Prime Minister Christopher Luxon delivers Anzac Day speech at Gallipoli

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says the “real lesson” of Gallipoli is the importance of maintaining peace.

• Prime Minister Christopher Luxon spoke at the dawn service at Anzac Cove in Gallipoli, Turkey.
• He is the first New Zealand Prime Minister in a decade to attend.
• Tomorrow he will travel to the Vatican for Pope Francis’ funeral.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon pledged New Zealand would never forget the horrors of war in a speech at the Anzac Day dawn service at Gallipoli, Turkey.

He said the “real lesson” of Gallipoli was the importance of maintaining peace.

Luxon said Anzac Day commemorated the “selfless acts of courage that ordinary men committed to save their mates, never knowing that, in doing so, they were writing themselves into the history of our nation”.

He said it would be “a disservice to those whose valour we remember if we forget the real lesson of this campaign: that we should do all we can to prevent anything like it happening again”.

It has been 10 years since a New Zealand Prime Minister visited the battlefields and attended the Gallipoli dawn service.

Luxon’s speech described the moment the sun rose on April 25 and the Anzacs saw the impossible terrain of the peninsula.

“One hundred and ten years ago, on the dawn of this day that we commemorate every year in New Zealand, Anzac troops came ashore here, shoulder-to-shoulder with their brothers from half a world away.

“Some anticipated an adventure far from home,” Luxon said.

“But as the sun rose and the shadows drained from the gullies, it was not adventure that greeted them, but horror.”

Luxon described a “metronome of gunfire and shelling”, which “kept the dreadful rhythm of life in the trenches”.

He said New Zealand had made a “disproportionate” contribution to the campaign and the First World War.

“Some 16,000 Kiwis served here. At the time, we were a nation of just one million people,” he said.

Luxon also paid tribute to Turkish veterans.

“While we remain proud of those who served, we do not glorify what happened here.

“We know too much to do that. Instead, we acknowledge the courage and tenacity of the Anzacs, and we respect the valour of the Ottoman Turks who resisted them.

“Our most decorated Gallipoli veteran, Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Bassett VC, said, ‘Real courage isn’t just an act of daring; it’s carrying on’.

“And carry on they did. On both sides,” he said.

He also thanked the Turkish Government and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for their efforts in protecting and restoring Anzac Cove after a fire last year.

This is Luxon’s second stop on his European tour. Tomorrow, he will travel to the Vatican for the funeral of Pope Francis.

Thomas Coughlan is the NZ Herald political editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the Press Gallery since 2018.