The Greens, Anzac Day, and the death of memory

In a move that would be laughable were it not so grotesque, the WA Greens—those self-anointed arbiters of virtue—were planning, and had planned to throw a fundraising party on Anzac Day. Not a solemn remembrance, not a dialogue on peace, but a party. A revel. On the day Australians honour our war dead.

Let that settle for a moment. The one day in our national calendar that transcends politics and unites Australians across race, religion, and region—not through conquest, but through remembrance—is to be co-opted for political profit. This is not merely tone-deaf. It is an act of profound cultural vandalism.

There is something pathological about the modern left’s compulsion to desecrate national symbols. Like termites feasting on the beams of a house they still choose to inhabit, they bore through the very structure that shelters them. Anzac Day, like America’s Fourth of July or Britain’s Remembrance Sunday or even Israel’s Yom Hazikaron, is not about glorifying war.

It is about remembering those who paid the price of freedom, often in wars not of their choosing, so that later generations—ours—could be free to protest, vote, or even sneer at the very concept of national service.

But for the Greens and their ideological cousins, it is no longer enough to critique or reform. The goal is total erasure. What we are witnessing is a form of historicide—a killing of one’s own history.

In American schools, this manifests in curriculums obsessed with systemic sin, where every founding ideal is reinterpreted as cover for cruelty. In Australia, it takes subtler forms: the deliberate marginalisation of Anzac Day, the sneering at national pride, the rebranding of patriotism as parochialism.

Make no mistake—this is not progress. It is a campaign of cultural defenestration.

We are told this is about inclusivity, about challenging outdated narratives. But who gets to decide what constitutes “outdated”? The descendants of miners and migrants who built this country through hardship and hope? Or the cloistered ideologues whose experience of sacrifice amounts to Twitter spats and faculty lounge posturing?

The Greens’ choice to party on Anzac Day is not accidental. It is an act of symbolic aggression. It says, “Your history is irrelevant. Your rituals are disposable. Your grief is less important than our fundraising target.”

Like the wicked son of our recent Pesach Seder, it says much about the Greens to speak of Australians in the third person: you, but not me.

What they fail to understand—what they choose not to understand—is that the West does not need to erase its past to build a better future. It needs to remember. It needs a healthy commitment to community, connectedness, and memory. The kind of society that builds school halls in the names of the fallen. That lays wreaths at dawn. That teaches children that freedom is not free, and that some debts cannot be repaid with money, only with memory.

It is memory that anchors us. It is memory that instructs us, cautions us, and binds us to one another. The Greens’ brand of politics—radical, disconnected, aggressive, judgemental—is precisely what happens when you cut the roots of tradition and call the falling tree “liberation.”

Anzac Day does not belong to the military. It does not belong to politicians. It belongs to all Australians. It is the rare civic ritual that offers us a moment to put aside grievance, ideology, and the endless churn of political fashion—and reflect on what it means to live in a country like this.

The Greens have made a telling mistake. They think Anzac Day is about war. It isn’t. It is about honouring people's service. And a politics that cannot recognise honour—even in those it disagrees with—is a politics not worthy of leadership.

This is not just an insult to veterans. It is an insult to decency. To our collective intelligence. To the very notion of a shared national story. To throw a party on Anzac Day is not radical. It is vandalism dressed in virtue-signalling.

Australia is a free country. The Greens are free to raise money whenever they like. But to do it on Anzac Day is to light a match at a memorial and call it a candlelight vigil. It is obscene.

We must do better. We must be better. Not by silencing dissent, but by insisting that memory matters. That history has meaning. That some days are sacred—not because they are flawless, but because they remind us who we are, and how we came to be.