Good evening. My name is John Howard and I’m speaking to you from Sydney, Australia, host-city of the year 2000 Olympic Games. At this important time and in an atmosphere of international goodwill and national pride, we here in Australia, all of us, would like to make a statement before all nations. Australia, like many countries in the New World, is intensely proud of what it has achieved in the past 200 years. We have a vibrant and resourceful people. We share a freedom born in the abundance of nature, the richness of the earth, the bounty of the sea. We are the world’s biggest island. We have the world’s longest coastline. We have more animal species than any other country. Two-thirds of the world’s birds species are native to Australia. We are one of the few countries on earth with our own sky. We are a fabric woven of many colours and it’s this that gives us our strength. However, these achievements have come at great cost. We have been here for 200 years, but before that there was a people living here. For over 40,000 years they lived in perfect balance with the land. There were many Aboriginal nations, just as there were many Indian nations in North America and across Canada, as there were many Maori tribes in New Zealand, and Incan and Mayan peoples in South America. These indigenous Australians lived in areas as different from one another as Scotland is from Ethiopia. They lived in an area the size of Western Europe. They didn’t even share a common language. Yet, they had their own laws, their own beliefs, their own ways of understanding. We destroyed this world. We often didn’t mean to do it. Our forebears, fighting to establish themselves in what they saw as a harsh environment, were creating a national economy. But the Aboriginal world was decimated. A pattern of disease and dispossession was established. Alcohol was introduced. Social and racial differences were allowed to become fault-lines. Aboriginal families were broken up. Sadly, Aboriginal health and education are responsibilities we have yet to address successfully. I speak for all Australians in expressing a profound sorrow to the Aboriginal people. I am sorry. We are sorry. Let the world know and understand that it is with this sorrow, that we as a nation will grow and seek a better, a fairer and a wiser future. Thank you.
S2 E3Reconciliation
S2 E4IOC Man
Tell me about the Bolivian soccer team.
Beaten 2–nil by Poland on Saturday. Got home yesterday. Last night the goalkeeper was shot.
Shit!
Shot.
Oh, come on, John. That’s a bit old hat, the corrupt IOC delegate.
Old hat? Gina, in the scientific world when they see that something is happening again and again and again, repeatedly, they don’t call it old hat. They call it a pattern.
Christ. I suppose it’s possible one day somebody might ask me a question about sport.
Oh, you won’t get a question about sport, Gina. No chance of that. Very old hat, sport. No-one will ask you about that. Every Olympics has got sport. The thing that differentiates the Australian Olympics, Gina, is that it’s going to be paid for by Australians.
[Repeated line]
Good news!
All of those trees we planted were uprooted and blown away in last week’s hailstorm.
I take it you’re not telling me this in order to demonstrate the awesome power of nature.
Well, who will be announcing we're not going to replant the trees , he asked rhetorically?
The Minister wants you at his office.
Ah!
Now.
Did he specify if I was to bring my own sword or will I be falling on one provided by the Minister?
[After angrily reversing his car into the garage wall]
Now why would you put a wall in there?
Well, this will be a moment of excitement. I’ve never actually met the Minister before. I've only ever seen him on television. Normally just his smile and maybe a tiny bit of his lawyer.
Good to know, Bill, that the IOC is well off for fully functioning photocopying machines. Photocopying whatever it is you photocopy up there. What is it? The location of stolen bullion, is it? Nazi escape routes? Something like that?
Do you bother naming the female children?
I’d love to move, but not for a million dollars.
Two million dollars perhaps, Bill?
And here’s that brief for the press conference for the launch of Australia’s Games tomorrow. You’ve got a rehearsal first thing in the morning.
Rehearsal?
The Channel Seven commentary team are going to be there dressed up as Shagger, Australia’s Gumnut Kangaroo.
All of them?
I think so.
Wilko?
Wilko’s its arse, I think.
Beer, mate?
One perishingly cold, thanks.
[Bill doesn't move]
Yes, that’s the other thing, of course. I could get it myself.
These quotes come from Wikiquote's The Games pages and are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.