PRIME MINISTER:
Good morning.
EDWARD STOURTON:
Were you actually with the Prime Minister when this news came through?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes we were having a private discussion in his study, we just started when the news came through?
EDWARD STOURTON:
How did you both react?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well, we were naturally interested in it and calmly ascertained what we could about the facts. We then went and had lunch and Mr Blair continued to be briefed and not surprisingly during the lunch, and as you are aware we had a joint news conference. But as to the details of the British response and the nature of what's taken place, that is of course a matter for Mr Blair and British police to talk about, not me.
EDWARD STOURTON:
I only ask because I mean I imagine it is the kind of news, I mean you went through it all with Bali, course which was much more serious in terms of loss of life, but I imagine it is the kind of news that any Prime Minister absolutely dreads getting.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well of course, but you have a job to respond and to handle the thing in a calm fashion. I have been greatly impressed, as have many Australians with the calm, and resolved response of the British, of the British Government and the emergency services. I think the emergency services here in London have behaved quite magnificently in quite a difficult situation. Sadly, this city has had a lot of experience with bombs going off over the years with the IRA and the like. In that sense there has been a period of preparation for what's happened over the past few weeks, and I am nonetheless very impressed with the quality of the response and there is something that I have learnt from that, which will be valuable back home.
EDWARD STOURTON:
You went to see one of your own citizens which was wounded in the July 7 attack in hospital on I think Wednesday and she said to you, 'Everyone says it's all about because of the war in Iraq, what do you reckon?'. What do you reckon?
PRIME MINISTER:
What do I reckon? Well I reckon so far as Australia is concerned, that we were a target for terrorism long before Iraq. September 11 occurred before Iraq; 88 Australians died in Bali before Iraq; Bin Laden specifically singled out Australia for criticism in November 2001 because of our help in liberating East Timor. Whenever groups associated with Al Qaeda claim responsibility they bracket Iraq and Afghanistan together, yet whenever I am questioned, and I suspect whenever Mr Blair or President Bush are questioned there's never any reference to Afghanistan, with the implication that we shouldn't be there, its always about Iraq. So I think these events are not incident specific, they are the consequence of a mind set on the part of certain people, and I think that we make a mistake if we see them as incident specific and of course...
EDWARD STOURTON:
Well you don't have to believe that one thing caused the other to argue that the two things are linked do you? You don't have to say that Iraq caused this to say at the same time that the link is something which we should discuss.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I am very happy to discuss it, I don't have any problem in discussing it, what I have a problem with is two-fold, is firstly the argument that in some way that a country should adjust its foreign policy because of terrorist threats, no self respecting country can do that and that is the implication of the constant linking of the two - why other would you constantly have the two linked in questions that you have given, and I think the other observation to make is that nobody can get into the mind of terrorist, certainly by definition, a suicide bomber. But what you can do is look at the objective evidence and the objective evidence is that many countries and people were targets long before the coalition operation in Iraq.
EDWARD STOURTON:
Sure, but you constantly hear from the Muslim community in this country people saying well don't know how to prove this, but what happened in Iraq may have fired these people up. Do you accept that that at least is true, that the action of your own Government and of ours in Iraq has made people potentially more sympathetic to these thoughts or ideas, or sort of ideas that drive these people?
PRIME MINSTER:
No I don't I believe that these attitudes and practices that flow from them are based on a perverted ideology and they are not event specific. The terrorists will opportunistically link events for their own purposes, it's a long pattern of terrorists who seize upon events and opportunistically claim that this happened because of that alleged misdeed by a western country. My argument is that whether that misdeed had taken place or not, the terrorist attacks still would have taken place because that is what the objective evidence establishes.
EDWARD STOURTON:
You obviously, I imagine you talked the Prime Minister, our Prime Minister yesterday about the sorts of ideas that are coming up to meet the threat that currently stands, can you give me a sense of which of those you found most promising in achieving?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it is too early yet. We did talk a little about the strengthening of the anti-terrorist laws in Britain, that your Government has under consideration. We'll feed them into our examination which we are conducting in the wake of the attacks on 7 July. I made the observation at the news conference that we essentially have 19th Century legal responses to 21st terrorist century terrorist behaviour. The world has had terrorists for a long time but we tend to forget that, the reality though that they're more lethal now is because of technology and the speed of communications.
EDWARD STOURTON:
But which bits of what you talked about...?
PRIME MINISTER:
Too early, its too early for me to make any specific judgements about that except to say that when something like 7 July occurs, and in any event you need to keep anti terrorist laws under constant review and that's happening in Britain and our legal systems are similar, and we intend to look very carefully at what the British do and if there is something in that for Australia, then we will be very happy to pick it up. Because we can learn from each other, we have very close cooperation, we certainly can learn a lot in relation to the security of our mass transit systems, they're not as extensive, because our underground rail network is not as extensive as London's, but there are nonetheless some similarities and we are very ready to pick up what we can.
EDWARD STOURTON:
Since you are with us, I was wondering whether I could turn finally to a slightly more cheerful subject - well cheerful, depending on which side of the battle you're on - I was think of the Ashes and the First Test.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it was an extraordinary day, 17 wickets in one day, quite extraordinary. This game is long way from over - when you have very low scores in the first innings, you could well have a situation where it ends up getting resolved effectively by the size of the two second innings as England is what, a little over a 100 or so behind - a hundred is not many and if they score a few more this morning and while they've got Peterson they can do that. We could go into the second innings with the two sides pretty equal on runs but the highlight of the match so far is of course Glen McGrath's performance. He in my view, speaking as an Australian, he must join Dennis Lilley and Ray Lindwall as the trio of the three greatest fast bowlers that Australia's produced.
EDWARD STOURTON:
Mr Howard thank you very much indeed.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thank you.
[ends]