by John Howard
It didn’t add to the taxpayers’ burden. There are fixed running costs for official residences, irrespective of how frequently they are used; the overall staff establishment of the two residences was lower than for my predecessor, and the earlier practice of overseas visitors staying at Kirribilli had largely been abandoned before I became PM. Our children lived with us at Kirribilli until going their different ways, quite a few years later. It was a very happy time in our family life.
Early in July 1996, Janette was diagnosed with cervical cancer. It shocked us both, with the strain and anguish for her being enormous. She underwent a major operation on 28 July, and after weeks of convalescence was able to resume what might loosely be called her ‘public duties’ in October. She was an amazing example of strength in handling a huge personal medical problem. She never lost her hope and optimism and continued to be totally involved with me in the challenge of my still-very-new responsibilities. Her illness, quite literally, immobilised me for a few days. Although the exact nature of Janette’s illness was not made public at the time, most assumed that it was cancer. Paul Keating rang to express his concern. The greatest inspiration I drew from this traumatic time was the profound unity and affection of our family. My three children rallied behind their mother in a way that must have contributed to her sense of optimism. Their love would have steeled her survival instincts. They were terrific.
All five of us remain grateful to God and to good surgeons that Janette emerged from her illness and operation with a very positive prognosis. Like so many others who have passed through such an experience, she came out of it with altered priorities. To her the future was about focusing even more on the welfare of her children and our relationship with them, in recognition that those relationships are the most important and enduring ones that life delivers. She also committed herself to an active level of involvement in helping organisations involved in cancer, particularly forms of cancer affecting women.
Economic issues had dominated our early months in government but two events, completely uneconomic ones, were to interrupt the early focus and themselves become intertwined in the aftershocks from each event.
22
SEIZING THE DAY ON GUNS
On 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant, a psychologically disturbed man, using two weapons — a semiautomatic Armalite rifle and a semiautomatic SKS assault weapon — killed 35 people on a murderous rampage in remote and eerie Port Arthur, Tasmania. Formerly a desolate penal colony in the early years of the nation, it was a popular tourist destination. The murders on that quiet Sunday shocked Australia and the world. It was the largest number of people who had died in a single series of incidents at the hands of one person. The whole nation reeled in disbelief for weeks afterwards.
The Tasmanian Government and police had the primary responsibility for dealing with the aftermath of the shooting, although there was no doubt as to where the ultimate responsibility would lie. The scale of the massacre gave it a national dimension. Tony Rundle, the Tasmanian Premier, rang me at Kirribilli House a few hours after the slaughter had occurred and asked that I come to Tasmania as soon as possible, visit the scene of the mass murder and associate myself with his government’s response. Even at that preliminary stage, we briefly discussed the adequacy of Tasmania’s gun laws. Although banned in some states, the weapons used by Bryant were not banned in Tasmania. Gun laws in Australia were then a hodge-podge, lacking both consistency and uniformity.
In one of my headland speeches, on 6 June 1995, I had argued for tougher gun laws in Australia, having for some time believed that we should do all we could to avoid going down the terrible American path, where the ready availability of firearms of all descriptions was directly responsible for the very high murder rate in that country. Although I knew that laws on the availability and use of firearms were exclusively state responsibilities, except in relation to imports, the scale of the massacre gave me pause to reflect. I began to give thought to the possibility of a national initiative to tighten those laws.
On Wednesday, 1 May I visited Port Arthur with Tony Rundle; Kim Beazley, the new Opposition leader; and Cheryl Kernot, the Leader of the Australian Democrats. It was a time for full bipartisanship. It was a bleak experience, the sheer loneliness of the place emphasising the horror of what had occurred. I then attended an emotional memorial service at St David’s Cathedral in Hobart. After it had finished I met many of those who had been involved in helping the victims, including a Dr Bryan Walpole, who had attended to the most seriously wounded. He broke down when speaking to me and, spontaneously, I embraced him. As a public figure, the most helpful response one can provide is the natural spontaneous one. Hesitancy and awkwardness only aggravate the grief of the person who is looking to you for support.
These experiences in Tasmania strengthened my instinct that the moment should be seized, and something done at a national level to toughen our gun laws. After returning from the memorial service, I spoke to the media and indicated that I was prepared to look at significant tightening of the laws, including a prohibition on automatic and semiautomatic weapons, which would cover the weapons used by Bryant. That evening I met advisors and senior staff at the Lodge to discuss this and other matters. At one point my chief advisor, Grahame Morris, pulled me aside and said that there had been press enquiries as to the extent of my commitment to prohibition. ‘Are you really serious about the semiautomatics?’ Morris asked. ‘Because if you are not, now is the time to make that clear, on a background basis.’ I told him that I was and that the press should understand my willingness to use the authority of my office to bring about a really big change.
Stricter gun control was not an easy issue, especially for the Coalition side of politics. There was plenty of support from the Labor Party. The NSW Premier, Bob Carr, was a strident opponent of the free availability of guns and was to prove one of my strongest backers. The two problem states were clearly going to be Queensland and Western Australia, both of which had Coalition governments.
For a limited number of people in rural Australia, firearm restrictions would be very hard. Mostly farmers, they clearly needed weapons for the operation of their businesses. Apart from the practical aspects involved, many deeply resented the possibility that as perfectly law-abiding citizens they should be caught up with a blanket prohibition made necessary by the actions of a madman. Then there were the numerous sporting shooter groups, dotted around the country, all of which saw what I had in mind as, at the very least, a huge pest but more menacingly a threat to their recreational activities.
I made some fascinating discoveries about gun ownership amongst my ministerial colleagues. That most mild-mannered and law-abiding Deputy Leader of the National Party, John Anderson, had a veritable arsenal. People like him were not the problem, but if we were to be taken seriously in seeking a blanket ban, he would have to give up most of his store of weapons. He did so with grace and goodwill, but that was not the case with many other dyed-in-the-wool Coalition voters, who saw what I was doing as the insensitive, kneejerk reaction of a city Liberal who did not understand country people.
Equally, however, many country people who had used guns on a daily basis from early in their lives did not understand the sense of fear and insecurity which a mass murder of the type carried out by Bryant produced amongst Australians living in our major cities, who had never held a gun. This applied particularly to urban women. My proposal certainly produced a hostile reaction in some country areas, but it also brought forth passionate approval in many other parts of the country.
From the very start I had, as PM, maintained my normal habit of walking to engagements when I was in the city, be it Sydney or any other state capital. In the days following Port Arthur, on several occasions people stopped me in the streets and, having made it plain that they had never voted for me in the past and were unlikely to do so in the future, nonetheless were emphatic that I was doing the right thing on guns and, for their children’s safety, should stay with it. I spent a goo
d deal of time talking to leaders of farming and other rural organisations, as well as Coalition colleagues in the states, in an attempt to gauge their reactions and persuade them to back tough national action. For many of them it was a painful issue. They wished to help, they knew the feeling of the nation, but it was their members and supporters who would be most directly affected. The Queensland Premier, Rob Borbidge, was a case in point. Politically it was harder for him than any other state premier, and at the cost of storing up later problems for himself, he was extremely helpful. I remained grateful for that.
The Government’s position, endorsed by cabinet on 6 May, was that there should be a total prohibition on the ownership, possession, sale and importation of all automatic and semiautomatic weapons. There would be other aspects, but that was the essence. I was determined that this would not be an ambit claim. That was what we wanted. Of course we had to get the states on side. There was to be a police ministers’ meeting in Canberra on 10 May.
For urban Liberals this was all relatively straightforward. For National Party MPs and rural Liberals, things were altogether different. It was going to get hard for Tim Fischer and John Anderson. They were both courageous in backing me so strongly on firearm restrictions. I never forgot. It was a prime example of the Nationals putting the good of the Coalition ahead of their own immediate political gains. It was one of the reasons why I would become impatient with those Liberals who begrudged some of the concessions I made to the Nationals on policy questions dear to them. There had to be give and take in the Coalition.
Daryl Williams, as Attorney General, chaired the police ministers’ meeting. There was a lot of opposition from the Western Australian minister, Bob Weiss, who, with Russell Cooper, the Queensland Police Minister, were most resistant to the prohibition that I had in mind. I was on hand in Canberra in the expectation that a personal involvement might be necessary to get them across the line.
Williams reported to me in the early afternoon that it was all a little too difficult, and that I might have to settle for something short of what we wanted. I was determined not to do this, not only because I thought the prohibition was essential public policy, but also because of the strength of public feeling on guns. The nation had been left numb by the Bryant slaughter and it expected the newly elected Prime Minister, with a huge majority, to do something about it. The general public was not too fussed about the federal/state or constitutional niceties. To them there was a problem and the Prime Minister should fix it, particularly as he had raised the possibility that he might do so.
I met the police ministers and, through a combination of persuasion, cajolery and — always a winner with state governments — an offer by the Commonwealth to substantially fund the gun buyback, which would be needed to implement the prohibition, agreement was finally reached. The agreement included a ban on automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns and a nationwide approach to registration and licensing. It covered the importation, ownership, sale, resale, transfer, possession, manufacture or use of the weapons targeted by the ban.
The senior bureaucrat advising me, Daryl Smeaton, expressed astonishment at the outcome. His advice had been that what the Government wanted was too ambitious and that I should settle for something a little less comprehensive. I felt an enormous sense of elation at what I had done. Within a few short weeks of becoming Prime Minister I had brought about a huge change in Australia’s gun laws in response to an unbelievable tragedy. I had been able to use my office in a constructive and effective fashion to bring about something which the overwhelming majority of the Australian people thought was good for the country. There was an ongoing cost involved, and the pain flowing from that was to be felt within the Coalition parties, particularly the National Party. It was to reverberate for many months and feed into another completely unrelated event which had yet to break upon the Australian political scene.
On the evening of that historic meeting in Canberra I flew to Melbourne to attend the first of the three Prime Minister’s Olympic dinners which I would formally host in the time that I was in the Lodge. My mood at the dinner was a mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration. It had been difficult, but we had won the right outcome, and I knew that the Government would be seen by most Australians as having put the public interest ahead of everything else. Media reaction, including from sources normally quite sceptical about me, was most complimentary. A big blow had been struck for a safer community.
If I had entertained the idea that the police ministers’ meeting was the end of this matter, I was completely mistaken. As the implications of that decision began to be understood, resistance, particularly through branches of the Liberal and National parties, began to grow. I was to have several testy party room meetings when a variety of members raised objections and argued that my goal could be realised whilst at the same time granting certain exemptions for rural people generally, and sporting shooters. I took an uncompromising line, knowing only too well that once a concession was made, more would be demanded and, in the end, the whole scheme would unravel.
One proposed change involved a process called ‘crimping’ — the disabling of a semiautomatic weapon so that only one shot at a time could be fired without reloading. The argument was that people who had crimped their weapons should be allowed to keep them. It was claimed that the AFP thought that this could work. So I asked that the army have a look at it. Shortly afterwards Grahame Morris rang and said, ‘It took the army blokes all of half an hour to reverse that crimping, boss.’ I would not agree to an exemption based on crimping.
Farmers had to have access to certain weapons for their daily activities. These were defined as covering other than semiautomatic or automatic weapons. Details of that nature were finally bedded down and in a way that most people appeared to accept, and they were not seen as weakening the central thrust of the original decision.
Despite the agreement of the police ministers, it was touch and go with two of the states, especially Western Australia, as to whether all the features of that ministers’ agreement would be legislated. The Commonwealth had no constitutional power beyond imports. I didn’t, therefore, try to stop a newspaper story suggesting that if all of the states did not come on board, the Commonwealth might hold a referendum to obtain the power to pass laws in its own right. Given the feeling of the nation, that was a referendum which would have been carried. Thankfully, that never eventuated. I would have done it if necessary, but a lot of division would have ensued, and it all would have been on our side of politics.
The gun buyback proved to be hugely effective and despite some erosion of the national agreement, it has by and large survived. More than 700,000 guns were removed and destroyed, or one-fifth of Australia’s estimated stock of firearms. The equivalent figure in the United States would have been 40 million guns.
Most importantly, gun-related homicides in Australia have declined noticeably since the introduction of the national laws. According to research from the University of Sydney released in November 2006, the prohibition has been successful. The research concluded: ‘Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms were followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearms deaths, particularly suicides. Total homicide rates followed the same pattern. Removing large numbers of rapid-firing firearms from civilians may be an effective way of reducing mass shootings, firearm homicides and firearm suicides.’1 Separately, the Australian Institute of Criminology found that gun-related murders and suicides had fallen sharply since the 1996 moves. In 2002–03 Australia’s rate of 0.27 gun-related homicides per 100,000 was one-fifteenth that of the United States. 2010 research published in the American Journal of Law and Economics found that our gun buyback had cut firearm suicides by 74 per cent, saving 200 lives per year.2
On this issue, the psychology of Americans and Australians is utterly different. Only two months after our national agreement, I hosted a dinner at Admiralty House in Sydney for Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, a
nd William Perry, the Defense Secretary, who were, with Alexander Downer and Ian McLachlan, attending the annual Australia–United States Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN) talks in Sydney. They questioned me about these new gun laws, expressed admiration for what Australia had done, but made it clear that even amongst the more anti-gun-inclined Democrats, there was no appetite to attempt something on that scale in the United States. There was even less prospect under a Republican Administration.
In March 2008, former President George H.W. Bush hosted me at his library in College Station, Texas, before a gathering of several hundred friends and supporters, who gave me a very warm welcome. That was until I was asked to name the things of which I was intensely proud from my time as Prime Minister. I cited national gun-control laws as one of my prized achievements. This produced an audible gasp of amazement from the audience. They were good-humoured but nonetheless made their views on the subject abundantly clear.
I made one big mistake in the handling of this issue. That was to wear a bullet-proof vest when I addressed a rally of angry opponents of the measures in the Gippsland area of Victoria. The local police had received a quite explicit death threat directed against me, and both Grahame Morris and my AFP detail advised me to take no chances. My initial instinct, which I should have followed, was to reject that advice, but, it being very early days in my prime ministership, I decided to play it safe. I was wrong to have done so. We all overreacted. I felt instantly embarrassed when I saw the vest bulging inside my sports jacket during TV footage of the event. I still feel that same embarrassment to this day whenever I see the footage replayed. I have never worn a bulletproof vest on Australian soil since. I didn’t feel scared when I addressed that Gippsland rally, nor indeed at any other gathering I spoke to in the whole time I was in public life. I have great faith in the essentially non-violent character of the Australian people.