David Penberthy: Stop mollycoddling the cowards who abuse our war memorial

Australia’s war memorials are sacred places, deserving of the same respect as Uluru. Whoever desecrates and abuses those places must face the full force of the law, regardless of their skin colour, writes David Penberthy.

It shouldn’t matter whether the people who are using our war memorial as a bar, bed and urinal are black, white, yellow or brown.

It shouldn’t matter that they are members of an itinerant indigenous community that comes and goes between Adelaide and the north of the state. It shouldn’t matter that they have problems with alcohol, that they are poor, that they are unemployed, with no job prospects of which to speak.

The sanctity of this war memorial should mean that anyone who leaves it looking like a dump and a sewer should be met with the full force of the law. Regardless of their race, their level of poverty, whatever other ameliorating red herrings that get thrown out to defend the lack of firm action.

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They haven’t been met with the full force of the law at all.

Barely any force, as far as I can tell, save for the bloke who was pretty much insisting on being arrested when he started drunkenly laying into one of his mates with a pair of crutches while the cops were watching on.

Rubbish left behind on the steps of Adelaide’s National War Memorial. Picture: Supplied

Other than that, the desecration of this monument has been met with the opposite of zero-tolerance policing.

And the discussion we have heard in Adelaide this past week about how to deal with the abject behaviour on Kintore Ave has been a stellar display of angsty, middle-class prevarication, where people in authority have been too busy walking on egg shells to face up to the problem and do what the public demands.

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The public wants this place treated with the respect it deserves. The people who are entrusted with that — the State Government, the city council and the South Australian Police — have failed to meet community expectations.

Adelaide’s National War Memorial has been trashed. Picture: Supplied

I lament the fact that the people who are doing this to the war memorial are indigenous. I am uncomfortable with the way some people have held this behaviour up as indicative of a broader truth about the majority of indigenous Australians, when it is not.

I hate to think what the Aboriginal man going to work or the indigenous mum getting her kids ready for school would have thought as talkback went into meltdown on Tuesday about this issue.

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But there is no point using the foil of race to defend an inexcusable lack of action. The plaintive cry of “it’s complicated” is in no way a justification for letting these people — or any people — act like pigs at such a special place.

But it is this mollycoddling sentiment that actually fuels racial generalisations, in that the vandals are being handed excuses for bad behaviour on the basis of being drunk and dysfunctional, rather than treated impartially and forcefully for behaviour which would see the rest of us prosecuted without a moment’s thought.

Police and ambulance attend Adelaide’s National War Memorial. Picture: Supplied

This war memorial is a sacred place. Not just for white Australians, but all Australians, including the many Aboriginal Australians who enlisted as servicemen.

Places such as the war memorial honour those who made the ultimate sacrifice defending their nation.

Thousands of them almost naively laid down their lives in accordance with the maxim — ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die.

This is the great humbling quality of these memorials, and it is why anyone with a skerrick of sense and humanity is suitably respectful in their presence.

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To that end, it matters not if it is a bunch of youngsters using a memorial as a skateboard, a political protester scrawling anti-war graffiti, a passer-by having a sneaky wee or a group of indigenous folks having a drunken spree.

The rule, for everybody, is that these places are off limits. That rule should be non-negotiable.

The people who are causing all this mess and damage should reflect on the respect that they would rightly demand at their own sacred sites.

A few years back, my wife and I took our kids to Kakadu, where we went through the required protocols to visit a national park that is home to sacred cave paintings. It was a stunning and special place, one that required a respectful standard of behaviour.

Garden beds at Adelaide’s National War Memorial. Pictures: Supplied

From my understanding, not all parts of this place were open to us Europeans, as there were places of special meaning that only certain indigenous people could enjoy.

Fair enough. It’s the same mindset that has seen white Australians, albeit grumpily in some quarters, accede to indigenous requests that we no longer climb Uluru.

I have no problem with that request.

However, these contrasts seem totally lost on the drunks on Kintore Ave.

Of course, the excuse-making riposte to that is to say that it’s because they are so impoverished and addled that such nuances would be lost. We have the right to make the point anyway.

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The shoulder-shrugging adjunct to the “it’s complicated” line is that if you move these people on, they will simply pop up somewhere else.

Well, yeah. Let them pop up elsewhere. Anywhere but the war memorial, thanks.

And if they dare go back and start piddling and chundering over it again, just arrest them.

I am not sure why Premier Steven Marshall hasn’t fired up big-time about this issue.

It is his job to set out the standards we demand on issues like these.

The photograph speaks for itself. It shows the authorities have failed to protect this place from these yobbos.

And hearing the police give their uninspiring account of their tepid response to this outrage, I was reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s line about his plodding civil war General George McClellan, who kept digging in as Robert E. Lee’s confederate troops headed north.

“If General McClellan is not using his army, I should like to borrow it for a while.”

@penbo