I personally think it was the Howard government playing dog whistle politics to appeal to racists and xenophobes.
I grew up before Anzac Day was considered such a big thing, when it was looked upon like Remembrance Day: an occasion to reflect on the tragedy of war. This is how I still think of it, and as I get older the sacrifice of so many young men seems even more tragic to me. But the 'revival' of Anzac Day and its politicisation began well before the Howard years (1996-2007), and the institution of the Anzac Day game (1995) before the Howard government is one indicator of this.
I've mentioned in another post an interview that Malcolm Fraser gave a few years ago, where he talked about how odd it would have seemed if he had gone to Anzac Cove on Anzac Day during his leadership, and yet Bob Hawke during his prime ministership did just that. Those Hawke-Keating years coincided with a whole range of 50-year anniversaries from the Second World War, and Keating in particular invested quite a bit of politics --and taxpayer money-- in the remembrance of Anzac. He hardly ignored WWI (e.g. tomb of the unknown soldier), but his own emphasis was on WWII and Australia's engagement with the Asian region during that war, which also suited his broader political agenda at the time. No Prime Minister before Keating had talked more about Australia's war past and its importance to the present, and initiatives like the tomb of the unknown soldier and the 'Australia Remembers' campaign underscored the message.
None of this denies that Anzac was also used by Howard, who drew upon it for his own political purposes, but my point is that the changing nature of Anzac Day long precedes him. Maybe a few hundred people used to attend the dawn service at the Shrine in the early 1980s, but they were attending in their thousands before Howard became PM in 1996, which suggests to me that Australia's relationship to its war history had been changing for quite a while.
I tend to agree that it is commercialised hype, but it's Collingwood's commercialised hype and we love it.
It's pretty hard to deny that the Anzac Day game is commercialised, but my own view is that the commercialisation of it doesn't diminish the occasion or render it meaningless. Cultural events can be exploited by commercial interests and yet remain culturally significant. For example, I'm one of those naive types who still thinks of football as something more than a profitable (for some) form of entertainment. I know people are making wads of cash from football, and the hype which accompanies their money-making rarely fails to nauseate me, and yet --in my worldview-- the Collingwood Football Club and the game itself manages to transcend this. The game remains 'more than a game'.
In a similar way, the promotional hype of Channel 7 shouldn't be allowed to define the significance of the Anzac Day game, and it doesn't define the importance and meaning of the occasion for the thousands of people who contribute to it. To put it another way, the significance of the Anzac Day game runs deeper than the hype which surrounds it.
Now it's time for coffee.