John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, has used the tsunami aid summit in Jakarta to apologise for the killer wave. Mr Howard, under intense questioning from the Ripper, admitted the tsunami was caused by the botched trial of a top-secret military device intended to flush approaching boat-people back out to sea.

Military sources told the Ripper that the machine was made using propellers and other parts cannibalised from the notoriously noisy Australian-built Collins Class submarines. Details were reluctantly confirmed by Mr Howard.

“Yes, we finally found a use for those giant underwater joke turds that you can hear from a hundred miles away. But sadly it hasn’t turned out well for some other countries, we were trying it out and I’m a non-technical person but I believe someone cranked the knob up a bit too high. Pauline Hanson always said we were being swamped by Asians but in this case it seems we’re the ones who did the swamping,” he said.

An Australian surfer, meanwhile, says he was holidaying in Aceh when the quake hit. He was “just sitting out the back when there was like this huge whooosh and I totally caught this filthy radical supersonic tube all the way to Somalia”.

“Dude, it was totally … well, words like ’sick’ and ‘phat’ just aren’t big enough man,” he said, speaking to a Ripper correspondent in Mogadishu. “That’s phat with a pee aitch - did you write it down like that?”

Mr Howard said he “regrets” the incident but would not go so far as to say “sorry”.

He announced a $1 billion tsunami aid package, mostly financed by selling the troublesome wave machine to the Americans.

“The septic tanks [yanks] are battling a wave of insurgency in Iraq and [President] George [W. Bush] hopes they can fight back by reversing the polarity or something on our machine. George apparently doesn’t realise that in the case of Iraq, ‘wave of insurgency’ is a metaphor and there’s no actual wave. But we’re happy to take his money, because for once we’re selling the Americans dud secondhand military machinery instead of buying it off them,” Mr Howard said.