ANZAC Day is a day of great privilege as a mayor, getting to play a bit of a role in the most special of days. 

This ANZAC Day was an extra-special one for me as I was invited to give an address at Lowburn, while my brother Murray McMillan read the Ode. I gave the same address at Clyde earlier in the day and it is copied below if you want to have a read.

I always feel that the chance to speak at events such as this should not be taken lightly and that if you are given the chance to say something, you really should actually say something. I was motivated in this year’s address by two conversations that I had had in the weeks preceding.

One was a comment made in a meeting with a fairly angry chap during which he told me that there was no such thing as democracy in New Zealand as leaders like me and those in Wellington don’t do what people want them to do. 

The reality that you can’t make all the people happy all the time appeared to have eluded him, but what made me bristle was the nonsense that we don’t have democracy in New Zealand. We do, and we are blessed to do so, and I feel it an insult to those who came before us and a danger to those that are to come after us that people like this guy devalue what we have to the extent to claim it doesn’t exist.

The other thing that got me thinking was someone saying to me that apparently President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has two $15m yachts, set around a premise that the west shouldn’t really be supporting him if that’s what he’s doing with the money. I mean, seriously? 

Firstly, where would he sail these things, given Ukraine’s only available bodies of water, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, are Russian Navy lakes and secondly there is probably nobody more likely to receive a sniper’s bullet in the world while sunbathing than he? It’s hard to fathom how this can’t be seen by some as misinformation, but there you go.

Hence my plea for people to critically question what they are told. 

I have a tip on that; if someone starts a story with “apparently” or even better “I have it on good authority”, set your BS detector to High because what is about to be said is probably shaky at best. 

I can’t remember how many people told me a few years back that they had heard from a brother who had a cousin who was married to a high-ranking police officer (or similar) who said Clark Gayford definitely had a Home D bracelet or got the nanny pregnant. 

In regard to the last one, I loved it one day when someone told the line about the nanny and an old bloke next to me said “he’s a slow learner because he got her pregnant last year too”. 

We now know, and should have then, that these were just ugly rumours, told so many times that they became seen as truth. And that’s bloody dangerous to all of us.

Here's my address from the day below, I hope you enjoy it:

As we meet this morning, there are as many reasons for attending as there are people here. Some will come to remember those they served with, many will be here to pay thanks to those people who came before us and sacrificed so much so that we can live our blessed lives in this incredible place, and some will be here to do those things but to also cast a worried eye to the world we live in today and to say a prayer or give thought to the hope that the peace filled lives most of us have lived will stay that way.

I am not sure I have ever lived in times where the world situation is as troubling as now. Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine has turned into a war of attrition that has no end in sight. Similarly, bloodshed in Israel/Palestine has shortened the fuse on the powder keg that the Middle East has been for generations and closer to home, geo-political tensions between the US and China, especially around Taiwan, seem to relentlessly march in only one direction.

It's got to the point where watching the news has become such a grim undertaking that sometimes I find myself switching off.

And that is a problem, because as our need to be informed, as our need to get as clear as possible an understanding of the challenges our world faces becomes even more vital, our news media is dying around us. And what is replacing it? Rumours, gossip and opinions; a boiling mess of misinformation that is a malignant growth that will thrive in an environment without proper journalism.

As we gather here today remembering and commemorating our past, we must stand strong to protect our future, to protect the democracy that is the foundation of all we hold dear, and as part of that, we must make sure we each ensure we are informed, not misinformed about the world around us. We must all constantly question and challenge the misinformation that threatens our very way of life.

In 1924, one hundred years ago, Adolf Hitler was in a prison cell writing his manifesto Mein Kampf. In that litany of hatred he wrote “What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.”

What better way to honour those who have sacrificed for us than we all today commit to thinking, to making the effort to be properly informed not by opinion and rumours but by fact, and that we recognise that in doing so, we are in our own small way fighting for the democracy that those who came before us fought so hard and gave so much for, the democracy that is the foundation of our fortunate lives, the democracy that that we must never take for granted.