John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome this legislation, the Criminal Code Amendment (Firearms Trafficking) Bill 2016, and let me explain why. I supported the gun buyback by the Howard government. At the time I had eight guns and rifles and I had to hand one in, a semiautomatic .22. It did not worry me one bit to get paid to hand it back, because I saw it as a dangerous weapon—a semiautomatic—the reason being that if it holds 10 shots in a magazine then you might shoot off four shots for some vermin or whatever you are trying to kill and then the weapon is left loaded, ready to go—dangerous. I have never been a big fan of semiautomatics.

But I discussed this with one of my state National Party friends some years back. The taxpayer spent over $300 million buying the guns back, the rifles back, from innocent people, who were innocent enough to hand them in. We set up a register of the rifles' and guns' ownership. It did not worry me, when I was a young fella living in South Australia—you had to register your guns back in the seventies. If you bought an air rifle, you took it down to the police station and registered it. They had the name of who owned that air rifle. So, registration never worried me one bit. It was part of my life. And you, Acting Deputy President Gallacher, coming from South Australia: if you ever bought any weapons you would be in the same situation.

What I found frustrating was that the innocent people did the right thing: handed their weapons in. The taxpayers of Australia forked out the $304 million to buy the weapons back when they were destroyed or whatever back then. And we have a situation in which a black market exists in firearms. Now, I think it would be the scariest experience of your life if you were working at a service station at two o'clock in the morning and someone walked in and put a pistol to your face. That would be scary, and, sadly, it does happen. Where does the weapon come from? It is probably stolen or brought in on the black market. So, I think this is good legislation because it has a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for anyone trafficking in weapons or weapon parts.

The reason we have to have this is because of what John Laws calls jelly judges. How often do we see people charged with serious crime and the punishment does not fit the crime? It simply does not. A minimum sentence is a strong message to those out there who are contemplating trafficking weapons and the black marketing of them—bring them in from China somehow in containers stashed away, hidden, and it is up to Customs to keep doing their fine job to keep a close eye on what actually comes into our country as far as the black market goes, and what is stashed, hiding in containers and various packages. But seeing this sends a strong message that if you get involved in the black marketing of weapons and you sell them on the streets—Mr Acting Deputy President, I would say it would be a fair guess that if you gave me $1,000 in cash and I went to some parts of Sydney then within a day I would have a black market pistol. I say that with confidence.