E&OE..................
Well thank you very much Michael Thawley and Deborah. To you Vice President and Lynne Cheney; Mr Secretary of State Colin Powell and your wife Alma; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and your wife; Secretary for the Interior and Secretary for Agriculture; your Honours, and we are particularly honoured to have two serving members of the bench of the United States Supreme Court with us tonight; other very distinguished guests; and most importantly of all friends of the relationship between Australia and the United States.
When I think of the relationship I can't do any better than sort of imagine this evening. A beautiful balmy evening. This could be Sydney or Brisbane or Perth in January or February. It's a glorious balmy evening and it's a wonderful opportunity for me to say to you Michael thank you for tonight's hospitality, to say to our American friends that of all the people with whom we relate around the world, of all the nations that we value and whose friendship we cherish, there's no relationship more natural, more easy and one more deeply steeped in shared experience in common aspiration for the kind of world we all want our children to grow up in than the relationship between Australia and the United States.
And I will have an opportunity tomorrow to talk to your President, a man whose values I admire and in many ways share, a man whose aspirations for his own society are very similar to many of my aspirations for the Australian community, a man whose undoubted leadership of the free world and the leader of the most powerful democratic nation and the most powerful economic nation on earth is very important to all of us. I look forward to meeting him. I look forward to exchanging some views about not only our bilateral relationship but what we feel in common about the future of our globe.
But it's great to be in America. It always is. I admire your country. I respect and salute its contribution to civilisation, its contribution to the democratic way, and I thank all of you very warmly for the honour that you've paid to me but more importantly the honour you've paid to my country which I love so dearly, in being here tonight. And I would like to propose a toast to something that we all feel for very strongly and that is the friendship of the people of America and the people of Australia. Can you join me in honouring that toast? To the friendship of the people of Australia and the people of America.
Thank you.
[ends]