JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister thanks for being with us this morning. The shootings began just after midday. How do you recall how you were told and what happened from there?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I was in Sydney. I was at Kirribilli House and the reports started coming through and at first we didn't quite know how many, we knew it was bad and then it seemed to get worse. I turned on the media and I spoke to my press office and I spoke later that day to the Tasmanian Premier who was then Tony Rundle. And by late afternoon it was clear what a terrible tragedy it was and like the rest of the country I was staggered. And our Parliament, our new Parliament was convened a couple of days later and I went to Canberra. I spoke to Tony Rundle again and I had a news conference obviously expressing the sympathy of the whole country to the people who lost so much. But I then said for the first time that I was determined to try and do something about the gun laws of our country which had made this more likely, it didn't cause it, but it made it far more likely.
JOURNALIST:
We'll get on to gun laws in a moment. But if you can take me back again, the details were fairly slow to emerge for the rest of the public that day. You would have had a greater insight.
PRIME MINISTER:
Not necessarily because in a situation like that the information is coming from the local police and sometimes the media on the spot get the information before anybody else. I'm not saying they shouldn't, it's just that they happened to be on the spot.
JOURNALIST:
When it emerged just how horrific....
PRIME MINISTER:
It was all those expressions one uses of unbelievable, how could this happen in Australia, we're meant to be such a peaceful country, and what made it even more eerie for Australians was that it happened in Tasmania. Now Tasmania has a reputation for being a nice, quiet place to visit. I mean, I don't mean that in a critical sense, in an admiring sense. It prides itself on its friendliness and orderliness and therefore it was all the more shocking. If this had happened in the centre of one of the big cities, you might have thought - you'd still be in shock - but you might have reacted a little differently. Such as Hoddle Street, for example, where a fewer number of people, a lesser number of people but nonetheless a rather more predictable environment.
JOURNALIST:
I was initially shocked at the scale of it as you were but then when I discovered, and when I found out that young Alannah and Madeleine were part of all of that horror, that's when it made me sick to my stomach.
PRIME MINISTER:
Yeah well that was a lasting connection in a personal sense that I had because I saw Walter Mikac on quite a number of occasions and I was involved in the formation of the Alannah and Madeleine Foundation with John Bertrand, who is now the trustee of that. And it's a shocking thing for a young person to lose all of that, his wife and his two little girls. Probably, there were 35 people who died, but in a way Walter's tragedy was a metaphor for the whole thing.
JOURNALIST:
A couple of days later you attended the memorial service, I know from reading that it was an extremely difficult thing for you to do.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well it was far more difficult for the poor people who lost loved ones, but it was a very traumatic occasion for everybody.
JOURNALIST:
How do you console people that ...
PRIME MINISTER:
Well all you can do is act naturally and it's very important when you are dealing with mass grief to be natural and to reach out to people in a physical sense as well as with words. And sometimes the physical reaching out is more consoling and more effective than the verbal reaching out.
JOURNALIST:
What were your initial thoughts about Martin Bryant at the time?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well he obviously was deranged, to use the vernacular. I don't know whether that's the correct medical expression, but in the language of the common man, he was obviously unbalanced, and you obviously don't have sympathy for somebody like that but you also recognise what a convulsed personality he must have been.
JOURNALIST:
Do you think that he somehow, somewhere along the line just slipped through the cracks?
PRIME MINISTER:
Must have, he must have. There's no other explanation for somebody to have the emotional impulses to do something like that to people he didn't know. He knew, in a vague way, some of them but he really didn't know them.
JOURNALIST:
As you mentioned before, you used this to campaign very heavily for gun law changes in Australia. Do you recall how difficult it was, despite what had happened, to get the...
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes, there was some resistance, although the general community was very supportive. It seemed to me that out of this terrible tragedy the moment had to be seized and something had to be done to reduce the number of guns. I mean it just seemed to me to be beyond belief and beyond acceptability that the sort of semi-automatic weapon that Bryant used was available to somebody like him. It just seemed a failure of society's laws and rules that that should happen. And I was determined at a federal level to do everything I could and to use the authority of my office to bring it about. And fortunately we were able to get everybody to agree. Some of the states were more agreeable than others and there were a few pockets of resistance along the way. But Australia is a safer country as a result of those laws.
JOURNALIST:
Do you think if you'd waited another couple of weeks you would have got them through?
PRIME MINISTER:
No, it would have been harder. You had to seize the moment. Every day that went by without something being done, the initial anger would cool and subside and I didn't want that to happen. That's why I said within a day of the thing happening that I wanted to do something about the country's gun laws.
JOURNALIST:
We have spent millions and millions of dollars on the gun buyback scheme. Have those guns been given back by legal Australians that had them legally or by criminals?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well the evidence is there, gun-related deaths, both murders and otherwise have fallen sharply since 1996. Now there's still too many, but they have fallen quite sharply. And both murders, homicides and also accidental or self-induced, the suicide rate has fallen a bit, particularly amongst young males in rural areas. I think that's got something to do with the gun laws. I'm not saying it's all due to that. That's not to say we can't go further, but the average Australian does not need a gun. I have never believed that he or she needs a gun. If you're a farmer, or a policeman, or a security officer - a different matter - you've got a proper reason. But the average person doesn't and the ready availability of guns increases the propensity of people to murder on impulse. Murder is a crime of passion as they say in the books. And if you have guns lying around, people will pick them up when they won't pick up a knife, or a hammer or a tomahawk.
JOURNALIST:
I think your right in terms of those figures apart from handguns. I think is it semi-automatic hand guns that are still a problem.
PRIME MINISTER:
Well look there are still problems, but the point I'm making it that if you look at all the gun-related murders, crimes, they have fallen. So that's not to say we can't go further and there's a lot of work that should be done on a state level on that. But I think we did achieve a great deal, but I still regard the control of weapons in our community as a work in progress, something where more could be done.
JOURNALIST:
What should happen then?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I think the states do need to do more on this front, and I'm not picking on them because many of them were very cooperative 10 years ago and also a few years ago when we tightened the hand gun laws, they were very cooperative. But the control of guns is, we don't licence guns at a federal level.
JOURNALIST:
Just finally, in light of all of those comments, and when you consider that the aim there was to make sure another Port Arthur didn't happen again, are you comfortable, confident that you have done everything you possibly can to avoid another Port Arthur?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I can't guarantee it won't happen. I think it's far less likely and the evidence is there that there are fewer gun-related deaths in Australia over the last 10 years and a significant explanation for that is the tightening of the gun laws following Port Arthur, of that there is no doubt.
JOURNALIST:
And as we commemorate the 10-year anniversary, what are the most immediate thoughts for you?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I obviously think of the people who lost so much 10 years ago. I hope they've all been able, in different ways, to rebuild their lives. Some will have done it more easily than others, that's in the nature of things. Some would have never recovered from it, in a common understanding of that expression. I hope the recall of it and I hope the marking of it in a national sense is of some help and of comfort to them.
JOURNALIST:
Appreciate your time today. Thank you.
[ends]