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At the ANZAC Day dawn service in Ngunnawal Country/Canberra on April 25, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese repeated the core of the ANZAC myth; the 8709 Australian soldiers who were killed in the failed 1915 invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey died for supposed national ideals of freedom and sacrifice.

But it is a cynically constructed myth.

The thousands who died at Gallipoli were sent there to serve the imperial interests of the British empire, in a war that was essentially a squabble between European powers over colonies.

Gallipoli was a bloodbath with nearly half a million casualties on all sides, with the greater proportion suffered on the defending Turkish side.

The experience of all the soldiers sacrificed in this imperial bloodbath was horrific and there is good reason to acknowledge this sacrifice.

However, through the ANZAC myth, this sacrifice has been exploited and weaponised by Labor and Coalition governments to justify and promote Australian participation of, and complicity in, subsequent imperial wars.

Many war veterans have never marched on ANZAC Day because of this: they hated war after experiencing its horrors.

These imperial wars include the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the war on Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the Palestine genocide.

Millions have been killed and the proportion of civilian casualties has been rising relentlessly, as the horror in Gaza has brought home to people all around the world.

A common feature in all these wars has been the systematic deployment of racism to justify imperial aggression and brutality. Non-white resistance to the empire was branded subhuman and this buttressed a racist double standard that prevails today.

The death and suffering of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of darker-skinned colonised people is valued less than a single life of a white person.

This is how the corporate media and most politicians justify the genocide in Gaza. 

An Israeli life is worth more than thousands of Palestinian lives (children included). International conventions against war crimes are ignored. Hospitals and schools can be bombed by Israel without being treated as war crimes. Paramedics, doctors, aid workers and journalists may be killed by our imperialist ally Israel and Australia continues to help supply the war criminals with arms.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has even said that under a government led by him, Australia would “do the same” as Israel if October 7 had happened here.

Australian governments have done the same as Israel — with more than two centuries of genocide against First Nations peoples. Numerous punitive expeditions which massacred entire tribes (including atrocities such as babies having their heads smashed against rocks and trees) were justified by a single spearing of a white person, or the killing of sheep or cattle.

The racist double standard even extended to First Nations soldiers who served in the Australian military. After being expected to sacrifice equally, the “coloured diggers” returned to inequality. Many were  into the Returned and Services League (RSL), were never offered assistance and some even denied back pay owed for their service.

There was no acknowledgement of First Nations war veterans in the official ANZAC Day commemorations until . There is still no acknowledgement of the genocidal frontier wars.

The and booing during the acknowledgement of Country at the Naarm/Melbourne and Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide dawn services this ANZAC Day was a graphic reminder of the racist and imperialist roots of the ANZAC myth.

Reports say the heckling was organised by small groups of neo-Nazis, who have been encouraged by the rise of US President Donald Trump’s and other far-right parties around the world.

However, the racism was not just the work of these neo-Nazis.

At the dawn service in the significantly gentrified inner-city Sydney suburb of Balmain, my Kurdish friend and political collaborator, Greens Inner West councillor Ismet Tashtan was racially abused by some members of the local RSL. "Go back to where you came from" and "You have no right to be here," were thrown at him for paying his respects to the war dead. This happened near where he lives and works as a carpenter.

Such incidents on ANZAC Day 2025 are a reminder that rich and powerful forces are ramping up racism to shift the blame for the cost-of-living and housing crises on to “foreigners” and non-white immigrants.

They are a reminder that racism is at the heart of the rise of far-right populism that is dogging the May 3 federal election.