Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Rhiannon from the bottom of my heart for bringing this motion on. I rise to strongly support this motion. In doing so I strongly support the National Firearms Agreement, which, as senators would know, came about due to the tragedy in 1996 at Port Arthur in Tasmania where 35 innocent people were massacred. In doing so, I want to very strongly suggest to this Senate that the Tasmanian Liberals were caught out in the 48 hours before the most recent state election by secretly providing a policy to the gun lobby that proposed to effectively destroy the National Firearms Agreement—in Tasmania, of all places.

We had Will Hodgman, the Premier of our state, who likes to portray himself as a moderate, a nice guy and a reasonable person, secretly providing a policy to the gun lobby in Tasmania—not to the broader Tasmanian people and the voters of Tasmania, but to a very narrowly targeted section of our community who want gun laws relaxed, who want to make it easier to obtain licences and who want to make it more difficult to control dangerous guns and weapons in our community. A policy that would destroy the National Firearms Agreement was provided secretly to them.

We heard from Walter Mikac, who even today is still mourning the death of his wife and his two beautiful daughters at Port Arthur in 1996, who said:

We would be totally betrayed to think that within a 20-year period they are looking at going back.

Indeed, the Tasmanian Liberals are looking at going back. They're looking at destroying the National Firearms Agreement, breaking the national consensus. What makes it even worse is they did it in a secretive way, they did it in a duplicitous way, they did it in a cowardly way and they did it in a way that shows how grossly out of touch Will Hodgman and the Tasmanian Liberals are with community sentiment on this issue in our state of Tasmania. They were caught out. The question for Will Hodgman now is: are you going to come forward and seek to legislate in the Tasmanian parliament to destroy the National Firearms Agreement? I tell you what my message to Will Hodgman is: don't you dare try this, because you will be the subject of a revolt from the Tasmanian people bigger than you've ever experienced before— (Time expired)