Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've returned this week hopefully with the same intent as other senators, that what we should be doing here in this shortened day is to take actions to reduce the risk of the horrific events of 14 December happening again. I don't support this bill because I don't see a significant link here between the tragedy of what we saw and what we are doing here today. In fact, much of what we are doing here today seems completely irrelevant to those issues and perhaps instead is in pursuit of a broader agenda that seeks to demonise the otherwise legal, recreational use of firearms in this country.

I've listened to some of the debate this afternoon and this evening, and I have heard it said often that the evil monsters that committed these acts on 14 December would have been breaking the law if we had passed these laws. One of the assailants was a foreign citizen. If we pass these laws, foreign citizens won't be able to have guns anymore, so December 14 couldn't happen. I can't accept that level of naivety as a reason to pass laws that restrict the rights of the rest of our law-abiding Australians. Those two murderers were breaking the law already. They were terrorists. They were murderers. They were killers. They were criminals. The idea, then, that somehow passing a law to make something illegal is going to stop crime does seem the height of naivety. If it's that simple, why don't we just pass a law banning all crime and then everything will be peaceful—apparently.

Those two individuals we now know were very committed to do the evil they did. They trained to do what they did. They possibly went to the Philippines and continued that training. They went to great lengths to commit the acts of evil that they did over a month ago. The idea that somehow in the future any two similar murderers with a warped mind and evil intent could not somehow find a way around the laws we're passing today indicates that we are not approaching this issue with the seriousness of what happened over a month ago.

There are millions of illegal firearms in this country. There are possibly hundreds of thousands of them in Western Sydney, where these two murderers came from. The idea that they couldn't get their hands on something that was illegal is absurd. It's totally ridiculous. Whatever provisions are here are not really going to tackle the major issue that confronted this nation over a month ago. Yet it was this issue of gun law reform, as the government describes it, that the Prime Minister first latched on to in his response. Within days of this terrible event, the greatest terrorist attack in Australia's history, the Prime Minister was latching on to the issue of guns, almost certainly, transparently, as a means to avoid having to confront the more difficult issue for himself and his political party of the spread of radical Islamic extremism inspired by antisemitism that this government has done far too little about. The Prime Minister's initial bumbling of this issue has left a bad taste in the mouths of those Australians that do use guns for work, that use guns for pleasure—it's not illegal to do that. There has not been good faith from the Prime Minister or the Labor Party on this issue, because, from the get-go, they sought to demonise gun owners as somehow contributing to the risks of this event when that was, to most Australians, completely absurd.

Now, because of the public pressure and because that initial response was so cynical and was so transparently desperate, the Australian people didn't buy it. They didn't buy it. I think the Australian people could see, after the Port Arthur massacre, a prime minister who was taking on his own political base, who was tackling a difficult issue. There were assault and semi-automatic weapons available out there to the general public then. So he saw a legitimate issue that the then Howard government was taking on—a tough issue, but one they took on. This time, very clearly, the Australian public saw that this was very political and not really a serious response to what happened. Yet here we are just a few weeks later, and the first bill the government has proposed after splitting their broader bill—it's a complete shambles, which we'll get to later—tackles not the root cause of what happened on 14 December; it tackles a whole lot of ancillary issues that don't go anywhere close to what happened on 14 December or the days leading up to it. It has led to the demonisation of a million Australians who own firearms, sometimes because they have to for work or sometimes because they enjoy the pastime and the pursuit.

Just in the previous speech, we heard that this is not a time to demonise fellow Australians or divide fellow Australians, that we've all got to come together and unify, except if you own a gun. If you own a gun, apparently you can be demonised, you can be judged and you can be prejudged. You can be prejudged such that, because you may collect guns or have more than five—apparently the people who, I think, have never shot a gun seem to understand how many guns you need—you're an evil person, you're a terrible person, you're a risk to society, you're a public enemy. Don't give me this rubbish of uniting. Don't give me this veneer of saying, 'We're all Australians,' after this event when you make your response to it transparently politically divisive.

It divides some Australians against others. I completely understand that as someone who doesn't own guns and has rarely shot a gun. I don't mind doing it—it's a bit of fun—but it's not my main pastime in life. We've got to get over this idea that just because I don't do it or I don't like it, I should take it away from a fellow Australian and stop them doing it. There are a lot of people in this country that legally pursue these things. We cheer them on when they win gold medals at the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games. We're happy for them then. But, when it suits us politically, we'll say that they're the problem to distract everyone from the more difficult discussions that we might get to later tonight, which are also being glossed over and are another story.

You can tell, as I said before, the government is not serious about this. It is not taking this issue with the due consideration it should be, through both the completely irrelevant provisions that are in this particular bill and the fact that, in the last day or two, the government's had to drop a whole lot of changes because it didn't consult properly on its initial bill released only a week ago.

This bill had restrictions on how many shells you could hold in a vest. I think it was limited to 30 rounds in a particular vest. You wouldn't be able to, in the initial drafting of this bill, import a vest that had more than 30 rounds. It took someone pointing out to the government that, if you want to practise for the Olympics and compete at the AIS down the road, you actually do need more than 30 rounds to do that. No-one had checked that! No-one in the government had checked that. Now, thankfully, they've removed that provision, but the problem, when you do these last-minute amendments, is you start, as a legislator, to think: 'What other gremlins are in this bill? What other things haven't they thought of properly here?' That is so, so silly. It should have been picked up in early consultations, which clearly did not happen before we got here.

This bill also, for some unknown reason, goes after people who use gel blasters. Now, I'm not the expert on this. I have shot a gun, as I've said, but I don't know if I've ever shot a gel blaster before. There's a group in Rocky, where I live, who I know do it all. They seem like good people. They put on parties and events and team-bonding stuff you can do. Good luck to people. Why is that in this bill? I don't know. I don't know if we're having a committee stage. Is everything just getting guillotined? Perhaps the minister can tell us. Has there ever been an incident with a fatality in this country involving a gel blaster? Has a terrorist organisation or group ever sought to acquire gel blasters to commit acts of terror? They do it with cars, they do with homemade bombs, and now, unfortunately, they've done it with some guns. But have they done it with gel blasters? If not, why is that in here?

This goes to show that this has obviously been a laundry list of things that certain people have wanted to get done, and they've just chucked it in. They've just chucked it in this bill because they didn't think people would be watching. Worse, in quite a contemptible fashion, they have used a national tragedy, the worst terrorist attack on our shores ever, to pursue an unrelated agenda under the guise of trying to do something about terrorism. That's what's happening here. That's what the government has done to people who are otherwise law-abiding citizens.

The government here hasn't thought through the provisions around a national gun buyback. They're trying to force this through. It's very much putting the cart before the horse, because most states haven't even signed up to a buyback yet. There is time to put funds in place if and when that ever happens, but, by rushing this here, the government, seemingly, has not considered why ammunition wouldn't be part of that buyback, like it was in the original buyback. That's not included at all. Some simple details have been glossed over by this government.

For all these reasons, the National Party and the Liberal Party will not be voting for these laws. They will not appreciably reduce the risk of a terrorist attack happening again on our shores. Terrorists are unlikely to be the kinds of people that are going to obey the law in any event. It would be much, much more sensible for us to focus on the root cause of what's happened here, at Bondi, which is these evil ideas, the antisemitic ideas, the divisive ideas, the hateful ideas, that lead to violence. Focus on that instead of reducing the rights of other Australians who have done nothing wrong.

On the gun issue, on the issue itself, clearly what should happen is a renewed effort to clamp down on organised crime. As I mentioned before, there's a lot of focus on the fact that there are more legal firearms in Australia since Port Arthur, although I'm indebted to my colleague Senator McDonald, who has pointed out that there are actually many fewer per person. Per person, the number of firearms in this country has fallen. You don't hear that. But, for all the focus on the legal firearm market, there's almost an ignorance, an unwillingness, to look at the fact that we have enormous numbers of illegal firearms in this country. These are controlled largely by criminal gangs and organised crime, which is growing like Topsy in our country right now because we've created enormous lines of businesses for these groups through our ineptitude on tobacco policy, our pigheadedness on vaping policy and our distractions from illicit drugs and substances, which have given those organisations enormous streams of money to import all kinds of contraband into this country, including, presumably, illegal firearms out there.

This brings me to my final point. I worry a bit about rushing something like a national gun buyback. How are we going to be sure that this won't be abused as well? We have seen the Commonwealth government—not just this government—fail to run basic programs time and time again. The NDIS has become a pot of gold for people doing the wrong thing—as, seemingly, has some of the childcare funding that has massively increased recently as well. I worry here that setting up a gun buyback scheme in a rushed fashion, without considering all the details of it, could easily be an ability for people—what's stopping someone from importing a gun and then going to sell it in the buyback and making heaps of money? That did happen, apparently, in the first round of the buyback, but it could be on steroids here because we've rushed this, haven't got the details right and are still changing it within hours of this bill passing this evening. That's why we should reject this bill.

We should, if we have to, support my colleague Senator McKenzie's amendment to push this to a Senate inquiry, consider it more detail and get the details right. But, right here, right now—tonight—this is not going to reduce the risk of another terrorist attack. It's only going to take away rights from Australians, and for that reason it should be voted down.