Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Customs (Prohibited Imports) Amendment (Firearms and Firearm Magazines) Regulation 2015 made under the Customs Act 1901 on 6 August 2015 and presented to the House on 10 August 2015, be disallowed.

Those of us—and there seem to be very few in this place—who read history books know the great march of history. There are some leaps forward. And one of the greatest leaps forward in the history of liberty and freedom was the writing of the Magna Carta by that wonderful man Bishop Langton. Heaven only knows what we owe to the Christians. In the Magna Carta, he said that it is the right of an Englishman to bear arms and the Crown has no right to take away an Englishman's right to bear arms. That was in the Magna Carta in 1215. In the Bill of Rights which delivered democracy to the people of the world—it was in 1660, or whenever the hell it was—they enshrined the right to bear arms. These are the greatest documents in human history. The greatest minds in all of human history have sat down and thought about government—unlike the pygmies that populate this place in a passing moment. These are things that have lasted for a thousand years.

As to Thomas Jefferson, who will forget that phrase of John F Kennedy's when he had the Nobel Prize winners at the White House? He said, 'This is the greatest aggregation of intellect in the history of the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.' Jefferson, and those other great men who wrote the Declaration of Independence, wrote into the Declaration of Independence the right to bear arms, for, without that, the individual has no rights; the rights of power lie exclusively with government.

There is a great debate over fishing closures in Queensland. In Queensland now, the only people with the right to bear arms are the people in uniforms. It is pretty scary when you live in a society where the only people with the right to bear arms are the people in uniforms.

Those who are of a conservative bent—and that most certainly does not include the Liberal Party—believe in certain inalienable rights and freedoms. They believe in the right of the individual and that it prevails over the right of the Crown. We are the inheritors of the English-speaking cultures—no matter what our racial backgrounds are. In fact, the English-speaking peoples are led by a person whose forebears come out of Africa. When the rights of individuals were taken away from us and delivered to the Crown, we had a very good habit of cutting off the head of the person who wore the Crown—in fact, the great bard said, 'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,' and well he might have said that, because we did it again and again, when they tried to take away our fundamental rights.

When we say 'the right to bear arms', some conjure up spectres of revolution. I do not. I conjure up spectres of my home. I look out at my backyard and I see beautiful gum trees and nice paintings from some artists that I love. I see the grass on my little football oval and my pointer dogs hopping around. I think, 'This is my home.' I have a right to defend my home. No-one has the right to take away from me the right to defend by home.

In the great debate in the Queensland parliament, I asked Peter Beattie, later to become the Premier of Queensland, 'Who is going to defend my home when the monsters of the night invade?' He said, 'The police, of course.' I said: 'I was waiting for that. The official response time is 50 minutes, so I think she is all over red rover by the time that 50 minutes is up, mate.' And that is if you are fortunate enough to be able to raise the police immediately to get them to come to you. My experience is that it takes you about 10 minutes to explain what the address is when you ring up triple 0. In my family there have been 13 break-ins for close and immediate family members, and in our personal experience it has been a little bit over two hours. So saying that the police will defend my home is a silly thing to say. We love the police and we feel very comfortable that they are there, but to say that they are going to defend my home is simply insulting my intelligence, when they arrive two hours later. By the way, with those 13 cases, I did not include the case where it took two weeks before the police arrived. I fully documented these cases, by the way.

So you have taken away my right to defend my home. You have taken away my right to be the king in my little castle, and if ever there is a great cry for those of us who come from English speaking cultures it is that an Englishman's home is his castle. A castle is of its very nature—the meaning of the word—defence. It is mine to defend and protect, and you take away my right to defend and protect. Those of us who are my age will recall that we were at war with our neighbours in Indonesia. They outnumbered us 20 or 30 to one in those days, and I was at an age where I was going to go to war. It gets you thinking very clearly. When we faced off we had 300,000 self-loading rifles and over a million semiautomatic rifles. My brother and I had one each. It is not good to pick a fight with people who have 1.3 million rifles. If you asked me, 'What is the only country in Europe that has not been invaded in the last 150 or 200 years?' I would say that the only country that has not been invaded is Switzerland. Why? Because every single home has an automatic rifle with nine rounds, by law. And if you say, 'Gee whiz, there must be a lot of deaths over there', ask me what country has the lowest death rate in Europe. Almost invariably it is Switzerland. The highest death rate in Europe was in East Germany whilst it was still East Germany. The neighbouring countries have an almost identical language, but if you ask me who had the highest death rate in Europe, it was East Germany, where all guns were banned by the communists.

We all know the hallmark of totalitarian regimes is that only the men in uniforms have guns. You say to me, 'We are not a totalitarian regime.' Well, start looking in the mirror, my friend. But for those of us who come from northern Australia—and I speak to Western Australians here as well, because the Brisbane Line was not a Brisbane line but was a recommendation by General Mackay to the parliament of Australia—Australia could not be defended. If they took Port Moresby—the Japanese were 10 days away from taking Port Moresby—the air cover would go over the top of Australia. We could not stop the invasion. There would be no way, with the troops we had, that we would be able to defend anything else except what I call the golden boomerang—Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and up the coast to Brisbane. That was all that was to be defended. All the rest, including Western Australia, was to be handed over to the enemy. It was delightfully called the Brisbane Line. So maybe the attitude of people from North Queensland is slightly coloured by the fact that the last time we had a serious stoush with our neighbours we had 1.3 million rifles. And for those who say, 'In modern warfare what use is a rifle?' Tell that to my friends who fought and died in Vietnam, where a bunch of people running around in pyjama coats with AK-47 rifles beat the devil out of the greatest military machine that the world had ever known. Wellington gave independence to Ireland because he said he would never see Great Britain go through the trauma and horror of the guerrilla warfare that he had experienced in Spain.

One of the greatest things I ever saw on television was about the Barbarossa campaign, on SBS. They were interviewing this little old lady, and Ian Causley, one of my great colleagues from this place, rang me up and said, 'Turn on the television.' I said, 'I'm already watching.' He said, 'Barbarossa?' And I said, 'Yes.' They were interviewing this little old lady and they said: 'So the Germans had taken three quarters of your army. They were in control of more than half of your population and the war was over. You had lost.' She said: 'Well, I didn't know that. I didn't know what was going on.' They asked her, 'So what did you do?' She said, 'I got my family hunting rifle and shot a German soldier.' They asked, 'They retaliated?' She said: 'Yes. They just grabbed two people in the street and shot them dead by way of retaliation.' The interviewer asked, 'So you stopped shooting German soldiers?' She said, 'No, I went out and shot two German soldiers.' They asked, 'And they retaliated?' She said that they put a cordon around a village of 102 people and slaughtered everyone inside the village.' They asked, 'So then you stopped shooting German soldiers?' She said, 'No. I got six of my schoolmates, and then we became 12, and we all got our family hunting rifles and shot 100 German soldiers.'

There is a message there for a little, tiny country like Australia. There is a message there for those of us who love our country and want to protect our country, for those of us who love our home and our family and want to protect our home in our family and not give that power away to the state, the people in the uniforms, the King, the Crown. Those are wonderful, high-flying, philosophical points that I make and, if I may say so, I make them with force.

Let us come down to reality. In Queensland we had no gun laws. In 1988, the year of the much maligned Bjelke-Petersen, we had no gun laws whatsoever. None. There were considerable numbers of firearms but no gun laws. You could have whatever rifle you wanted any time you wanted. I walked in off the street and bought an AK-47 one day because I thought it would be very useful, and anyone could to that any time they liked. We had eight deaths from guns. That is all.

New South Wales, with very stringent laws on firearms, had 38 deaths from guns. With draconian laws in Victoria, a state 50 per cent the size of Queensland, there should have been 12 deaths from guns. They did not have 12. They did not have 24. They did not have 36. They did not have 48. They had 54 deaths from guns. For years after the gun ban there were more deaths than in the years before the gun ban. I am not going to go into the psychological reasons why this occurs and why it is a phenomenon that occurs throughout the world. All I am going to say is that we are here today because there are further bans on guns.

I must declare a pecuniary interest. I have a relative who is involved in the Adler shotgun that is being banned under this regulation. I asked myself: why would I withdraw from the battle and from things I profoundly believe in? Is it because I have a relative involved? No way! It does not muzzle me. In fact, the opposite may well be the case.

This is where you see the ridiculous nature of government. People here think they are governing. But I compare it to the government that I proudly was a part of that ran Queensland for $8,000 million. The LNP could not run the same state for $51,000 million. It would be a good comparison of our relative intelligences and capacity levels. The ALP could not run it for $49,000 million. We ran it for $8,000 million. Maybe we had some good ideas when we were governing Queensland.

People have said that this lever action process is a new technology. (Time expired)

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is there a seconder for the motion?

Cathy McGowan (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

David Feeney (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this motion moved by the member for Kennedy. The member for Kennedy may have killed his own argument more spectacularly than I am able to do, but nonetheless I will set out Labor's position on this disallowance motion. It is fair to say that we are motivated by different principles than those that motivate the member for Kennedy. We do believe that the state should have a monopoly on violence. We do believe that it is a wrong-headed notion that a community is safer if its citizenry is armed. We do believe that if every citizen were to carry a weapon that would lead to a more violent society not a less violent society.

The proof of this, of course, can be found readily in statistics. If one looks at gun murders per 100,000 residents, we can see in the United States that the figure is 3.7, unsurprisingly the highest number in the world.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Have a look at the states that ban guns and the states that do not. Take the interjection!

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! I remind the member for Kennedy that he was heard in silence and should afford the same hospitality to the member for Batman.

David Feeney (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If we look at a country like Italy, we see that the number is 0.68. If we look at Canada, we see that the number is 0.50. That is less than one-seventh of the neighbouring nation of the United States. In Australia it is 0.13, and in the United Kingdom it is 0.07. These statistics clearly bear out that, where a society is liberally armed, it is a society where gun murders are at a far higher incidence. Having set out that principle—

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I rise on a point of order.

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What is your point of order?

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You must give fair and accurate judgement of the figures. The figures do not define which states have the bans and which do not. If you do, then the exact opposite—

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is no point of order.

David Feeney (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Having set out those important principles that motivate Labor in this debate, I do entirely recognise that that leaves scope for the legitimate presence of firearms in our community. But that legitimate presence is confined to issues such as sporting, recreation and, of course, the need for some people in some occupations to have guns as a part of their working life, farmers being a typical example, although there are others. It is from that prism, from that public policy proposition, that Labor approaches this conversation.

The Customs (Prohibited Imports) Regulations 1956, the principal regulations, impose import controls for various items including firearms and firearms related articles. The amending regulation amends the principal regulations as they relate to the importation of lever action shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than five rounds. Issues relating to the prevention, detection and prosecution of crime are for the most part the responsibility of state and territory governments. The various categories of firearms were agreed by all Australian jurisdictions some time ago at a special meeting of the Australasian Police Ministers' Council in May 1996. That gave rise to the 1996 national firearms agreement. The categories are reflected in both the Commonwealth legislation that regulates firearms imports and state and territory legislation that regulates licensing, such as the Firearms Act 1996 in my own state of Victoria.

To import a firearm, a person must have a firearm licence, obtained through the relevant state or territory registry, and permission to import the firearm, obtained from the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department in some cases and the state or territory registry in others. Any changes to the categories would need to be approved by all jurisdictions through the Law, Crime and Community Safety Council.

The technical elements of the national firearms agreement are currently being reviewed, with a view to being updated as recommended by the Martin Place siege review. As part of this, the appropriate classification of lever action shotguns, particularly those with a magazine capacity of more than five rounds, is being considered. In order to ensure any update of the NFA in this regard is not undermined by having a large number of lever action shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than five rounds imported into Australia in the time taken to finalise the review, a temporary prohibition on the importation of those firearms is being put in place, and I would humbly submit that is mere common sense. This is an interim measure until the review and the update of the NFA are completed. This process will ensure there will be fewer individuals licensed to possess these firearms who will be affected should the update to the NFA result in a change in the categorisations of such firearms—again, mere common sense. The update of the NFA is expected to be finalised in early 2016.

The purpose of the amending regulation is therefore to amend the principal regulations to prohibit the importation of lever action shotguns fitted with a firearm magazine capacity of more than five rounds. In order to ensure that the prohibition on the importation of lever action shotguns with a magazine capacity of greater than five rounds cannot be avoided by importing the magazines separately, the amending regulation also prohibits the importation of magazines with a capacity of greater than five rounds for lever action shotguns. Labor believes that, as gun technology is updated, it is entirely appropriate that our laws are reviewed from time to time to ensure that they keep up with the advances in technology and that they do not become outdated. We will carefully consider the outcomes of the national firearms agreement review when they are released.

Further to the measures in this regulation which will prevent the importation of the Adler A110 lever action shotgun with a magazine capacity of seven rounds, Labor believe that the government must also act to prevent other powerful weapons entering the Australian market while this review is being completed. We are extremely concerned by reports that a modified version of the Adler shotgun may now be imported into Australia. Under the current national firearms agreement, lever action shotguns with a magazine capacity of five rounds or fewer are category A, and that means they are available to Australia's 700,000 licensed recreational shooters—I might say recreational shooters, not a militia ready to spring to the defence of our democracy at the behest of the member for Kennedy. Gun critics have said that the Adler A110, which can shoot multiple rounds in rapid succession, is faster and more powerful than other models of firearms. Given that the appropriate classification of lever action shotguns is currently under review, we should not be seeing more of these weapons enter Australia. The Victorian police minister, Wade Noonan, said that they would argue the weapon should have the same restrictions as a semiautomatic firearm. He said:

I have spoken to the Acting Chief Commissioner Tim Cartwright about this matter. He has raised his concerns that this weapon — and others like it — are no longer appropriate for a category A classification. I share his concerns.

Can I stress that this is an interim measure until the review and the update of the NFA is complete. Labor appreciate that the overwhelming majority of firearm owners comply with the relevant legislation and we acknowledge the work of the various firearms organisations who promote the safe use and safe storage of firearms. Labor also recognise that a very significant number of Australians participate in the sport of shooting. However, until the national firearms agreement review is completed, this shotgun should not be allowed into the Australian market, modified or otherwise. Given the events of the past week domestically and abroad, now is not the time to erode or undermine John Howard's tough gun laws, which are respected around the world.

Under Tony Abbott the Liberal Party was happy to put political expediency ahead of community safety concerns. Malcolm Turnbull can now put safety before politics. He should show leadership where Tony Abbott did not and immediately have this modified version of the shotgun banned until the national firearms agreement review is complete. The Liberal government must immediately act to prevent these high-powered weapons from being imported into Australia in the absence of such a thorough review. On that basis, Labor will be opposing the motion for disallowance.

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the government, I oppose the motion for disallowance of the Customs (Prohibited Imports) Amendment (Firearms and Firearm Magazines) Regulation 2015. I need to outline what has happened here so that everybody can understand it. In the wake of the Martin Place siege the government has undertaken to review the national firearms agreement, an agreement that is almost two decades old and that was struck between the Commonwealth and the states after the Port Arthur massacre, where an enormous number of Australians were killed by a deranged criminal. The states and territories got together under the leadership of then Prime Minister John Howard and resolved to change the way we deal with guns in Australia. As a result, the national firearms agreement was born, which restricts ownership in Australia of various categories of firearms and restricts ownership to people who really have a legitimate use for them.

Because that agreement is almost two decades old, it is appropriate that we have a review. Since that time there have been some technical advances in guns that we need to take account of. One of the concerns expressed to me by the states and territories at the time was around the importation of the Adler lever action shotgun, which was going to be imported in quite large numbers. Whilst we have a conversation with the states and territories about where that gun should appropriately be classified, I took the view that it would be silly to allow thousands of those into the community and then have to retrospectively do something to buy them back, for example. It made a lot more sense to restrict their import whilst we had this conversation, given that I knew this conversation was going to be concluded in the not too distant future.

The Law, Crime and Community Safety Council, made up of police ministers and attorneys-general, will be meeting in Canberra in November. Collectively, we need to make a decision about what we are going to do with the national firearms agreement. My goal, overwhelmingly, is to make sure that we keep the NFA intact. That means, of course, that I want all states and territories to move concurrently with the Commonwealth and have a common view about what we do with this particular type of gun.

States and territories will come to Canberra with their own views. What we then need to do is make a collective decision about lever-action shotguns that have a magazine capacity of over five rounds. I have had some informal consultations with state and territory police ministers. I think we will probably get to an agreement where we are all of the same mind, but my overwhelming objective in all of this will be to keep the NFA intact. That is very important for Australia.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Statistics prove just the opposite!

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate that the member for Kennedy has a totally different view, and he is completely entitled to it. There is overwhelming evidence that the NFA has kept Australia safe over the past two decades. I have had this conversation with people who have a similar view to the member for Kennedy and I think he is wrong. The vast majority of Australians would probably assume that he was wrong as well.

There are other countries around the world that are currently looking at Australia and wishing they had a political class capable of doing this.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No. Some people in those countries—

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Under your protection, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will continue. I appreciate that the member for Kennedy has a totally different view on all of this.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, on a point of order: the minister is misinforming the House. Canada has just abolished the legislation.

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Kennedy will resume his seat. That is not a point of order.

Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is an ongoing consultation process. The states and territories will join with the Commonwealth and come up with sensible arrangements about where we are going to classify this particular gun. I would urge everyone to let that process take its course. I have taken the view that it is a very sensible thing for us to have this temporary ban whilst we come to that conclusion together.

Question negatived, Mr Katter dissenting.