Those manic user-pays, economic rationalists are at it again with the Australian War Memorial _ memorial, that is, not museum.
They want to charge people to go in. They tried it in 1991 but it was knocked back by the Senate after a storm of protest by ex-service groups.
A confidential report (leaked to soften people up for the fees suggestion) by KPMG Management Consulting warns that the memorial faces a shortfall of $9 million in the next four years.
The premises, of course, are wrong.
The two premises are that government funding should stay the same and that the way it is spent should stay the same.
And moving away from that logical straight-jacket, are there not other things the Australian War Memorial can do to meet some costs. It has successfully got the states to kick in a bit. Now it has to think wider.
For example, it may borrow a leaf from the National Gallery of Australia. Every now and then it has special exhibition which attract an extra entrance charge. Why not have the main gallery free but an charge for the specials?
Another opportunity arose last week when the Land and Planning Appeals Board knocked back the plan to build houses on part of Tuggeranong Homestead. The homestead is where Charles Bean wrote the Story of Anzac, the first two volumes of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, which was the genesis of the Anzac legend.
The ACT Government and War Memorial could restore it and turn it into a Charles Bean centre and charge an entry fee. Bean’s widow left the memorial Bean’s study furniture and other material.
Bean, of course, put the argument why entrance to the memorial should be free. He was, incidentally, its first director.
In the preface to the Story of Anzac he wrote (in December 1920 at Tuggeranong): “”In his search for rigid accuracy the writer was guided by one deliberate and settled principle. The more he saw and knew of the men and officers of the Australian Imperial Force the more fully did the writer become convinced that the only memorial which could be worthy of them was the bare and uncoloured story of their part in the war.”
Bean’s history does that and so does the Australian War Memorial.
The memorial cannot be divided into a free roll-of-honour memorial section and a pay-as-you enter museum. The bits the user-pays people would like to call a museum are not one. They are a memorial in the sense that Bean wrote about in 1920 because they tell “”the bare and uncoloured story” of Australians’ part in the war _ and subsequent wars.
Surely, Australia 80 years after Gallipoli and 50 years after the end of World War II can put away accountants’ logic. Surely, if the memorial was free during earlier periods of depression and recession it can remain free.
The costs of the War Memorial should come out of general taxes alone so there is no impediment for anyone wanting to visit it.
Rather than arming itself with an accountants’ report justifying fees on a false premise, it should articulate a solid argument as to why it should get greater funding _ one that will pass solid Cabinet scrutiny.
Entry fees are a cop out. In the long term they will only result in an off-set in the government subvention and the memorial will be no better off. But the people of Australia will be because fewer people will visit this important part of our heritage and expression of national values.