GRANT:
It's my great pleasure to welcome to the show the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard. Good morning Prime Minister.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good morning Luke, good to talk to you again.
GRANT:
And to you, thanks a lot for your time.
PRIME MINISTER:
I'm sorry about the sad circumstances in which it takes place.
GRANT:
Yes indeed, and it really has impacted upon our community. As you could well imagine we all have some way or some connection with many of the people injured, there are still people in hospital that we fear about and of course there are those tragedies of the loss of life. Is it inevitable that this will continue as we do what we can rightly do, take holidays in Asian places?
PRIME MINISTER:
I wish I could say this is the last time an atrocity like this would occur - I'm afraid I can't say that. Bali has become a very dangerous place, but people will have to make up their own minds whether they go there again and I feel very deeply for the Balinese people because they're lovely and they're always very friendly to Australians and Australians like going there. But we are living in a different era now and this fight against terrorism is likely to go on for some years. I can't put an end date on it, I don't think anybody can. We can work as closely as possible with other countries in the region, we can certainly strengthen our own laws and strengthen our own intelligence services and we shouldn't assume that because this has happened in Bali again that it makes an attack in Australia more likely because the possibility of an attack in Australia has always been there and Indonesia is a very different country from Australia and there are a lot of currents and conflicts and groups in that country that don't exist or only exist in a very minimal way in our country.
But it's an unhappy situation. I wish I could say to your listeners, 'well it's all going to be over in a couple of years and this is the definitely the last time something like this will happen' - I can't say that. And I just feel particularly for the people of the Hunter. I know it is a close knit community, I've been in touch with one of my parliamentary colleagues, Bob Baldwin, and I know he's been working with the other members on both sides of politics in the Hunter to help as best they can. And it will hit your community hard and the community work that so many of these people are involved in - I've just read a little bit about it and Bob's told me about it, they are in every way great local people.
GRANT:
Yeah they are. We wouldn't see this first up because it's obviously something that would go across your desk on a daily basis, but is the intelligence you received, of all our forces working against the terrorists, is the information better today than it was a few years ago?
PRIME MINISTER:
It is better; we're getting more of it. But you can never get enough, you know, that's the sad thing. We had no hard intelligence; we had no intelligence in relation to this latest attack. The Indonesians, to my knowledge, didn't, they certainly haven't indicated otherwise to us. You get a lot of rumours when you're living in this kind of environment but we have no warning that there's going to be a bombing. In the past there have been warnings and it has been possible to stop things happening. They don't get publicised because you prevent something occurring rather than being unable to anticipate something that does occur.
GRANT:
How close are we to being as well protected at home as we could be? And I ask you in the light of the fact that we few weeks ago we had a Greenpeace vessel practically hold our harbour to ransom here in Newcastle. How much more work do we have to do to be as safe as we can be here at home?
PRIME MINISTER:
That old expression 'how long is a piece of string'? There is no end to what you can do, but there does reach a point where taking additional precautions is counter-productive. For example we could search every bag of every person who boarded a train, now you could do that but you wouldn't because it would bring the nation to a standstill. There are some things one can't do and that underlines the needle in a haystack challenge that's involved in dealing with an issue like this, and it also emphasises how important it is to have good intelligence arrangements. These things have to be done on a risk assessment basis; you can't search every person, you don't need to search every person because there are only a very tiny number of people who are a threat. You've got to work out ways of finding out who those people are and you not only search them you, where appropriate, perhaps might detain them or put a control order on them which will be possible under these new laws that we have put forward. It's a huge challenge because you could make it impossible for the sort of thing you refer to to ever occur. But the means that have to be employed in order to bring that about would bring the country to a standstill.
GRANT:
Yeah, a lot of us here are feeling pain and this Abu Bakir Bashir keeps getting his sentence reduced in Indonesia. Is there anything you can do about that?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well when that happened last time, we raised that with some anger with the Indonesian authorities and in the light of those reports I'll be instructing our Ambassador this morning, at first light, and Indonesia is two or three hours behind Australia, to raise that issue again because we received assurance from the Indonesian authorities on the last occasion that these automatic remissions wouldn't apply in the future to people in certain categories and it's certainly been put very forcefully to the Indonesian Government that any further remissions, however small, however automatic, however general, given to him will cause very deep and lasting anger in our country.
GRANT:
Yeah, and before I let you go, and again I appreciate your time, are we any closure to capturing people involved in these blasts in Bali, any of the perpetrators?
PRIME MINISTER:
I can't add anything to what's been reported in the media. They are making progress, there are about 25 to 30 Australian Federal Police working with the Indonesian police. I hope that we can make some further progress soon but I can't report anything beyond what's in the media.
GRANT:
Before you go, can you please pass on, or be aware at least that the members of our community, Sharon Grierson and Bob Baldwin in particularly, have done a wonderful job - they've had their offices open most of the time and I just know from the feedback from many of our listeners that they've been very helpful.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well that's good and good on both of them for having done their job.
GRANT:
Prime Minister thanks for your time.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thank you.
[ends]