PRIME MINISTER
EMBARGOED UNTIL DELIVERY CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
DEPARTURE OF POPE JOHN PAUL 11
PERTH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT 1 DECEMBER 1986
Your Holiness,
It is with some regret that I undertake the task of
farewelling you from our country. For it has been a great
honour to have you as our guest over the last week; more
than that, it has been a great pleasure.
You have visited every Australian State and mainland
Territory. You have made contact with hundreds of thousands
of Australians in all walks of life the young, the old,
the sick, the unemployed; in hospitals and in our homes;
at work in the country, in industries and in universities.
For people of all faiths, and most especially Australia's
large Roman Catholic community, your visit has been an
inspiration and a cause for great joy.
it has been an experience which all of us have found
stimulating and inspiring and which you yourself, we are
pleased to see, have evidently found rewarding.
Your schedule has been an extremely demanding one. Yet you
have retained throughout your freshness and enthusiasm and
your genuine interest in Australian people and their
problems. Your Holiness,
When you arrived in Canberra last Monday you said that you
came to us as a pilgrim, as one who journeys as an act of
religious devotion.
While you have been here you preached a message of peace, of
hope, and of justice. You reminded us of the dignity and
importance of human work. You drew attention to the tragedy
of unemployment. You issued a message of hope to the
Aboriginal people. And you have caught the imagination and
tapped the idealism of our young people who seek peace and
justice in the world.
Australians who have seen you, whether at first hand or
through the media, have been reminded that despite
differences in religious beliefs, political opinions and
material circumstances, we are united as one nation,
basically sharing a common core of ideals, a responsibility
towards each other and an aspiration to live in peace and
harmony. On behalf of all Australians I thank you for the efforts you
have made so willingly and unstintingly to remind us of
those great values.
I hope you leave our shores with a strong conviction that
this is a country prepared to support the cause of peace and
justice.
You leave behind you the impression of a leader committed to
those universal values of peace and justice, and of a man
with an abiding compassion for all people.
Your Holiness,
On behalf of all Australians I wish you a safe return to
Rome and every success in your continuing endeavours for
peace and for the betterment of mankind. -i