My fellow Australians. I have just telephoned the Leader of the Australian Labor Party Mr Rudd and conceded that the Coalition has lost the election. I congratulated him and his party.
I would like to thank those who voted for us, my staff, and Coalition candidates for the magnificent effort they put in over the past six weeks.
I thought until yesterday that the polls had got it wrong or if they had got it right that there would be a last-minute change and voters would ultimately turn back to the Coalition.
I now realise that I was wrong. I thought that the only thing that mattered was the economy. Provided the economy was going well, a government would not be voted out of office, I thought.
I now realise that, to the Australian people, other things mattered.
So I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to Coalition voters for losing office.
When the Coalition was elected to office in 1996 I said there were more things that united Australians than divided them. That, obviously, is no longer the case. I promised that I would bring trust back to public life. That turned out to be a non-core promise.
We should not have followed America into the illegal war in Iraq based on shonky, doctored intelligence without UN approval. I should not have subscribed to the view that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when UN inspectors had found no evidence of them.
I should not have accepted George W. Bush’s assertion that Saddam Hussein was housing Al-Quaida terrorists when anyone with any knowledge of the Middle East knew they came from different sides of Islam and were enemies.
I apologise for making Australia a less safe place and the world a less safe place for Australians because of this war.
I would also like to say sorry for making Australia a meaner society through the Government’s treatment of refugees, for suborning poor Pacific nations into complicity in this mistreatment, and for the waste of $1 billion of taxpayers’ money in keeping the hapless refugees off-shore.
I also now realise that I should not have used flimsy, unsubstantiated evidence of refugees throwing children overboard for cheap political point-scoring.
The Government should not have put a proposition to the High Court that a refugee could be locked up indefinitely.
The Government should not have politicised the upper echelons of the Public Service, thereby denying it frank and fearless advice that would have benefited all Australians.
I should not have said in the lead-up to the 1996 election that Medicare would remain unchanged and then later systematically forced most people into private health insurance on the pain of an extra levy.
I should not have led a scare campaign against the obvious best model for a republic, thereby keeping Australia at the symbolic apron strings of the English monarchy for more than decade longer than needed.
I came too late to understanding that symbolism matters in Indigenous affairs. I should have walked across the bridge with Peter Costello.
I realise now that I should have nipped Hansonism in the bud on the very day she made her divisive, racially inspired speech to the House of Representatives. I realise now that it was not good enough merely to disagree with her but defend her right to say it. I and my ministers should have repudiated the poison point by point.
I should not have said publicly that the Liberal Party was a broad church while doing my best privately to shut out anyone who did not share my social conservatism and economic radicalism – denying people of talent and integrity a full roll in the Government.
The Government and its ministers now acknowledge the hypocrisy of condemning Keating Labor’s “great big whiteboard” of sports rorts and huge spending on government advertising, only to go several steps further with the Regional Partnerships Program and spending several hundred million dollars on thinly disguised propaganda over Work Choices and other government programs.
On the economy, we now acknowledge that Australia’s fortunate economic position is largely due to the resources boom and other factors in the world economy as well as the excellent work of the Reserve Bank. Governments of all persuasions have made economic mistakes in the past but both major parties now understand and practise good economic management these days.
Government’s only role is in Budget policy. I now regret handing out large tax cuts, instead of investing in infrastructure, because these merely added to inflation and higher interest rates – and voters now seem to understand this.
I only belatedly realised the importance of dealing with climate change. I should not have listened to the vested interests of the coal and nuclear industry who put their selfish profits ahead of the common good. I should not have smothered contrary views even in my own Cabinet. We should have ratified Kyoto and been a leader in solar and wind energy development.
We got the balance wrong on civil liberties when dealing with terrorism and immigration as the cases of David Hicks, Muhammed Haneef, Izar ul-Haque, Cornelia Rau, Tony Tran and others clearly attest.
We should not have enacted Work Choices without a mandate and it should not have been so unfair that the even Government had to re-introduce a fairness test.
I should not have put the interests of my wife and children in refusing to move to Canberra in 1996, thereby putting hundreds of public servants to inconvenience to travel to the seat of government in Sydney.
And if we had not been so secretive with government information the media and the public service might well have warned us of the errors I have mentioned and saved us.
Finally, I leave it to the Australian people to judge whether my apology is genuine or if — in aggregate — I am only sorry about these things because if I had not made these errors then I would be settling in for a further three years in office instead of being the defeated Prime Minister and, by the look of tonight’s count, probably the defeated candidate for the seat of Bennelong as well.