By: Barry Soper | Monday, October 29, 2012 6:00 AM

Our Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage is a man who fits the portfolio as naturally as Luigi Peters fits into a roudy restaurant on Wellington's Courtney Place on a Friday night.

Chris Finlayson's a classicist in every sense of the word, from music to literature and from haute couture to pristine coiffeur.

But today this former bristling barrister is going to get down and dirty, he's going to take the cufflinks off, roll up the starched Persil white sleeves and turn the first sod at our National War Memorial Park.

Towering over him will be the Transport Minister, Michelin man Gerry Brownlee who's there because the existing highway will be forced underground at a cost of 75 million bucks and cowering will be the capital's Kermit Mayor Celia Wade-Brown. She'll be cowering because the park's caused deep divisions around the council table.

There's a Green behind the ears element there and at Parliament that feel the expansive park's glorifying war with one councillor going as far as to say it's a black day for Wellington. They presumably have the same view of the war memorials dotted all around the country remembering the 30,000 young men who've lost their lives since the First World War.

And the park will also remember the 300,000 men and women who've served overseas and it'll be built in time to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli where my own grandfather fought with the Otago Mounted Riflemen.

Even though he hated the war and all subsequent dispatches of our young to fight in someone else's battle, he would have appreciated the efforts a hundred years on to remember those who needlessly lost their lives.

But he would also have seen the irony in the RSA catch cry, Lest We Forget.

We may not have forgotten, which the turning of the sod will symbolise today, but unfortunately we do tend to repeat what we would like to forget!