2017-10-31
Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — The Greens will not be supporting the bill put forward by Mr Bourman today. I am actually quite surprised at the comments made both by the government and by the opposition with regard to this bill. The government is saying it is not very far away from where Mr Bourman is with regard to his bill, and it raises the issue, which I think is an important issue with regard to this bill — and I know that Victoria Police have raised this concern too — that the bill, the way it is presented to us, could enable people to identify the whereabouts of firearms. We know that the stealing of firearms from registered firearm holders who do not necessarily keep them as secure as they need to is a problem. So that is good that the government has recognised that.
I am not sure that there is anywhere we could move with regard to the existing legislation. I will talk about the legislation in the other states because Mr Bourman talks about that in his second-reading speech. I am not sure there is much room for us to move away from the existing legislation under the Firearms Act 1996. We would support keeping that, and in fact we would support tightening it slightly to bring it more in line with the New South Wales legislation with regard to the process that a person must go through if they are wanting to purchase a second-hand firearm.
I am surprised that the opposition would support this bill given the flaw in it, in clause 3(2), which substitutes the current section 101(3) of the Firearms Act 1996 with regard to the publishing of a firearm for sale. It states that in order to do so, where the firearm is being offered for sale must be in the advertisement. I think that is a flaw in this bill that does raise a lot of concerns, I am sure, with the police, and it would with the community as well.
I have had a look at section 101 closely since this bill has been presented. Just going to Mr Bourman's second-reading speech where he says at the start of one paragraph: 'Technically, you may only advertise a legal firearm via a printed shooting magazine'. Well, there is nothing actually in that section that says that. Section 101(5) says:
Subsections (1) and (2) do not apply to the publication of an advertisement in a magazine published by an approved club or in a commercially published firearms or shooting sports magazine.
It does not say that has to be a printed one. In fact many of them are online, and I have had a look at some of them in researching my contribution on this bill.
The other thing is to say is that I am not sure if in Victoria there is a prohibition on not being able to advertise via a magazine online. If there is a prohibition, it is clearly not being adhered to. If you go to usedguns.com.au, you can see private ads, not through a dealer. There are many dealers ads; the majority of them are actually dealer ads. Whether they are from Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales, Queensland or anywhere, they tend to be dealer ads; they tend to outnumber the ads by private persons. There is certainly one here, just by way of example, which is a semiautomatic Norincoo, model SKS, for $1000 — one of the sorts of weapons I wonder why people actually need to have at all. Certainly semiautomatic weapons are meant to be covered by the national firearms agreement, but here it is online for private sale.
Looking at handguns, I think many people in the community would be horrified to see the number of semiautomatic pistols you can actually find online in private ads as well, not through dealers. I think this bill is a solution looking for a problem. I am concerned that those ads are allowed at all and that they are not all done through dealerships, as really the intention of the legislation is.
So if we look, for example, at the process for purchasing a firearm in Victoria, you must possess both a current firearm licence and a permit to acquire from Victoria Police. In Victoria you need not wait for a Victorian firearm licence to be approved before applying for a permit to acquire. Now, I would say this is not the case actually in New South Wales, in Tasmania or in Queensland. If you look at their legislation, you actually do have to be a licensed firearm holder, so you do have to have applied to the police for a licence and be in possession of a licence before you can apply to purchase a firearm, but not in Victoria. In fact I think Victoria needs to catch up with the rest of the states with regard to that. We should not be able to obtain a permit to acquire a firearm in Victoria without a licence, so that is a loophole that needs to be fixed. Perhaps the government could bring an amendment to the legislation it has in the lower house to actually bring us into line with the rest of the country on that. I think most people in the community would be disturbed to find that in Victoria you do not actually have to have a licence to get a permit to acquire a firearm. In all other states there are processes for purchasing a used firearm that involve having to attend a licensed firearm dealer and/or a police station to actually take possession of the firearm and fill in the paperwork.
I am not sure what this bill is trying to achieve, but I certainly would not like to see firearms starting to be advertised on Facebook et cetera, which is also where we could head. It is interesting that I have just received some answers to questions on notice which were in fact reinstated by the President because they were not answered properly in the first instance with regard to the number of firearms that are registered in Victoria. In the year 2014–15 there were 767 304 firearms registered in Victoria. In the following year, 2015–16, there were 792 845 firearms registered in Victoria, which was a 10 per cent increase in that time. In both years the ratio of firearms to licences was about 3.6 firearms per licensee, so on average each gun owner — if you just make that an average — owns about 3.6 firearms. But I have mentioned in this place before that of course the average does not cover everyone. Some people will have fewer guns and may only own one or two. But there are a number of people — and this was revealed by the Australian Institute of Criminology a couple of years ago — that actually own very large numbers of firearms, particularly on rural properties but not necessarily, and that is a concern. My colleague David Shoebridge in New South Wales raised this issue last year in the Parliament of New South Wales. Their research in terms of the number of firearms in New South Wales, for example, last year found there were 850 634 registered firearms in New South Wales and that some particular firearm dealers and collectors owned between 71 and 300 guns each.
I have said in this place before that there needs to be something in the legislation as well to put certainly a cap on the number of guns you can own if you want to own more of them. Mr Shoebridge is suggesting five guns. I am not sure whether five is the right number, but it would be a good number whereby a person who wanted to purchase a firearm had to go through a higher hoop than in the original statement that was made with regard to attaining a licence for a firearm, just to make sure that people are not amassing caches of firearms, which is happening. Of course when that does happen, as Mr Leane pointed out, if people who are not necessarily in the business of owning registered firearms but are in the business of stealing them and using them for nefarious purposes find out where those caches are, that is a very concerning situation.
Now, the police have raised many times their concerns about the numbers of guns that are in circulation in the community. Their concern is that when they stop vehicles, for example, the number of times there are firearms in those vehicles has increased. Mr Bourman in his second-reading speech said something like:
There are those that will use this opportunity to bore us with their usual ideological dribble about how law-abiding firearm owners are bad, whilst refusing to support tightening laws on actual criminals …
That is incorrect. He is possibly directing those comments at someone like me, who is a strong advocate for stronger firearm control, but I do not refuse to support tightening laws on actual criminals. He also said:
… despite all evidence to the contrary that we have the best gun laws in the world and cannot weaken them, but the reality is that we law-abiding shooters aren't the problem and over-regulating us will not do much more than make people feel like something's been done.
I would say that is ideological drivel and that firearm holders are not overregulated — they are appropriately regulated. I have already pointed out following my research into this bill where the legislation in Victoria needs to be tightened up to fall into line with other states with regard to a person who does not have a firearm licence being able to apply to purchase a firearm. I do not think that is appropriate, and that needs to be fixed. I got this off the police website, so I am presuming it is correct.
Mr Bourman interjected.
Ms PENNICUIK — Mr Bourman might want to have a bit of a backhander at the police, but it is the police that are actually raising concerns about his bill and the ramifications of it. It is the police that have been raising concerns about them being the first responders, as everyone likes to talk about, at incidents involving firearms.
They have raised publicly their concerns about the increasing number of firearms they are finding when they stop vehicles, so I do not think it is appropriate for Mr Bourman or anyone else in this place to be dismissing the concerns of the police in this regard just because they want to own more firearms and actually weaken the firearms laws.
There was a report released just last week pointing out where firearms laws have been weakened across Australia since the 1996 firearms agreement, including in this state, where under the previous government there were some amendments made to the Firearms Act and the requirements of sporting shooters were loosened. The whole point of the requirements on sporting shooters and hunters going back to 1996 was to actually prove that they were engaged in those activities and not just joining a sporting shooters club — and never actually participating in the club — so that they could have a firearm licence and purchase firearms. It was to make it difficult to get a firearm license and purchase firearms. That is the point; it is not meant to be easy. So when people like Mr Bourman and Mr Young come in here and say that it is too difficult for them and that they are law abiding — it is meant to be difficult. It is not meant to be easy to purchase a firearm. That is the point — to show that there is a legitimate reason. It is the most basic bar that we could expect people to have to climb over to be in a position to have a firearms licence and possess firearms.
The other furphy, of course, that we are always told is about law-abiding gun owners not using them. Of course they do not use them in a criminal way; nobody is arguing with that. But the problem is that the more guns that are in circulation, the more people who are injured or killed by them, and that is the inescapable evidence from around the world. I do not understand why the government is indicating that it needs to move in this direction, and I am totally surprised that the opposition would be supporting this legislation. The Greens will not be supporting it.