The Australian War Memorial accepted more than $830,000 in sponsorship and donations from arms manufacturers over the last three years, including a $28,000 donation for a Remembrance Day dinner last year.
Historians, some veterans and retired memorial staff, including ex-directors, have long criticised the institution’s acceptance of money from arms manufacturers, saying a body designed to commemorate Australia’s war dead should not be funded by companies that profit from conflict.
The criticism has done little to dissuade the memorial from continuing to accept such funding.
Figures released to the Senate show it has taken $803,785.98 in sponsorship funding from Boeing, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Thales since 2020-21, usually to fund special exhibitions.
Boeing was by far the biggest funder of the memorial, providing $350,149 for three exhibitions. It separately gave a $28,000 donation for the memorial’s 2022 Remembrance Day dinner, the figures show, which critics described as “just plain offensive”.
Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, which enjoyed surges in their stocks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, handed the memorial $233,636 and $34,000 respectively.
Lockheed Martin’s money helped fund a $120,000 veteran podcast series examining the experiences of soldiers in modern conflicts, including veterans of the Afghanistan war. The company profited significantly from the Afghanistan conflict, manufacturing the Black Hawk helicopters used extensively there.
The AWM council chair, Kim Beazley, who was appointed in December, said such sponsorship was “important for presentation and events of a special character outside the normal operational budget”.
“Our partnership policy does not provide any direction of content by donors,” he said. “We don’t charge for entry to what is a costly but superb presentation of an important facet of our national life and fulfilling an obligation to acknowledge and respect those who served.”
But the Greens senator David Shoebridge, who obtained the information about memorial sponsorship through budget estimates, said the practice was “deeply troubling”.
“How can the war memorial be consistent with ‘never again’ when it accepts funding from weapons manufactures that literally profit from killing soldiers?” he said.
“The Australian War Memorial should never take money from arms manufacturers who are responsible for the killing of the people the memorial is seeking to commemorate. It’s simple, really.”
The Medical Association for Prevention of War, which campaigns against the memorial’s acceptance of weapons companies’ money, said the contributions from arms manufacturers were small relative to the memorial’s budget. But they allowed the companies to gain valuable corporate branding and media recognition, program and activity naming rights, and invitations and attendance allocations to major ceremonies.
“The paltry amounts that the weapons companies give to the Memorial – about $228,500 total for the last financial year – are a tiny percentage of the institution’s budget, and yet they are sufficient to essentially buy a range of benefits,” said the association’s president, Dr Sue Wareham.
Wareham said she welcomed Beazley’s appointment , given his views on the need to commemorate the frontier wars. But she did not expect a similar change on the issue of arms manufacturing sponsorship – Beazley is still on the board of the defence contractor Luerssen Australia and was formerly on the board of Lockheed Martin.
“It is likely to reinforce the memorial’s deeply inappropriate practice of accepting funding from the very industry that most profits from wars – the weapons industry,” she said.
The former Liberal leader Brendan Nelson, a former AWM director and previous council chair, prompted controversy during his tenure for saying weapons companies had a responsibility to help tell the story of “what is being done in the name of our country”.
Nelson took a role with the arms manufacturer Thales during his directorship and a job with Boeing after his departure.
