Subjects: Christmas Day; Exodus Foundation; Drugs.
E&EO ……………………………………………………………………………………
BACIK:
Mr Howard, good to talk to you again and happy Christmas to you and your family.
PRIME MINISTER:
Merry Christmas to you and all of your listeners and it’s great to spend a few moments with you.
BACIK:
John, today, in fact as we speak, people will be travelling all over the country, hither and thither, thousands of people here with me this morning at the Exodus Foundation – people looking for friends and family and a way to celebrate Christmas. What do you remember growing up as a kid in Sydney as your Christmas?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well my Christmas was like millions of others for my fellow Australians. As a kid it was always Christmas lunch at home with my mother and father and four older brothers with people calling in during the day. In the evening always went to my paternal grandparents home when they were alive. Dad was the eldest of nine children so he had quite a large extended family and that was a tradition that continued way until I was, I guess, in my early 20s even long after my grandparents and indeed my own father had died. We tended to gather as an extended Howard family. Of course in more recent years with my own children and everything we have a gathering on Christmas night with my brothers and their families which is rather nice. It’s a tradition that’s sort of carried on to the next generation and the one thereafter. Now that is a very typical story. There’s nothing unusual about that.
BACIK:
Did your mother do the roast on those hot, distinct Christmas days when it was 35 degrees.
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh yes all of those and we would think our throats were cut if there was any suggestion that that wouldn’t happen. I often reflect at what a mammoth task it was with a husband and four sons for my mother but she wouldn’t have wanted it otherwise because having the family around her at Christmas time was very important to her as it is to millions of people. We are creatures of habit but we’re also people who like our own at Christmas time. I always feel that people who don’t have a lot of family and a lot of friends need special help and that’s why something like what Bill Cruise does – he’s fantastic – because it extends the gift of friendship and company to people on Christmas Day. And there’s nothing more lonely than to feel out of it when everybody else is together and has got people around them. Loneliness is one of the greatest threats in a big city and Sydney is a big city and anybody who makes a humane contribution to reducing loneliness and giving people comfort is to be greatly admired and Bill’s done that for a long time and through his foundation. And so many other people do the same thing and good on you Bill, you’re a true practical Christian.
BACIK:
Was the Howard family, I mean I grew up in what I call a pagan family and I don’t think I darkened the door of a church except for one funeral until I was about sixteen, and even on Christmas that wasn’t part of my culture because my family didn’t get into it, was that a thing for you?
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh no I grew up in a church going family.
BACIK:
So Christmas Day?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, we’d go to church. When I was a younger person we from the local church we’d go carol singing around the streets of Earlwood where I grew up and we would sing carols and drive some people made I suppose with our bad singing.
BACIK:
Did that give you a taste of public performance?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I didn’t get rave notices for my carol singing I can assure you of that. But we’d sort of get in, you’d sing carols outside somebody’s home and they invite you in for supper. It was a bit of a ritual in the 1950s doing that kind of thing with church groups. It was good fun. You’d often go all night and you’d be a bit exhausted the next day – sometimes the wisdom of that was questioned by the parents of some of us who did it but that was the sort of thing that I did. That was more when I was a teenager, not so much when I was younger. But my own family will have been to church on Christmas Day. I’m not an every weekend church attender. I’m a spasmodic church attender but I still regard that as an important part of my life. It’s something that I always see religious belief and practice as an intensely private thing but it is important and certainly Christmas Day is something where church attendance – some kind of worship – is an element of it, an important element of it as is the coming together of your family. That’s a fantastically important element of it and I’m very grateful to be able to spend Christmas Day with my wife and three children and my wife’s mother who’s getting on now but still a great character and a wonderful part of our family and an enormous source of encouragement to me and my wife and our three children.
BACIK:
John, just talking about the spiritual, religious part what I think people find it amazing here in Australia is, I mean right now we have three if you count the Democrats and some people do but yourself, Kim Beazley, Meg are all quite willing to acknowledge themselves as being Christians but it’s not something that you ever hear used like the Americans.
PRIME MINISTER:
No, we’re a different kind of people. We’re not as …
BACIK:
You don’t get nailed by the journalists walking into church like say Bush or Gore or even Clinton.
PRIME MINISTER:
No, no, it’s a different …
BACIK:
What do you put that down to? Are we less cultured?
PRIME MINISTER:
We’re just a different people. We are more, I guess, private and sceptical and introspective on those sorts of things and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad sort of thing. I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. I think religious belief and practice is a very private thing and its really your behaviour and the way you relate to people in the end that is the outward sign of how you conduct yourself. I don’t seek to force my personal beliefs down somebody else’s throat. I’m not in your face about it. Other people are different and I respect their right but we do have a different culture. We’re not as, we don’t publicly parade religious belief in this country in the same way. I don’t think it means that we are any less a spiritual nation – we just do it differently.
BACIK:
It’s interesting though, in America I think Leo Schofield quoted in the paper last weekend that an American guy came and saw the decorations in Sydney and said oh wish people a happy Christmas whereas in America they can’t say happy Christmas – they have to say happy holidays because of political correctness.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well that is stupid. But yet side by side with that an American President will always end his speech with God Bless America. An Australian Prime Minister wouldn’t do that – not because he may lack religious commitment, it is just we are different in that sense. I think it has something to do with the influence of the pilgrim fathers and the overtly religious origins of the United States.
BACIK:
Rather than say that they started as a pilgrim colony, we started as a penal colony and I don’t think the Archbishop of Canterbury probably sent his top three churchman to Australia in the three boats.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I’ll stay out of that but it’s just different. I think there is that greater deposit of Celtic reserve in this country which means that people tend to internalise these things. And I don’t think that’s bad. I think we’ve come a long way. People talk about their feelings more now than they used to and that’s a good thing but I wouldn’t like, and I don’t think Australians would feel comfortable with the externalities of religious profession that is the habit of American leaders. It’s a different country in that way and viva la difference.
BACIK:
John, what’s the best Christmas present you ever had as a kid, can you remember?
PRIME MINISTER:
Oh I guess something to do with the next cricket bat – as you might expect. I had a happy childhood. I was lucky I had very good parents and we were happy family. I guess the Christmas after my father died – he died just before one of the Christmas’ when I was sixteen – that was a pretty ordinary one, clearly the most ordinary of the ones I recollect as a young person. We weren’t over indulged but my parents were always very thoughtful in relation to Christmas presents. But the thing I enjoyed most about Christmas, as I do now, is having all the family around you and being able to see a few people you don’t get the opportunity of seeing at other times of the year. Now there’s nothing unusual about that. Some people will say that’s a very ordinary view of Christmas. Well if it is, so be that. It’s ..
BACIK:
But it’s something – the pressure of politics.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it’s what matters to most Australians and I think we should sort of, cease sort of searching for some extraordinary depiction of Christmas or extraordinary definition. We are all in the end people who like to have those who mean most to us around us at important times. And yeah, it will be very good for me to have the Christmas period with my family but it’s the same with so many other people and I want Australians to have Christmas’ that they feel comfortable with. I want them to have it with their families and I do feel for those people who don’t have families and who don’t have close friends. And there are a lot of people, particularly in the cities who are lonely and loneliness is an awful thing for anybody and even more so at a time when everybody else is celebrating.
BACIK:
I warned you that I wasn’t going to ask any political questions and I’m not, but if you could be Santa to Australia today, on Christmas Day, so taking away tax cuts ‘cause that would be a political question, what would you like to give Australians that …
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I’d like to give the young of Australia a drug free future. If I could think of one single thing that would improve the horizons, lift the horizons, is to find an even more effective way of persuading young people not to indulge drugs in the first place. Now there are many things you do when people do indulge drugs – you chase down these appalling people who live off the weakness of others and you try and rehabilitate people but even more important than that you’ve got to find a way of discouraging young people. Now that would mean more to me and would be more positive for the future of Australia than just about anything I can think of off hand.
BACIK:
Well let’s work on that together.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeah, OK.
BACIK:
John, a happy Christmas to you and Janette
PRIME MINISTER:
Happy Christmas to you. Thank you.
BACIK:
and your family and on behalf of all the people here at the Ashfield Uniting Church Exodus Foundation, we wish you and your family the best.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I thank Bill and, no pun intended, his crew for the tremendous work they do. It truly is great. Merry Christmas to all of you and I hope the day you spend together brings some cheer and happiness to you.
[ends]