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TRANSCRIPT: Port Arthur 20 years on

FULL 'I had to act' John Howard on Port Arthur

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MELISSA DOYLE: A national leader, fresh to the job, is alerted to a catastrophic incident unfolding on his watch - a murderous attack is under way, a huge number of people are being killed. What is he going to do? In many ways, Port Arthur was John Howard's 9/11, an unexpected, shocking assault on his citizens, a dreadful loss of life and a nation suddenly feeling very afraid and vulnerable. Next week, Australia will mark 20 years since Martin Bryant massacred 35 people at that former penal colony in Tasmania, and we will do so knowing that the likelihood of it happening again has been dramatically reduced because of landmark gun laws brought in after the atrocity. Tonight, the inside story of how Australia was disarmed. We've gathered together key figures, each dramatically affected by Port Arthur, and who turned that blackest of tragedies into a profound purpose - a father who lost his wife and girls, survivors who lost friends, a paramedic who saw it all - and how they directly and indirectly inspired a new prime minister to take action. As you will see, the worst of times can bring out the best in us.

JOHN HOWARD: We were facing, and the nation was facing, a massacre of unprecedented proportion.

(GUNSHOTS)

MAN: There's somebody going crazy shooting people here.

(GUNSHOTS)

JOHN HOWARD: This was the largest number of people who'd been killed by one individual in a single murderous act in the history of mankind.

(GUNSHOTS IN THE DISTANCE)

JOHN FIDLER: Why is a good-looking young kid doing this? I...I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I knew it was real, and I couldn't take my eyes off his eyes as he was walking towards us. But I couldn't believe that it was happening in Australia.

WALTER MIKAC:: For me, after Port Arthur, there was a long time where I thought, “I don’t… “There’s no-one else in the world that feels the way I do.

PARAMEDIC: I was told that the person that goes into the Broad Arrow won’t be the same person that comes out again. And, um, it was…true.

JOHN HOWARD: And this had happened in OUR country, and it had happened in this lonely, desolate former penal colony of Port Arthur in Tasmania.

JOHN HOWARD: These are your three golfing friends who died?

JOHN FIDLER: They were. Uh…

JOHN HOWARD: Uh, just give me their names?

JOHN FIDLER: This is Kevin Sharp.

MELISSA DOYLE: They’re a group of people with very different and very searing defining experiences of Port Arthur.

JOHN FIDLER: And this is Ray Sharp, who was Kevin’s brother.

JOHN HOWARD: Yeah.

MELISSA DOYLE: They’re stories of dreadful loss, survival and leadership.

JOHN HOWARD: How long had you been married?

FATHER: At that point, 10 years.

MELISSA DOYLE: The people in this room have another thing in common – they’ve all done their bit to ensure the awful events of 20 years ago won’t happen again.

FATHER: For me, it’s still hard to actually believe that it really did happen, that it COULD happen here.

MELISSA DOYLE: This is the story of how each played their part to transform the nation and make it safer.

JOHN FIDLER: What you did with the guns, it was magnificent.

JOHN HOWARD: It certainly is better and safer.

MELISSA DOYLE: Where you were you on that day, the day of the Port Arthur massacre?

JOHN HOWARD: I was at Kirribilli House. I’d only been prime minister for a little over six weeks.

(PHONE RINGS)

JOHN HOWARD: I got a phone call from my press office to say this terrible thing was unfolding, and I flicked on the television coverage, and of course, I watched with horror the events.

NEWSREADER: A siege is under way in the Tasmanian town of Port Arthur.

JOHN HOWARD: A massacre on, you know, an unbelievable scale. And from the very beginning I started thinking to myself, “I have got to do something about this.”

WITNESS: A man was firing indiscriminately into tourists and other people down at Port Arthur.

JOHN FIDLER: When the shooting started, the first explosion, I thought, “That was a shot.” Look, I couldn’t see him, but Gaye and I had been to Knott’s Berry Farm in the States and a couple of cowboys jumped on the train and started firing blanks, so the initial thought was that this was going to be a re-enactment.

(GUNSHOTS)

MAN: Just stay inside. I’m pretty sure someone’s got a gun. In fact, I’m bloody positive of it.

MELISSA DOYLE: John Fidler and his wife, Gaye, were inside the Broad Arrow Cafe
at Port Arthur with their friends, Kevin and Ray Sharp and Walter Bennett.

JOHN FIDLER: As he was walking towards us, he was firing. That’s when he hit Kevin and Wally and Ray. And then I froze. I was terrified. I just couldn’t move. I was watching his eyes. I couldn’t take my eyes off his. And when Gaye said, “Oh, something’s hit me,” I turned around and I could see a bit of blood on her shoulder, starting to come through her white shirt. So then I pushed her down under the table and went down on the floor myself.

GAYE FIDLER: As John pushed me down under the table, I said to him, “Oh, the man behind me hasn’t got a head.” And with that, I sat up again, and I said, “Oh. It’s Ray.” Now, how I knew it was Ray I don’t know. I hadn’t seen what he was wearing or anything like that. And then of course, the others under the table told me to shut up, which I did,
and just lay down very quietly. But when I went back down, John had a rope cut… ..like a rope cut across his forehead, which turned out to be a shot…a bullet that had gone through Kevin’s arm and put part of Kevin’s body matter on John’s forehead. And the bullet shell was right near his head. And instead of saying to him, “Are you alive?” I said, “Are you dead?” Which was a silly thing to say, but you’re just not even thinking.

(GUNSHOTS)

JOHN HOWARD: How could this happen in Australia? This is terrible. And a madman who’s gone amok in a situation where people are just going about their daily lives, enjoying themselves, visiting a tourist resort, lunching, out with their families on a Sunday. It’s just the sort of thing that you never believe might happen in your own country, certainly not Australia, which, although we’d had massacres, nothing on this scale. Nothing that remotely resembled this.

GAYE FIDLER: I can’t remember breathing, because he was standing over us. We closed our eyes. I know I closed mine.

JOHN FIDLER: We didn’t move. And we were covered in body matter and blood and… He must have just thought I was dead, turned around and walked away.

MAN: There he is. He’s over there. I can’t believe it.

MELISSA DOYLE: Bryant walked away. But outside the Broad Arrow, many more would be in the firing line.

WOMAN: He’s getting into a yellow car.

MELISSA DOYLE: By the time his killing spree had ended, 35 people were dead, many more injured.

JOHN HOWARD: I remember late in the day I got a message from John Major, who was then still the prime minister of Britain, and he said that just a few weeks earlier, they’d had the massacre in Dunblane in Scotland.

REPORTER: Of a class of 29, 15 children and one teacher lay dead.

MELISSA DOYLE: Another child would later die in hospital.

JOHN HOWARD: And I thought, “Gee, this is even worse than that.” And he said in his message, “I never thought that any massacre in your country “would go anywhere near what had occurred at Dunblane.”

MELISSA DOYLE: And like the Dunblane Primary School massacre, children were targeted.

MAN: This man’s lost his wife and two children! A bit of human sympathy, please!

WALTER MIKAC: Having gone to the site to see them, you know, that’s not something
you’d wish on your worst friend – to see them as they’d fallen. There’s nothing left to your imagination as to what happened. Look, my immediate response
then was… ..I really just would have been happy to go with them at that point.

MELISSA DOYLE: Walter Mikac became the face of the tragedy. His wife, Nanette, and daughters, Alannah and Madeleine, came to ymbolize the senselessness of this grotesque rampage.

WALTER MIKAC: How was one person able to cause all this? How could that possibly be? How could not one person intervene, do something, stop? My initial reaction was, “I feel cheated by the world “and I don’t want to have anything to do with the world again.”

(SOPRANO SINGS ARIA)

JOHN HOWARD: It was an awful trauma, his wife and two dear little girls murdered. It’s…it’s heart-wrenching. And he wasn’t the only person who suffered, but his loss was colossal. And when little children are involved, that takes you to the zenith of grief and anguish.

PETER JAMES (PARAMEDIC): He shot the three-year-old first ‘cause she begged him not to kill the kids. And he did that to just make her suffer first, and then shot her, and then tracked the six-year-old around the back of the gum tree. That’s how evil he is. You know, and he still is. The two girls were the same age as my two boys. With trauma, it seems that you see those two kids as being your kids. And I came home and I still remember saying to my wife, “How could someone do that to our sons?” And it’s just not in our make-up to have the concept of how anyone could do that.

MELISSA DOYLE: Peter James was among the emergency crews confronted by death and injury of a scale none had ever seen before.

(MACHINE BEEPS)

MELISSA DOYLE: He was, and is, a paramedic. These days, he travels where he’s needed with Tasmania’s Flying Doctor Service. Back then, he had the awful task of accompanying police to each and every scene of death.

PETER JAMES: I’ve seen one old lady, she’s looked up and he’s got her right through the forehead. You know, just people in mid-stride, you know, with burgers still in their hand. I didn’t eat wedges for years, because so many people had wedges. Stephen King couldn’t write a novel like it.

MELISSA DOYLE: Port Arthur may be 20 years ago, but the images and experiences still haunt him.

PETER JAMES: I remember the biggest shock to me down there was one of the bodies was… his feet was uncovered and he wore the same shoes as my dad wore. And this is where people from especially the southern area of Tasmania would go for a picnic on Sunday afternoon. And I HAD to move that sheet and make sure it wasn’t my dad. And it just was a flash moment, that sort of, “Oh, my God.” Those sort of things burn their way into you. And you don’t forget things. It’s just graphic. There was an innocence lost.

MELISSA DOYLE: As the emergency crews dealt with the carnage, friends and families dealt with the shocking loss, John Howard was already thinking about a dramatic and definitive response.

JOHN HOWARD: I was shocked and I was angry, and my immediate reaction, apart from feeling for the people the sense of… I shared the national grief and outrage that this had happened, but I immediately thought to myself, “Hang on. You’ve just been elected prime minister with a huge majority.”What are you going to do about it?”

MELISSA DOYLE: And when he encountered those directly affected at memorial services at Port Arthur and Hobart two days later, he resolved to act.

JOHN HOWARD: I laid some flowers at a memorial in Port Arthur, and the place was gloomy, desolatethe pall of death, the feeling of tragedy hung around. The newspapers and television were just full of it – the photographs of these poor people who’d lost their lives.

(CONGREGATION SINGS)

JOHN HOWARD: And then I went to a memorial service at the cathedral in Hobart. I reacted as any person would. It had been a dreadful experience. I remember going back to Canberra that night and having a meeting at The Lodge with some of my closest advisers, and I said, “Look, we have really got to go ahead with a total ban. One of my advisers quite rightly said, “Well, if you’re not serious “and you feel you can only go a certain distance, “then now is probably the time to indicate that.” And I said, “No, I want to go the full distance.”

PETER JAMES: He was a pathetic example of a human being. It’s a shame that people of value are taken down by worthless, worthless souls. And to me, he’s one of them. These are people and they’re not forgotten. They still matter to people. And he doesn’t. He’s an absolute nobody. No. But they do. They… You know, they’re, um… They, um…they still,
you know, live in our… They live in the hearts of the people that loved them. Don’t you start crying.

JOHN FIDLER: I don’t believe anyone should have guns other than the farmers, to…..a single shot to destroy sick animals. I had a .22 rifle that was my father’s. As soon as this happened, I couldn’t get rid of it quick enough, and I did.

MELISSA DOYLE: Was it our tipping point?

JOHN HOWARD: Often it takes a terrible tragedy to bring a nation to a point where it changes direction on something, and this was… this was what happened, and it was a challenge to my government.

MELISSA DOYLE: The prime minister had made up his mind to press for a ban on automatic and semiautomatic weapons, but he needed to convince the states and territories of his plan.

JOHN HOWARD: They know that I want this scheme. They know that I’m very strongly
committed to it. We’ll sort it out in a fair and reasonable fashion.

MELISSA DOYLE: John Fidler was already lobbying key figures.

JOHN FIDLER: I couldn’t stand by and see three of my mates murdered and not do something about it. We couldn’t sleep. And I just lay there thinking, “Who can help me? “Who can get rid of guns?” And the only person I could think of that I might be able to get to was Jeff Kennett. I went and saw him when I got back from Tasmania. I was still in the same clothes that I had on down there. He had to see me in the state that I was in.

JOHN FIDLER: John. Good afternoon.

JEFF KENNETT: Mr Kennett.

JOHN FIDLER: Good to see you again.

JEFF KENNETT: Pleased…

JOHN FIDLER: Very, very pleased to see you.

JEFF KENNETT: You look very well.

JOHN FIDLER: Well, I’m in much better shape than when I saw you last time in this office.

JEFF KENNETT: Yeah.

JOHN FIDLER: He said to me, “John, you can’t get those guns here in Victoria.” And I said, “I can put my car on the boat, go to Tasmania “and get those and bring them back here.” That made him think seriously then. He got things moving from there on.

JEFF KENNETT: A gun-free environment is a much happier environment.

MELISSA DOYLE: The Victorian premier would be a key ally in John Howard’s campaign to convince other state leaders to change their gun laws. Walter Mikac would be another key figure.

WALTER MIKAC: It was the flight back to Melbourne from Tasmania. I thought, “Look, I’m gonna just write a one-page letter “about the impact of this on me, “and, for what it’s worth, I’m gonna send it off, “have it faxed off to the prime minister when I get to Melbourne.” That letter started, “Dear Mr Howard,” you know, “As a father, I’ve lost my children, I’ve lost my wife at Port Arthur, “and I plead with you to do something about the gun laws “that allowed this to be able to happen.”

JOHN HOWARD: Despite his immense grief, he looked ahead. He was willing to publicly support gun control measures. And he didn’t – as he was entitled to do – totally disappear and retreat into his grief. His grief was obvious and intense and unrelenting, but he was able to say, “Well, this is what we ought to try and do as a society,” and that was, uh… you know, impressive.

WALTER MIKAC: My brother said, “It’s John Howard on the phone.” I thought he was
having a lend of me. It was incredible. He said, “Look, I really want to thank you for the letter “and I’d like to read it at the police ministers’ meeting, “because some of the states don’t really… “..are a bit reluctant to make these laws happen.” So I said, “Yeah. I mean, that’s the whole point. “We need to harness the emotion of the time “and actually make change happen.”

JOHN HOWARD: Are all the press here? And anybody else? (CHUCKLES) Bit of room over here.

WALTER MIKAC: Thank goodness, you know, that was able to occur.

JOHN HOWARD: I’m very happy to announce that the Commonwealth and the states and territories have agreed on a uniform and much tougher approach to gun laws. It is an historic moment.

MELISSA DOYLE: The PM prevailed. The federal government would fund a massive buyback of guns and the states would enact the tough new laws.

JOHN HOWARD: I think what we’ve done today is magnificent.

MELISSA DOYLE: Many in regional Australia were outraged.

MELISSA DOYLE: Did you ever fear for your life?

JOHN HOWARD: No, I didn’t.

JOHN HOWARD:..serves the greater good of…
(HECKLING)

JOHN HOWARD: In Gippsland, the local police had advice from somebody that he intended to shoot me, and that was passed on to the Australian Federal Police and to me, and the suggestion was made I wear a bulletproof vest. And I at first said, “No, I’m not gonna do that,” and in the end, my then chief of staff and good friend – still remains a close friend of mine – Grahame Morris, said to me, “Boss, how am I gonna explain to Janette “if somebody really does kill you? “You put that” – expletive deleted – “thing on!” And I did. And I felt foolish afterwards, because I didn’t feel unsafe. 650,000 to 700,000 guns were bought back. I feel it was one of my government’s great achievements.

JOHN FIDLER: Our sister-in-law is walking down the street and there was a guy walking up the street with a gun. And she rang. She said, “Don’t come down to Heidelberg. “There’s a bloke with a gun.” But he was taking it back to the place to have it destroyed. We thought that was one of the best things ever.

JOHN HOWARD: I can remember a lady stopping me in Pitt Street a couple of months after, and she says, “I wouldn’t vote for you if my life depended on it, “but you were absolutely right in what you did on guns.”

GAYE FIDLER: Other world leaders have never done what you did.

JOHN FIDLER: It was brilliant. It was the best thing ever.

WALTER MIKAC: Thanks, Mr Howard.

WALTER MIKAC: Potentially hundreds of people who are alive today around Australia who wouldn’t have been if those gun laws weren’t enacted.

MELISSA DOYLE: I found a quote where you said, “People used to say to me, “You violated my human rights by taking away my gun.” Tell me your answer to that.

JOHN HOWARD: My answer to that was, the greatest human right we all have is safety and to go unmolested about our daily lives without fear of arbitrary murder or assassination. What can be a greater human right that that?

MELISSA DOYLE: John Howard is a big supporter of the work done since the tragedy by Walter, John and Gaye in establishing the Alannah & Madeline Foundation. It helps children who are the victims of violence and bullying and relies heavily on donations
from the public. I’m also a patron of the foundation. There is a link on our website.