This is John Howard speaking to what I hope is a fair proportion of the world from Hobart.
Evidence now before me has altered my thinking significantly on an important policy issue.
I have said before that international terrorists, many of them armed with bombs and five o’clock shadows, have been swarming south from the Axis of Evil in leaky boats with cunning female accomplices and kidnapped compliant children rehearsed in their fraudulent autobiographies, and setting those boats on fire in the hope of better outcomes and the furtherance of their plans to blow up indiscriminately any crowd of innocent people that comes their way in most of our major cities.
I now find this was wrong, and this blood libel on innocent, desperate people I now retract. I am sorry. And all my government is sorry, especially Philip Ruddock, whose assault on the English language he now admits was a crime against humanity for which he will give himself up tomorrow at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The evidence now before me suggests, and largely affirms, another story. That most of the people are true refugees, sometimes from situations too complex for an ignorant Australian official to comprehend in detail across a language barrier. That none of the children were kidnapped, and were loved by their accompanying parents, who sought for them a better world than the one they are fleeing from.
That the boats are leaky because all boats we capture we burn on the beach, in an act of arrogant piracy that endangers the lives of all who come after, who go down to the sea in ships that are cheaply bought and may not survive the voyage. That our attack on the Tampa daunted other vessels from rescue at sea at other times, and people, hundreds of people, therefore died. That our Pacific Solution of tormenting many, many blameless people and their children far from our shores and our news photographers was a waste of money, perhaps no more than five hundred million dollars.
The evidence further suggests that I was wrong, and misinformed, about Woomera. I was misinformed by Philip Ruddock, who has never been there, and lives in a world of his own. It is my belief now that Judge Bhagwati, and even Bob Ellis, are better judges of Woomera because, unlike Philip Ruddock, they have been there, and their assessment of a culture of irrational persecution, emotional torment, beatings, theft, low-level enslavement, routine humiliation and what must be called by its legal definition, child abuse, shames Australia in unprecedented ways before the thinking and watching world.
A couple of years ago, on the opening night of the Olympic Games, I like you was proud to be part of an exuberant, smart and funny and welcoming Australia admired that night, and the following fortnight, by all the world.
Admired no longer. Proud no more.
We have become a country tourists fear, whose Orwellian linguistic renditions of the persecution of the innocent, and the proud embracement of the right to torture, are a laughter and a mockery among thinking people across the world, whose treatment of children evokes the worst of nineteenth century England, and the otiose practices still abounding in Africa and the Asian sub-continent.
I now find this is wrong, and I apologise. My name is John Howard, and this is not my Australia. My name is John Howard, and I say let the children go. Let the mothers go. Let the fathers go. Let the word go forth and the bells ring out and the young intelligent migrants of whatever country feel free to seek their fortune in a better land than those they have fled from. Let them come to Tasmania, where caring neighbourhoods await them, and a civilised people is prepared to embrace them as brothers and sisters and fellow-creatures, fellow-human beings, not supplicant animals weeping and thrashing about in the sea.
In the years to come when we all are asked how we stood at this time, when Philip Ruddock decreed that it was right to imprison children if they came from the wrong country, we will not I think find it easy to forget, not even for a moment, where we stood today on that question, and yesterday, and last month, and last year.
My name is John Howard and I know where I stand, and I know where my feet, if they must, will march.
Philip Ruddock believes that mothers and children of imperfect or unproven origins should be imprisoned and humiliated, and I do not. I believe that we in Australia should be part of the great world and its prevailing ethic of reasonable mercy, and he does not. Philip Ruddock and I are at odds, and history will tell, and tell pretty soon, which of us is in the right and which of us is a cruel and prattling weirdo whose grave posterity will spit upon.
My name is John Howard and I am sorry for these wretched of the earth and these orphans of the sea. Let the word go forth, from this time and place to all nations of the birth today of a new social order in a country that can be proud again.
Let the bells ring out. Let the anthems arise.
Advance a fair Australia.
Realise across its width and length the better angels of our nature. Let the good in us all fly free.
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