John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I am very happy to answer the question. I do not regard Kirribilli House as my house and I do not regard the Lodge as my house. I recognise that I am greatly privileged to occupy both of those residences at the present time because I happen to be Prime Minister of this country. I know that my predecessors—or most of them—would have adopted the same attitude.

But seeing that the Leader of the Opposition has persisted with this falsehood that the function held last Friday week was a fundraiser for the Liberal Party—which it was not—perhaps I might draw the attention of the Leader of the Opposition to a memorable paragraph in a book entitled The Fixer: the untold story of Graham Richardson, written by Marian Wilkinson, who is hardly a journalistic promoter of John Howard, to put it mildly. I think she almost competes with David Marr—no, not quite—as somebody who is fairly uncharitable to the current Prime Minister.

This particular book describes, on pages 262 and 263, an event that took place at Kirribilli House in the winter of 1987. As I remember, in the winter of 1987 Bob Hawke was the Prime Minister and I was the Leader of the Opposition. So I remember the winter of 1987 extremely well. It was a winter of some discontent for the Liberal Party of Australia and, in political terms, a winter of some comfort for the Australian Labor Party. The book spoke of a gathering at Kirribilli House in these terms:

The guest list for the night, if not secret, was certainly handled discreetly. The invitees were coming to Kirribilli House for what was, in reality, an exclusive fund-raising dinner.

Let me read on, because I can assure you that it gets infinitely better than that, Mr Speaker. It goes on to say:

Among the millionaires—

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