Australia's lavish spending on Anzac memorials cloaks a more distasteful reality

Submitted by Paul Daley on Wed, 11/11/2015 - 5:42am

The government has put $552m towards the first world war centenary. As we pause for Remembrance Day, isn’t it time to stop spending millions on the dead and focus on living veterans?

Remembrance Day, commemorated annually on 11 November since 1919 to honour all Commonwealth war dead, has arrived again.

But a century after the first world war began, I think it is well and truly time to reflect on how it is, precisely, that we commemorate those killed. It’s certainly time we stopped spending hundreds of millions of dollars on pointless new monuments to the Anzacs and to focus, instead, on the living.