LAUSR

You can do a lot with $500 million. In November 2018 Labor’s National Conference pledged $500 million to measures to address international refugee pressures – an expensive way, critics suggested, of avoiding division on the conference floor. Three months earlier, $500 million was the projected cost of Project Jetstream, the digital infrastructure Chairman Justin Milne envisaged superseding broadcasting just prior to the implosion of the corporation’s senior leadership – and, again, critics wondered if Milne’s vision of a huge database into which ‘we will pour audio video assets, complete shows, rushes, news footage, news segments and archival footage’ was, fundamentally, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s national mission. And in April $500 million was the ‘gamechanger’ figure to address the threat of climate change to the Great Barrier Reef, much of which was bestowed on a private charity. That last element also remains controversial: if it wins the May 2019 election, Labor vows to ‘claw back’ the money. Five hundred million dollars, it seems, fits the role of big political gesture; it frames emerging models of government, social needs and public expectations; it tests thresholds of accountability. That sum is also the budget allocated to a major, seven-year program of redevelopment for the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra, confirmed in November 2018. There was, unlike some of these examples, no surprise about the AWM’s bid, and nor, said the memorial’s director, Brendan Nelson, any ‘apology’ for it. The AWM’s case, and its cost, had been refined over several years as part of the memorial’s commitment to ‘remain relevant to all Australians’ (the actual plans, which propose demolishing an award-winning extension completed in 2001, were more of a shock). Yet the November announcement enabled Nelson to build on the profile of the fourth Invictus Games, held in Sydney the previous month, for extra flourish. However rhetorical, that link indicates one of the significant ways in which that national ‘relevance’ is now defined. With great publicity, the ‘wounded, injured and ill former or currently serving defence personnel’ from eighteen nations participated in those games, ‘using the healing power of sport to recover, rehabilitate and overcome’. In the closing