Full text of Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters’ dawn service address at Gallipoli today.
Mai ia tawhiti pamamao, te moana nui a Kiwa, kua tae whakaiti mai matou, ki to koutou papa whenua. No koutou te tapuwae, no matou te tapuwae, kua honoa pumautia.
Ko nga toa kua hinga nei, o te Waipounamu, o te Ika a Maui, he okioki tahi me o koutou toa ki tenei onekura tupuna, e moe, e moe.
From the distant Pacific Ocean, we arrive with humility upon your land. Our footprints and your footprints are joined forever. The fallen warriors of our people and your people rest together within your ancestral soil. Rest in peace.
We meet at dawn at the site of a great battlefield. We meet here to commemorate the ground around us as the final resting place of far too many of our young men.
Turkish, British, Australian and New Zealand men.
Young men on all sides of the battle who never lived to see their respective countries emerge from empire to become strong independent nations.
Fraternal bonds were forged and nations who were once enemies, are now friends. Major General and later President Ataturk’s words to ANZAC mothers after the Gallipoli campaign spoke to that friendship:
“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives…
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.
Therefore, rest in peace.”
We meet at dawn to commemorate the terrible loss of so many lives, yet we cannot hallow these grounds. The men who died here have already made sacred the ground upon which we come every twenty-fifth of April.
What we can do is remember their sacrifice while reflecting on their appalling loss. Gallipoli strongly lives on in New Zealand’s national consciousness because we lost so many young men. Ten percent of our adult males served during the Great War. Their average age was 25 and we lost a fifth of them, many here. Our young country lost so much potential and possible futures on this ground and so many other fields across Europe.
Doug Hill, among us today, is the great grandson of Mrs. Eliza O’Donnell. Mrs. O’Donnell had two sons fight at Gallipoli. One son Jack died here, the other son Bill survived, only to die at Messines. Another son, Edward, lost his leg at Passchendaele. A son-in-law was killed in France.
Anzac Day for Doug, as with all of us gathered here this morning, reveals how our memories link the past with the present, and bind our efforts to learn from history so as never to repeat its worst expression, war.
But standing here at Gallipoli, our words matter less than their deeds. We will never forget what they did here.
Dawn begins each day. Sunrise speaks to the promise of a better day. From a long-ago battlefield to this morning’s promise, we must leave this ground dedicated to making our worlds better. Then the men buried here will not have died in vain.
Yet we live in a troubled world, the worst in memory.
We have emerged from a global pandemic a more divided world. Regional instabilities and the chaos they create threaten the security of too many.
So we must all do more. Demand more. And deliver more.
It took Winston Churchill nearly forty years after the fighting waged across this peninsula, and a second World War, to learn from Gallipoli’s experience to declare, “to jaw jaw is better than war war.”
It was true then. It is true now. Never has diplomacy been more needed to de-escalate conflicts and ease tensions. That is our lesson and resolve when leaving Gallipoli today.
You will create your own memories and draw your own lessons from being here. But we must all come together, as people and as nations, to do more to honour those who paid with their lives.
We must protect and care for our young.
We must reject and resist those who seek to conquer and control.
We must always seek the path of peace.
Then, and only then, will the men buried here not have died in vain.
Winston Churchill and the British empire are war mongers and I am ashamed to be any part of it. My and my husbands grandfathers fought in their bloody wars and were lucky enough to come home. So many others had their lives extinguished and families ripped apart. We will remember them.
Here’s my message to the so called “elites”:
We will not fight your wars, the world wants peace. You make your money by doing some hard work for a change, we, the many have had a gutsful of you and it’s only a matter of time before we come for you. You can ramp up your security, you can dispense with one or several of us, but where we leave there are hundreds, nay thousands most likely millions who will be ready to fill those shoes. Go down to your bunkers and stay there for all eternity you utter parasites.
And on 25 April every year we will remember them. The young men you used as human collateral so you could all profit and put yourselves into positions of power with your lies, your games and your corruption. Judgement Day is coming……very very soon.
We salute your resolve, Sir/Madam.
And yes, we are like the Gallipoli soldiers.
(Not sure if Winston really means what he says).
My uncle, a Spitfire pilot, died during WWII. His sacrifice and those of others, has been betrayed again and again by successive globalist sock puppet party’s, ruining this country. Kowtowing before the likes of WEF, WHO, US/UK and others.
Winston is aligning NZ with the countries complicit in Israels war crimes and genocide. With the countries responsible for the suffering of the average Ukrainian through their backing of the puppet Zelensky. With countries that lied about the reasons for the invasion of Iraq, lied about Syria’s Assad government gassing its own.
I say, screw our traditional allies. They are not a shadow of their former self.
In the words of Gandalf, Winston.
Keep your forked tongue behind your teeth
Nice.
Exactly….they can f*** off and so can NZ Last………
My father was W/O in the No 30 Squadron RNZAF flying in Grumman Avengers. He spoke often of ‘ the bloodthirsty warmonger Churchill.’ The media is hot to canonise the old fool.
Three thousand New Zealand men died at Gallipolli when our population was 1.1 million souls. Another Churchill FUBAR. I doubt that any one of them knew the real reason for their presence there.
Young people are being given a romanticised version of war with the ANZAC Day theatrics now being broadcast and will be ripe for conscription when it happens again. Already so-called AUKUS is laying the foundations for a nuclear powered Oceania and triggering tensions against China – from whence comes just about everything we have in our homes. The US is at present involved in its largest joint exercise with the Philippines since the Cold War in the South China Sea earlier this week. The exercise, dubbed Balikatan, is set to run through May 10 2024 and is said to involve over 11,000 US soldiers and 5,000 Philippine servicemen. The war machine, once set in motion, cannot be stopped. Winston Peters knows the consequences, does not want us in AUKUS, and is playing for time.
There is a group of people in this world who are so mired in their own deception that to keep power over the truth they would reduce the world to ashes rather than face the consequences of their own actions.
I voted for NZF and I consider(ed) Winston to be a force for sanity and good in a country which is fast losing its way in the world.
Imagine my surprise and disgust when I read Peters’ opening two paragraph w**k in an irrelevant stone age language which has no meaning whatsoever outside the tribal meeting house, and which hardly anybody understands even there.
Stop this flagrant anti-New Zealand wokery, Mr Peters.