Australian Government departments and agencies usually put a lot of work into their Annual Reports, even if few people read them. Defending Country does.
The rules for the Australian War Memorial's Annual Reports are contained in the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013, administered by the Department of Finance. A few years ago, the rules under that Act were tweaked to require departments and agencies to strip their Annual Reports of corporate puffery and glittering photographs.
There was then an incentive for departments and agencies to decant the puffery and pictures into separate documents. Hence we have the War Memorial's Annual Report 2023-24, lean and hungry and recently tabled in the Parliament, and its Year in Review 2023-24, much thicker, landscape format, with lots of handsome illustrations, and some testimonials from visitors to the Memorial.
To what Purpose?
We recommend both volumes. Meanwhile, having two of them to hand allows us to check for inconsistencies. The inconsistency we detected previously between the Memorial's Corporate Plan 2024-28 and Strategic Plan 2023-28, is still present between the Annual Report and Year in Review. It is still mystifying, despite a tweak:
Memorial Annual Report 2023-24, page 7:
Purpose
Drawing from the functions of the Memorial as described in the Australian War Memorial Act 1980, the purpose of the Australian War Memorial is to commemorate the sacrifice of those Australians who have died in war or on operational service and those who have served our nation in times of conflict. [Emphasis added]
Memorial Year in Review 2023-24, page 3:
Our Purpose
To commemorate the sacrifice of those Australians who have died in war or on operational service and those who have served our nation.
Those first emphasised words in the Annual Report 'Purpose' clause - referencing the Act - are new compared with the version in the Corporate Plan. The second lot of emphasised words, 'in times of conflict', do not appear in the Year in Review 'Our Purpose', just as they do not appear in the Strategic Plan 'Our Purpose'.
So, the Memorial is still happy to spruik two different Purposes, one with a legislated basis, the other without.
We described the potential effect of that inconsistency in our 9 September post:
[W]e can legitimately ask whether this clause as worded ["Our Purpose" in the Strategic Plan and the Year in Review] means the Memorial has a plan to extend its area of interest to people "who have served our nation", but not in times of conflict. This might cover ambulance officers, doctors and nurses, firefighters, police, schoolteachers, or even school-crossing supervisors.
Caption clanger
There are always errors in corporate documents, no matter how hard people work on the drafts and redrafts. Some of these errors are trivial, others not so much.
One error leapt out of the Year in Review. On page 32, there is a photograph of six of the ten members of the Memorial's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group. According to the caption, the second person from the left in the photo is member Ms Lorraine Hatton OAM.
It is actually member Ms Marianne Atkinson, whom the caption shows as 'not pictured'. It is not Ms Hatton.
Ms Hatton was recently appointed to the Memorial Council. She also escorted the King and Queen when they viewed the For Our Country installation in the Memorial grounds. The miscaptioning is thus a surprising error.
Defending Country contacted the Memorial on 8 November about the Hatton-Atkinson error but there was no response before deadline. We are happy to print any belated response.
Picture credit: RAAF contingent, official opening of War Memorial, 11 November 1941 (AWM)
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