‘There’s a madman in Port Arthur’: John Howard relives day mass shooting changed us all

TWENTY years on from Australia’s worst mass shooting, former Prime Mister John Howard relives the day that changed our world.

Chilling call: John Howard has relived the words which alerted he got to the Port Arthur tragedy.

“BOSS, there’s a madman at Port Arthur killing people.”

Those chilling words down a telephone line alerted then-Prime Minister John Howard to the unfolding tragedy of Australia’s worst mass shooting as Martin Bryant killed 35 innocent people and injured another 23 at Port Arthur in Tasmania on April 28, 1996.

The call from Mr Howard’s press secretary was the first of many the newly-minted Prime Minister — six weeks into the job — would take as he switched on the television at Kirribilli House and witnessed the horror as Bryant continued his murderous spree.

On the 20th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, Mr Howard today relived that call and the gun control battle that unfolded in that blood-soaked Sunday’s wake, telling Triple M’s Merrick Watts he knew almost immediately gun laws would have to change, and Australia expected him to do it.

“Thirty-five people dead in remote Tasmania was absolutely horrific. It left the country reeling — reeling was the only way I could describe it,” Mr Howard told Watts.

As the calls continued — from his office, the head of the Australian Federal Police, the then-premier of Tasmania Tony Rundle — talk of tightening gun laws had already begun.

“We (Tony Rundle and I) began to talk on the day it happened about the possibility of tightening gun laws not only in Tasmania but around Australia,” Howard said.

“I remember getting a message from the British Prime Minister, John Major ... several weeks earlier there has been a massacre at Dunblane in Scotland where 27 people had been killed, and he said in his message: “I never thought for a moment that within weeks of that terrible disaster I would be sending condolences to your country for an even greater disaster”.

“I immediately started thinking to myself: This is a greater tragedy involving the use of guns than we’ve ever had before therefore the country will expect their PM to do something about it”

“The individual horror stories — one of those that is sadly recalled is that of Walter Mikac — who lost his wife and two little girls — 35 families and countless friends and others it was tragedy that would never be forgotten and never be erased from the minds of those people.”

The opposition he might face, from his own party, the gun lobby, remote rural communities and his opponents did not deflect him, or the majority who wanted change — across all political parties and levels of government, he recalled.

“The great majority of the Australian public ... wanted to do something, they really did ... there was always strong support for prohibition — there still is,” he said.

Twenty years on, Mr Howard says some of the statistics that came out of tighter gun laws are irrefutable.

“I’m not saying people feel absolutely safe and I can’t guarantee there won’t be some kind of mass murder involving a gun in the future — I can’t do that,” he said.

“All I can do is to point to the irrefutable statistics and that is if you measure a gun massacre by a factor of five in one incident by one person there were 13 before 1996 and there have been none since,” Mr Howard says.

“The greatest human right is the right we have to walk through the streets unmolested and without fear of assault or murder or random attack.”

* Mr Howard’s full interview with Merrick Watts will air on Triple M’s Merrick and Australia show from 4.30pm today.

Originally published as ‘There’s a madman in Port Arthur’: John Howard relives day mass shooting changed us all