Tim Blair

GERARD HENDERSON on the problems

GERARD HENDERSON on the problems facing the Australian Labor Party:

If the ALP wants to work out what went wrong, it should spend some time reassessing the contemporary meaning of the Anzac legend. Here John Faulkner and Robert Ray, watching the Test cricket in the West Indies on a privately funded holiday, may provide some assistance. The Labor senators could report how Steve Waugh and his team participated in a ceremony to mark Anzac Day. It is unlikely that members of a touring Australian cricket team would have involved themselves in such a ritual a decade or more ago.

It's not that previous Test teams were uninterested in Anzac, but that Australians are now more outwardly patriotic than at any time since the Pacific War. For the first time in many years, the Chief of the Defence Force, Peter Cosgrove, is a well-known and popular figure. Indeed, the military has seldom been so admired.