild with full employment.
Why don’t we do the same today?
Honouring the Fallen by Uplifting the Living
We can live out ANZAC values by:
• Investing in public services: Education, housing, and healthcare for all.
• Supporting veterans properly: With trauma-informed care and full pensions.
• Ending corporate welfare: And redirecting public money to people, not profits.
Australia has dollar sovereignty. We issue our own currency. The government can afford to fund what matters, without needing to cut from elsewhere or raise taxes.
Expert Quote: “A currency-sovereign government faces no financial constraint, only resource constraints.” – Prof. Bill Mitchell
Dialogue: “Don’t tell me we can’t afford to look after our own. We’re not broke – we’re misled,” says a pensioner at an ANZAC Day event in Brisbane.
A Citizens’ Call to Action
Let’s reclaim ANZAC values through action:
• Vote for independents and parties who prioritise people over donors.
• Demand public investment in services, not endless surpluses.
• Challenge narratives that justify suffering in a wealthy nation.
Change won’t come from the top down. It must come from us.
Summary – The Legacy Lives When We Live It
We honour ANZACs not by ceremonies alone, but by carrying their values into action.
ANZAC meant solidarity, sacrifice, and fairness. But neoliberal policies have eroded those principles. We can choose another path – one where public money serves the public good and no one is left behind.
Closing Thought: “If we remember the dead but ignore the living, have we really remembered at all?”
Q&A Section
Q1: Isn’t it unaffordable to expand public services today?
No. As a currency sovereign, Australia can invest in healthcare, education, and housing without financial limits – only real resource limits.
Q2: How does this relate to ANZAC values?
ANZAC values reflect fairness, solidarity, and courage. Leaving veterans, pensioners, or struggling families behind is a betrayal of those ideals.
Q3: What can citizens do?
Share articles, challenge media narratives, support justice-driven candidates, and engage others in these discussions.
Call to Action
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Lest we forget.
Brave young Australians lost their lives and youth fighting in far-off lands to protect those that the inhuman German Nazi holocaust was directed at.
How has Zionist Israel shown its eternal gratitude?
Zionist Israel, with contemptuous disrespect and callous disregard for those young Australians who made the ultimate sacrifice, bulldozed their sacred Australian war graves in Gaza nurtured and respected by Palestinians. Not a word of profound condemnation or outrage from Australia’s spineless politicians or the complicit mainstream legacy media. Disrespecting our Diggers will have consequences for our grovelling craven politicians.
Like Australia’s Labor government, it’s opposition the Netanyahu government and the IDF have no honour. Cowards one and all.
If the Albanese Labor government and Opposition think they will not be held accountable, they should think again.
The pathetic leadership of Albanese and Dutton that is impacting on and jeopardising Australians’ national security, sovereignty, economic well-being, international reputation that is corrupting Australia’s values and moral standards must, without doubt, question and challenge the validity and viability of the two party policical system. Albanese is weak, timid, and trashed many Labor and Australian values, while Dutton is strong on racism, negativity, and anything that lines fossil fuel industries pockets.
What a patheticly sick authoritarian society Australia has become where someone waving a flag or holding a sign is more egregious to the establishment political class and legacy media than the horrendous systemic slaughter of women and children. It has become essential for citizens to hold these politicians, their parties and legacy media accountable and to choose representatives and media who are more worthy and keen to protect and preserve international law, human rights, Australia’s moral values and its national interests.
Australia’s best days are behind it, not that that’s an argument for returning to the past, as attractively nostalgic as that may seem… nevertheless, an impossibility, given the scale of change in all metrics; political attitudes and understandings, global engagements, environmental realities, corporate and capital challenges along with the perspectives of the Millennials and Gen Z contrasted against their predecessors.
The flag-waving performative solemnities of annual commemorations of this country’s engagements various in offshore wars, the great majority of which posed zero threat to this nation are irrevocably losing their lustre and shine as generations age, memories fade and combatants succumb to the inevitabilities of sickness and old age, along with the fact that for those who are the emergent future of this land these events have next to zero significance.
Far far better, for all, to focus on the establishment and maintenance of good relations with our near neighbours and fostering best-practice behaviour in relation to our custodianship of this country and its natural assets.
Of course you’re correct as usual,Denis Hay,and I agree with ajogrady.Stand by for the usual sickening hypocrisy and platitudes wheeled out on Anzac Day.What a load of bollocks by the usual suspects.
If we want this shit to change, vote Independent/Green.
As for the extremist Zionist murderers,it is almost certain to incite a repetition of previous pogroms of centuries past,providing any of them survive the near future.
ANZAC day celebrates the sacrifices of war for the Imperial rulers of Australia at that time. Our young men were sent to fight, used as cannon fodder by a British military which sent them to the wrong place, and when it was over, sent them on further to fight in the trenches of France.
That was WWI
And when push came to shove in Singapore with the Japanese invading that island from the north instead of the expected south, the British left with their tails between their legs and our brave young men were enslaved to build a railway in the tropical heat.
And Australia was left on its own until the very brave McArthur came to tell us how to win a war…. and then tied us to the protection of the USA.
On ANZAC Day we celebrate the time when King and Country meant that we had to sacrifice our young for their benefit.
My dad was a TPI but not till he was in his 50s having endured being wired up,in Daws road (i saw ‘one flew over the cuckoo’s nest’ men shuffling in pyjamas. oh so sad) every 6 months. ANZAC DAY was a no go for our family but my classes knew of the automatic firing system, simpson and his donkey, albert jacka and mustapha kemal attaturk as heroes and churchill as a bungling racist prick. Sadly they have disappeared from ANZAC. The kiwis leaving Maori out of the rugby in south africa on the way home put a dent in ANZAC, still does. but since he died we went to dawn services and put a poppy on for him but not recently because security means only important people can drive in.so we go after those have gone and have a brunch service. Once we saw a turk dressed in ww1 uniform at a bush dawn service in brisbane he looked pretty smart..