SCOTT BEVAN:
The Prime Minister Tony Abbott has just arrived here on the Anzac Peninsula, on the Gallipoli Peninsula on Anzac Cove following security talks in Ankara and Istanbul. Tony Abbott joins me now. Prime Minister, thank you so much for your time.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thank you.
SCOTT BEVAN:
This your first visit to the Gallipoli Peninsula. What your impressions as you walk around here?
PRIME MINISTER:
This is obviously a very moving place to be. It was mayhem here 100 years ago, now it's a place of enormous peace and reverence and tranquility. But it's special and our task tomorrow will be to appropriately honour our forebears who did such extraordinary things here – ordinary men doing extraordinary things – and to recommit ourselves to their values.
SCOTT BEVAN:
A year ago at your Anzac Day address you said, “when all is said and done, Gallipoli was a defeat but the Western Front was a victory”. Is that how we should view Gallipoli? A defeat?
PRIME MINISTER:
It was, if I may say so, a magnificent defeat because of the courage, the tenacity, the selflessness, the duty and service that was displayed by our soldiers here. But, yes, it was a defeat. We didn't secure our objectives. We discovered a great deal about ourselves, we discovered a great deal about our Turkish foes – they were honorable foes – that is why there's been a friendship from that day to this. But, yes, it was a defeat. We should remember Gallipoli but we should also remember the terrible victory of the Western Front which Australia played such a significant part.
SCOTT BEVAN:
The correspondent and the official historian Charles Bean said, “through World War I the Australian nation came to know itself.” What role do you think Gallipoli played in that? And how did we come to know ourselves? What did we learn about ourselves?
PRIME MINISTER:
We were a very young country and we had not been tested as a nation in any substantial way prior to Gallipoli. We were called upon to serve. We were part of an empire at war. It was, I believe, a just and right war but we were called upon to serve and we did so magnificently in vast numbers.
SCOTT BEVAN:
Now, as Prime Minister you have the ultimate responsibility to say farewell to young service men and women today as they go off to operations. You farewelled 300 troops just earlier this week as they left for Iraq. As you walk past the lines of these memorial stones behind us here in Shrapnel Valley cemetery, how does that play on your thoughts of the role you have to play with our present day service men and women?
PRIME MINISTER:
Obviously there is a big distinction between what the original Anzacs were called upon to do and what our service personnel are currently about to undertake in Iraq. This was an invasion. Iraq is a training mission, not a combat mission but, nevertheless, it is a capable force that can look after itself if needs be. I am very conscious that the hardest thing any government, any Prime Minister can do, is to put our service men and women in harm's way. But, if it is in our national interests and in accordance with our national values to do so, it is the duty of the government to make those decisions, no less than it is the duty of our service men and women to follow orders.
SCOTT BEVAN:
For the commemorations not just here but throughout World War I, the centenary years, the Federal and State Governments are committing hundreds of millions of dollars to commemorative events. Some have been critical of this saying there should be more focus and more money, that money put on to present day service men and women and recent veterans to help them. How do you answer that?
PRIME MINISTER:
It is not an either/or business here. We are spending a very great deal of money to help our contemporaries. We are much more aware of the mental health problems that veterans suffer from than we were in those days back in the 1920s, when it was referred to as shell shock. We have a vastly better understanding and we have vastly more empathy with people in that position because we now appreciate just what we ask of our service men and women in the ways that perhaps we didn't back at the time of the Great War.
SCOTT BEVAN:
As I said in the introduction, you have just come from a series of meetings in other key areas in Turkey about the issue of terrorism. How confident are you that Turkey is doing all it can to fight terror groups such as Islamic State, considering that Australian fighters cross borders from here to places such as Syria?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, I don't use that term. I refer to it as the death cult because it mocks religion, it mocks the duties that a state has to its citizens. It's thoroughly evil. It is medieval barbarism come to the modern world and I believe that the Turkish Government and the Turkish people are every bit as alarmed about this as we are and certainly Turkey as a partner in the fight against this kind of extremism and I'm confident that the cooperation between Turkish authorities and Australian authorities, already close, will be even closer in the days and weeks and months ahead as a result of the talks I have had.
SCOTT BEVAN:
Prime Minister, we appreciate your time here with us today and all the best for the address tomorrow at the Dawn Service.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thanks so much and I hope I can find words that will express what our people feel at this time.
SCOTT BEVAN:
Thank you. The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, joining us here in Shrapnel Valley.
[ends]