The Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, and the Special Minister of State, Senator Michael Ronaldson, have delivered speeches at ANZAC Day services overseas.
Ronaldson, who is also the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Centenary of ANZAC, spoke at the Gallipoli Dawn Service and the Lone Pine Service, in Turkey.
Bishop spoke at the Dawn Service at Villers-Brettonneux, in France. [Read more…]
Retired General Peter Cosgrove is to be Australia’s next Governor-General, according to a report in today’s edition of The Australian.
Cosgrove has been rumoured to be the choice of Prime Minister Tony Abbott for some time. Whilst the newspaper says Abbott refused to comment on its report, the news comes as no real surprise.
The newspaper says the appointment will be announced at the end of January.
The current Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, has held the position since September 5, 2008 and will retire in March. Her 5-year appointment was extended by six months by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, due to the proximity of the federal election.
Cosgrove will be Australia’s 26th Governor-General since 1901. The last Governor-General with a military background was Bryce’s predecessor, Major-General Michael Jeffery. [Read more…]
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has delivered ANZAC Day speeches at Gallipoli.
Minister Warren Snowdon spoke at ceremonies at Villers-Brettoneux in France.
This is the text of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Commemorative Address at the Remembrance Day Service, held at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Fellow Australians, friends of Australia, Veterans of Australia:
90 years ago today, the great guns fell silent.
After fours years of bloodshed, the battlefields were silent.
Great empires had been broken.
Millions, millions lay dead.
Among them, sixty thousand Australian heroes whose final resting place will forever be foreign soil.
And then there were the wounded a further one hundred and fifty thousand whose bodies and minds were to be forever scarred by the horrors of war.
And all this from a country of some four millions.
The scale of the carnage; the new ways of killing on an almost industrial scale; the tiny pieces of land over which so much blood was spilt; the sheer, stark horror of life and death in the trenches made all peoples hope that this could never happen again. [Read more…]