Welcome address: Young Leaders Group Australian American leadership dialogue

I am 57 years old. I have learned many things throughout my life. One of those is that you don’t realise what you’re learning when you are learning it. The most significant things that have shaped and influenced my own thinking have come in unexpected quiet moments of random revelation, and in circumstances I would not have expected to learn anything.

Although leadership cannot be taught, it can be learned.

The power is in the story.

You have spent the day in the parliament, within which resides our nation’s political capital. From it you have travelled along Anzac Parade here to the Australian War Memorial – our nation’s soul.

It is not the building nor the artefacts and relics displayed that make it so. It is instead the story of 2 million Australian men and women behind it, those who have worn and who now wear, the uniform of the Royal Australian Navy, Australian Army and Royal Australian Airforce.

The paradox of this place, the Australian War Memorial, is that it is not about war.

It is about love and friendship.

Love of friends, love of family and of country.

It is the story of men and women who devote their lives not to themselves, but to us - and their last moments to one another.

It is not possible to really understand us as Australians until you come here. It is also the case that only after coming here, do overseas visitors understand why we are an ally of the United States and not simply ‘good friends’.

I stood in the commemorative area with the Chief of the Turkish Airforce two years ago and he pointed to one of the names in bronze of the theatres where Australians have fought and died over more than a century. He asked me why Australians had been there.

I replied:

General, that is a very important question. In answering it on your journey of discovery you will come to understand who we are and what makes us ‘tick’. Every government who made the decisions to send these men and women to these places did so on the basis of Australia’s national interest, geostrategic circumstances and our nation’s alliances. But there is another of which this place reminds us. We are Australians there are some truths by which we live worth fighting to defend, what is the right thing to do?

Those names in bronze also tell the story of an alliance with the United States spanning every major conflict since the First World War.

The Australian War Memorial has its origins in the First World War. The official Australian war correspondent, who would subsequently be appointed the official historian, was Charles Bean.

Bean landed with the Australian troops on Gallipoli on the 25th of April 1915 and stayed with them at the front through the entire war. Despite being wounded at Gallipoli in August he refused evacuation. It was said of Bean that no one risked death more often than him.

One hundred years ago this July and early August at Pozieres, Bean was witness to Australia sustaining 23,000 casualties in just six weeks. A mortally wounded Australian asked of Bean, “Will they remember me in Australia?”

Reflecting on what he had seen and the question asked, Bean wrote:

Many a man lying out there at Pozieres and in the low scrub at Gallipoli, with his poor tired senses barely working through the fever of his brain, has thought in his last moments….well, well…it’s over. But in Australia – they’ll be proud of this.

We are. We are very proud.

Bean conceived and resolved that at its end he would build this, the finest memorial and museum to the men of the Australian Imperial Force and nurses.

On the 26th of October 1963, US President John F Kennedy went to Amherst College for the ground-breaking for the Robert Frost Library. Kennedy and the poet Nobel Laureate had engaged a bitter public falling out over Kennedy’s approach to Khrushchev. Frost had questioned Kennedy’s ability to stand up to his Russian counterpart, but had died before Kennedy’s attendance at Amherst.

On that day, Kennedy said in part:

A nation reveals itself not only in those whom it produces – but those whom it honours. The men it remembers.

Since 1993 in the Hall of Memory here, beneath the byzantine inspired dome and 15 sentinel stained glass windows, has been interred the Unknown Australian Soldier.

Shortly after he became Prime Minister, Tony Abbott proposed we consider an Arlington style cemetery for Canberra, the nation’s capital.

I said to its proponents:

We love the United States. We share our common convictions and belief in political, economic and religious freedoms; the co-existence of faith and reason, of free academic inquiry, an independent judiciary and free press. We are free people in no small way due to American sacrifice in the Pacific from 1942 until the end of the war. Not a day goes by in this place or our nation where privately or publicly we do not give thanks for 300,000 American casualties - 103,000 dead and half those bodies never found.

But we are Australians.

We have one man buried at the Australian War Memorial. We have no idea who he is. He is probably a private, corporal, sergeant or maybe a sapper. He could be Aboriginal. We do not know. But we are Australians. Whilst respecting Generals and Admirals, we honour the idealism and heroism of the everyday Australian more than anything else.

We reveal ourselves as a people by this man whom we honour and who represents all of them – 102,700 Australian who have given their lives for us and our freedoms.

In this room we gather here under First World War planes and relics surrounding us which tell the stories of the men behind them. Behind me here is the Sydney Emden display from the engagement of the German raider by HMAS Sydney in early November 1914, thereby securing safety in the Indian Ocean for the remainder of the war.

Then back behind it is a Japanese midget submarine, reminding us of 1942 - the most important year in our history after 1788.

Days after the fall of Singapore the first of 100 Japanese bombing attacks on the Australian mainland commenced. It was the year of the gripping struggle at Kokoda, Milne Bay and Isuarva; Guadalcanal, Coral Sea and Midway; three Japanese midget submarines in Sydney Harbour looking for USS Chicago and battles that forged the bond within which our alliance with the United States has been built.

Our vital interests were at stake. We don’t forget it.

In my experience, what differentiates management from leadership in a civilian context is - vision.

Charles Bean articulated the vision for the Australian War Memorial in 1948 to which we remain true:

Here is their spirit in the heart of the land they loved. And here we guard the record which they themselves made.

To his audience at Amherst College, President Kennedy spoke of the strength of a nation.

But what is most important is the spirit that informs it. For our nation Australia, that spirit is here.

To you young leaders falls the challenge of building the Alliance between our two nations. It is one born of conflict and sustained in capability, intelligence, interoperability and defence. But now it is for you to drive it in research, education, culture, industry, trade and our many fields of common human endeavour.

You are welcome to this place. You always will be.