30
September 2020
PDF version [236KB]
David Watt
Foreign Affairs, Defence and
Security
Introduction
Proposals to redevelop the Australian War Memorial (AWM) were
first announced during the early months of 2018 as it emerged that the AWM was
seeking funding and putting
together a business case to put to the Australian Government. The AWM
director at the time, Dr Brendan Nelson, stated that the cost of the project
might be as much $500 million.[1]
On 1 November 2018 Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced
that the Government would provide funding of $498 million over nine years for
the redevelopment. When making the announcement, the Prime Minister said:
The Australian War Memorial, the soul of the nation. That is
what is housed within its stone and brass walls. It is sacred to us all. It
transcends politics, it transcends all of us.[2]
A media release from the Prime Minister and the Minister
for Veterans’ Affairs stated that the redevelopment would allow the AWM to
display more of its collection and tell the story of Australia’s involvement in
Afghanistan, Iraq, the Solomon Islands and East Timor.[3]
The release stated that the redevelopment would increase the size of visitor
areas by 83 per cent, or around 10,000 square metres.
The Shadow Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, Amanda
Rishworth, immediately stated that the Labor Opposition would honour this
commitment if elected to government in the 2019 federal election.[4]
The 2019–20 Budget contained $166.78 million worth of funding across the
forward estimates for the AWM’s redevelopment.[5]
Brendan Nelson put the case for the redevelopment in the
following terms:
The Memorial’s ability to tell the stories of those men and
women who serve in Australia’s Defence forces has now reached its limits. The
Memorial’s galleries are at capacity, and yet the Memorial must continue to
grow.
Just a fraction of the collection is on display. In crowded
galleries the stories of Australian military service from the Boer War through
to the First and Second World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam are all largely told.
Yet, the service of 70,000 young Australians in the Middle East Area of
operations of the past two decades currently covers only 2 per cent of
available space.[6]
Dr Nelson provided further detail to a
Senate Estimates hearing, stating that the Memorial’s Council had been
presented with four designs on 4 July 2018 and had been unanimous when choosing
the winning design. Dr Nelson said that the preferred design ‘was
chosen on the basis of minimum complexity, maximum efficiency, minimum threat
to the integrity of the existing heritage building and best value for money for
the Australian taxpayer’.[7]
He went on to say that construction would
commence in the last quarter of 2019, starting with the demolition of Anzac
Hall and that this would be rebuilt in 2021 to be ‘wider, deeper, two levels,
and with an atrium in the centre’. Dr Nelson also informed the Committee that
the AWM was negotiating with the ACT Government to acquire land behind Treloar
Crescent (that runs behind the Memorial), which initially would be used for
site management purposes and in the longer term as a car park.
On 7 March 2019 former Lendlease General
Manager of Operations Wayne Hitches was announced as the Executive Project
Director for the redevelopment project.[8]
On 18 November 2019 the Prime
Minister released the official plans for the Australian
War Memorial Development Project, which were made publicly available in the
AWM information gallery. The AWM stated that it had submitted a ‘referral under
the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act 1999, including a
Heritage Impact Assessment, to determine if the plans require formal assessment
and approval’.
After the plans were made public the War
Memorial announced that it would hold a series of community consultation
sessions in each Australian state and territory during December 2019. The
memorial also stated:
Preparations for early works construction to extend the
underground car parking facilities on the eastern side of the precinct have
begun. It is expected work on the new Anzac Hall will begin in the second half
of 2020, with work on the southern entrance commencing the following year.
On 14 November 2019 the project was referred to the
Department of Environment and Energy for consideration under the Environment
Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). On 18
December 2019 the project was declared a ‘controlled action’, requiring an
assessment decision under the Act. The second phase of EPBC Act consultation
began on 2 July 2020.[9]
Parliamentary
inquiry
On 30 April 2020 the Governor-General referred the War
Memorial development project to the Joint
Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works.[10]
The Committee received 77 submissions,
which prompted further public comment on the development project.
In its submission, the AWM set out its view as to why the project is necessary:
The need for the Project can be divided into four categories
which are described in detail below. The Project will address: spatial
constraints that prevent
- the
telling of the stories of recent conflicts and operations at a level of detail
consistent with earlier conflicts, and
- the Memorial
properly recognising the service of those who served in recent conflicts and
operations; b. the lack of capacity to include large technology objects such as
planes, helicopters and armoured vehicles within galleries, as these objects
are critical to telling the stories of recent conflicts and operations;
- circulation
challenges caused by the numbers of visitors being well in excess of what the
building was designed for, and which has now been in excess of one million per
year for the last five years; and
- the lack of compliance with the Federal Disability Discrimination
Act, 1992 to ensure the facility is accessible for all Australians, regardless
of physical capacity.[11]
The AWM has engaged in a process of public consultation about the
redevelopment and what it calls the Precinct
Masterplan. Consultations
are ongoing at the time of publication.
Reactions
The redevelopment has not been universally welcomed. For
example, members of the Canberra community took issue with the
plan to acquire land behind the AWM for use as part of the building site and
longer term as a car park, pointing out that the land is now what is known as Canberra Remembrance Nature Park and is
meant as a place of quiet reflection.[12]
The Memorial later decided not to proceed with this part of the plan.[13] Richard Thwaites, whose
parents were responsible for persuading the ACT Government to create the park,
made the point that the AWM was allowing its role as a tourist attraction to
take precedence over its function as a place of commemoration: ‘The worrying thing with this development is it’s amplifying a trend
which has happened in recent times, which is since self-government, the ACT
government sees the memorial as a tourism site...’.[14]
The proposed demolition of Anzac Hall has also been
criticised. This display space is only 17 years old and was awarded the 2005 Sir
Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture. The Australian Institute of
Architects, which is running a ‘Hands off Anzac Hall’
campaign, has called the proposed demolition a ‘colossal
waste’.
In addition to the complaints above, some members of the
community feel that the AWM is being given a significant amount of money at a
time when many other cultural institutions have struggled to maintain funding.
In March 2019 eighty prominent people signed a letter stating their disagreement
with the proposed redevelopment, which, in part, read:
The Australian War Memorial’s $498 million extensions should
not proceed. They cannot be justified, they show the Memorial is being given
preference over other national institutions, and the money could be better
spent.[15]
A submission to the inquiry by a former AWM director,
Steve Gower, was critical of a number of aspects:
- the lack of Department of Agriculture, Water and Environment
clearance of heritage matters
- the proposed demolition of Anzac Hall and
- the lack of medical evidence supporting the AWM’s claims that the
new galleries will be good for veterans suffering from PTSD.
In evidence to the inquiry, military historian Peter
Stanley and Margaret Beavis, a GP and the secretary of the Medical Association
for Prevention of War, have both criticised the ‘therapeutic milieu’ rationale
for the development. Dr Beavis described the notion that the development would
have a beneficial impact on the mental health of veterans as ‘wishful thinking’.[16]
Stanley went further, stating:
They claim, for example, that the expansion of the memorial’s
displays will have a supposedly therapeutic benefit upon former service
personnel who visit. Medically speaking, that is simply snake oil. They offer
anecdotes in support, but there is no demonstrable therapeutic benefit in
traumatised veterans visiting the display of their former weapons, vehicles or
aircraft. It’s meretricious to suggest so—that is,
it’s superficially attractive but it has no real value, no substance, in any
clinical study or academic test.[17]
Stanley had previously described the case for the
development as poorly articulated and stated that in his view:
The Memorial has not demonstrated that it has suffered any
undue harm to its fabric or, more importantly, its collection. It has not shown
that there is any stated need to increase its space on the Campbell site, or
that it has suffered by any comparison with comparable national collecting
institutions.[18]
Retired senior Royal Australian Navy officer and former Chief
of the Defence Force Chris Barrie has suggested an alternative use for the
development budget. In his submission to the Public Works Committee inquiry he
argued that the money could be better spent on developing ‘a national advanced
brain and mind research institute that is dedicated to becoming a world class
centre of excellence in the treatment of PTSD’. [19]
Another former AWM director, Brendon Kelson, has written
to the Prime Minister stating that the redevelopment should be abandoned and
that, instead, work could be done to extend the AWM’s annex in the Canberra
suburb of Mitchell.[20]
Mr Kelson said in his letter that an upgrade to the AWM’s
Mitchell campus should not exceed $100 million, as the existing infrastructure is
already ‘state-of-the-art’.
Other people have argued that the
redevelopment would provide the AWM with an opportunity to tell the story of
Australia’s frontier wars. During 2013 Brendan Nelson explicitly rejected this
suggestion, stating:
But the Australian War Memorial is not in my very strong view
the institution to tell that story. The Australian War Memorial, as I say, is
about Australians going overseas in peace operations and in war in our name as
Australians. The institution that is best to tell those stories, in my view, is
the National Museum of Australia and perhaps some of the state-based
institutions who are most likely to have whatever artefacts or relics that
exist from this period in our history.[21]
Former AWM employee Richard Llewellyn
published a lengthy critique of the design options for the redevelopment.[22] In particular, Llewellyn
was critical of what he saw as the lack of rigour in the AWM’s assessment of
its future needs:
The
Memorial’s future space requirements are vaguely expressed – essentially an
ambit claim – and seem to be driven mainly by the need to find space to ‘park’
superannuated military equipment taken on from the Department of Defence.
...
The treatment of the options lacks assessment against
metrics, but is subjective (including a subjective assessment against
subjective criteria) and often emotive and evidence-free.[23]
Former director Dr Nelson defended the AWM
against many of these criticisms, pointing out that the AWM has endured funding
cuts similar to many other institutions, and advocated the AWM’s role in the ‘therapeutic milieu for men and women and their families coming to
terms with what they’ve done for us and the impact it’s had on them’.[24]
The current AWM director, Matt Anderson, responded to the
‘therapeutic milieu’ criticisms by telling the Public Works Committee that the
AWM had been ‘told by veterans and their clinicians’ that signing the Tarin Kowt wall
for Australians who served in Afghanistan, has ‘positive mental health benefits’.[25]
Former director Dr Nelson rejects the criticism of the ‘therapeutic
milieu’ aspect of the development:
I note those appearing have derided the notion of the
Memorial being a part of the ‘therapeutic milieu’ for veterans and their
families. It is, and powerfully so. I saw and felt it every single day of my
seven years leading the Memorial. Appreciating it requires both an open mind
and emotional empathy. The Memorial tells stories that hurt, in doing so they
heal. Apart from many powerful stories in support of this, one of the key
drivers of Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS) is meaninglessness. If you believe that
what you did doesn’t matter, doesn’t count—that people neither know or care
about what you did, as a veteran you feel a devalued and diminished individual.
Having ‘your story’ told and proudly so at the Nation’s War Memorial is a very
important part of the solution. Many Vietnam Veterans suffered such emotions
for decades after their return.[26]
An AWM spokesperson responded to Richard
Thwaites’ criticism of the encroachment on the Canberra Remembrance Nature Park
by stating, ‘Any design would consider the natural aesthetic of the area and
would improve the amenity for visitors to the memorial and people seeking to
access Mount Ainslie’.[27]
On 29 June 2020 Mr Anderson also rejected
some of the criticisms made of the development:
‘‘When people criticise the development as saying it’s going
to bring ‘a theme park’ to it, I wonder what it is they’re talking about,’’ Mr
Anderson said. ‘‘Typically when I ask them that question they say it’s the use
of modern technology, bringing in modern fighter jets or Chinook helicopters,
and overpowering what is a serene environment. ‘‘I would argue that every
single item that we have in the memorial right now, including some very large
technology objects like the Lancaster bomber, exist to tell the story of the
individuals who served them, who crewed them, who farewelled them, who welcomed
them home.’’[28]
The Australian Peacekeeper & Peacemaker Veterans’
Association conducted a survey of its members and found that most members
supported the development. In its submission to the inquiry the Association
supported the development arguing that it would ‘deliver social heritage value
to current and future veterans, their families, and all Australians’, and
stating that ‘there is a need to tell the stories of operations much more
quickly than has been done in the past’.[29]
This publication was updated on 22 October 2020 to
reflect developments.
[1].
E Williams, ‘War memorial pushes for $500m revamp’, The
Sunday Age, 8 April 2018.
[2].
S Morrison (Prime Minister), Address to the Australian War Memorial masterplan redevelopment, media release, 1 November 2018.
[3].
S Morrison (Prime Minister) and D Chester (Minister for Veterans’ Affairs), Telling
the stories of our service men and women, media release, 1 November
2018.
[4].
A Rishworth (Shadow Minister for Defence Personnel and Veterans’ Affairs), Address to Australian War Memorial development launch, Canberra, media release, 1 November 2018.
[5].
Australian Government, Portfolio
budget statements 2019–20: budget related paper no. 1.4B: Veterans’ Affairs
portfolio, p. 92.
[6].
B Nelson (Director, Australian War Memorial), Building
the Memorial of the future, Australian War Memorial, 2 November 2018.
[7].
B Nelson (Director, Australian War Memorial), Evidence
to Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation
Committee, Estimates:
Defence portfolio, 20 February 2019.
[8].
D Chester (Minister for Veterans’ Affairs) , Project lead for Australian War Memorial redevelopment announced, media release, 7 March 2019.
[9].
Second
phase of EPBC consultation begins, Australian War Memorial, 2 July
2020.
[10].
The Public
Works Committee Act 1969 allows the Governor-General to refer a
public work to the Committee for consideration when the Parliament is not in
session or is not sitting for a period exceeding one month.
[11].
Australian War Memorial, Statement
of evidence to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works,
Inquiry into Australian War Memorial development project, February 2020, p. 9.
[12].
D Dingwall, ‘Nature park at Mount Ainslie is for remembrance, not cars: advocates’, The Canberra Times, 6 March 2019.
[13].
D Dingwall, ‘War
Memorial retreats’, The Canberra Times, 6 August 2019, p. 1.
[14].
Ibid.
[15].
‘Opposition to War Memorial’s $498 million extensions grows; more
than 80 distinguished Australians sign letter’,
Honest History website, 23 March 2019.
[16].
P Karp, ‘Experts
deride “snake oil” mental health claims for $498m Australian War Memorial
expansion’, The Guardian, 14 July 2020.
[17].
P Stanley, Evidence
to Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Inquiry into the
Australian War Memorial development project, 14 July 2020.
[18].
P Stanley, Submission
to Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Inquiry into the Australian
War Memorial development project, 16 June 2020.
[19].
C Barrie, Submission
to Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Inquiry into the
Australian War Memorial development project, 17 June 2020.
[20].
F O’Mallon, ‘Former
Memorial boss slams upgrade’, The Canberra
Times, 24 June 2019.
[21].
B Nelson (Director, Australian War Memorial), National
Press Club address 2013, Australian War Memorial, 2013.
[22].
R Llewellyn, ‘The
Australian War Memorial extensions: a critique of the design choice’, Honest History website, 24 June 2019.
[23].
Ibid.
[24].
B Nelson, ‘The Strategist Six: Brendan Nelson’, The
Strategist, blog, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 24 April 2019.
[25].
Karp, op. cit.
[26].
B Nelson, Submission
to Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Inquiry into the
Australian War Memorial development project, n.d.
[27].
Dingwall, op. cit.
[28].
T McIlroy, ‘Memorial boss rejects “theme
park” concerns’, The Australian
Financial Review, 29 June 2020.
[29].
Australian Peacekeeper & Peacemaker Veterans’ Association, Submission
to Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Inquiry into the Australian
War Memorial development project, 6 August 2020.
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