Deadheads of coal wars aren't worthy of a giant like John Monash

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 5 years ago

Opinion

Deadheads of coal wars aren't worthy of a giant like John Monash

Almost on the eve of the last Anzac Day of the centenary of World War I, with the Australian Prime Minister about to dedicate a major memorial on the Western Front to the nation’s greatest general, John Monash, a small group of malcontents - double entendre intended - decides to  draft Monash’s name into a political argument over … coal!

What a squalid exercise.

What a pathetic moment in Australian history.

To have pulled this stunt, clearly designed to undermine their own prime minister, serves only to prompt the thought that none of the members of the new pro-coal Monash Forum is worthy of licking the boots of a giant like Sir John Monash.

Why, they didn't even have the courtesy of inquiring of John Monash's descendants whether it might be all right to use the name Monash in their cause.

It wasn't all right, it turns out, with seven direct descendants issuing a statement on Wednesday declaring "we disassociate ourselves specifically from the Forum's use of the Monash name to give their anti-science and anti-intellectual argument an air of authority, and we ask that they withdraw the name".

Members of the Monash Forum include Craig Kelly, Eric Abetz, Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce and Kevin Andrews.

Members of the Monash Forum include Craig Kelly, Eric Abetz, Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce and Kevin Andrews.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The signatories to what you'd have to call now the illegitimate Forum, headed by the usual suspects - Tony Abbott, Eric Abetz, Kevin Andrews and Craig Kelly, and announced on Sky TV by Abbott’s non-commissioned officer, Peta Credlin - presume, in their “manifesto”, to be entitled to dedicate their cause in the name of Monash because in civilian life, he was an engineer who in 1921 became the first full-time chairman of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria.

In this role, Monash oversaw the creation of Victoria’s brown coal electricity-generating power stations. It was revolutionary at the time - the Latrobe Valley was the site of the second brown-coal station in the world after Germany.

Almost a century later, the members of the Monash Forum, climate change deniers and sceptics among them, want governments to continue focusing their energy and their treasure on the production of electricity by coal, including brown coal, ahead of alternatives. This is not news.

Advertisement

What is worth considering anew, however, is whether John Monash, an innovator as both a military man and a civil engineer, would want his name associated with propping up a creaking industry that hasn’t evolved much since he chose brown coal to power the state.

Sir John Monash

Sir John Monash

For all anyone knows, Monash - who spent much of his life looking at what was accepted theory and finding alternative solutions - might today have covered the state in solar farms, wind farms, tidal turbines and geothermal power plants.

No one can know: Monash died in 1931.

More than 300,000 people came to pay their final respects, for he had done what no other general of the First World War had come close to achieving.

He had turned away from the tactics of medieval conflict practised throughout most of that hideous war, insisting that his infantry should not “expend itself upon heroic physical effort, not to wither away under merciless machine-gun fire, not to impale itself on hostile bayonets, not to tear itself to pieces in hostile entanglements”.

Instead, his troops would go into battle protected as best he could manage by coordinating artillery, aircraft and tanks.

And at the battle of Hamel on July 4, 1918, he proved his tactics worked. He said he could defeat the Germans there in 90 minutes. It took 93 minutes, and Monash had hot meals sent to his men on the front line.

It is this, and the subsequent battles Monash led that changed the course of the First World War, that will be remembered in a couple of weeks when Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull opens the Sir John Monash Centre at the Australian National Memorial site at Villers-Bretonneux in northern France.

And back in Australia, the deadheads of the coal wars are doing their best to appropriate John Monash’s name and sully Turnbull’s moment in the cause of a factional war within the Liberal and Nationals parties.

Pitiful barely covers it. Squalid gets closer.

Most Viewed in Politics

Loading