2015-10-20
Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — I rise to speak on Mr Bourman's motion to refer several issues regarding the current gun laws to the joint Law Reform, Road and Community Safety Committee. The Greens will not be supporting this motion. The Greens have a long history of supporting strict gun control, which started in the Parliament of Tasmania in the 1980s when attempts were made by the Greens to ban automatic and semiautomatic weapons due to ongoing concerns about public safety and the number of guns in circulation not only in Tasmania but nationally at the time.
As I mentioned in the recent debate on the Firearms Amendment (Trafficking and Other Measures) Bill 2015 introduced by the government in relation to illegal firearms, after the tragedy of the Port Arthur massacre, where 35 people were killed and 23 injured, we saw a national approach to gun law reform that put community safety first. It involved an amnesty and gun buyback that took some 600 000 firearms out of the community. These reforms have become the envy of the world. Other countries look to Australia for our gun laws, which are something that many countries — in particular the United States — would like to introduce. Recently there have been several more mass shootings in the United States. Statistics vary depending on where you are looking, but one site says that as many as 994 shootings have occurred in the last 1004 days. The president of the United States, Barack Obama, has pointed to Australia's gun laws as the benchmark for his country.
Before national gun law reform in 1996, almost 20 years ago, there was a hotchpotch of state legislation and regulation and no national licensing and registration system, so these were important and long-overdue reforms. The principles were that people needed to have a genuine reason to own a gun, that a national tracking system for guns be introduced and that to own a gun is a privilege not a right. In my point of view and that of the Greens, those principles have not been implemented strictly enough — for example, what is a genuine reason to own a gun? There are problems with the national tracking system as well.
As I mentioned, some 600 000 firearms were taken out of the community under the buyback scheme, and this has had a big impact on safety. There have been no massacres since that time, except for a recent family tragedy in the New South Wales town of Wagga Wagga. The strong evidence is that the more guns that are in circulation, the more likely there is to be injury to people from firearms.
We are particularly concerned when we hear about shootings in the public arena and on our streets; and the recent shooting in New South Wales was very distressing for everybody. But of course we also know that one of the major ways of committing suicide in Australia is through the use of a firearm and that firearms are used in family violence situations. It is important that firearms are taken out of circulation, taken out of homes and away from people wherever possible.
Professor Andrew Goldsmith, strategic professor of criminology at Flinders University, has said that in terms of Australia's achievement the 1996 reforms have had a positive effect on reducing homicides in Australia and that we should be looking at gun control from a public health point of view. He has also said that where there is a prevalence of guns there is gun injury, and there is evidence and information on accidental and incidental gun-related harm that is often left out of the discussion on the effectiveness of gun laws.
We have had many reports that the number of guns in the community is increasing again, and in some states we have seen some watering down in terms of the national agreement. While there is still strong commitment to the national agreement among the states and territories and by the federal government, the state and federal police forces and others who are involved in this discussion at a national level, there has still been some watering down at state levels — for example, in Victoria under the last government there was a watering down of the number of shooting competitions sporting shooters were required to demonstrate they had actually participated in in order to retain their firearm licence. The Greens did not support that because the principle at stake was that in order to demonstrate that you had what is called 'a genuine reason' to own a gun, you need to demonstrate that you are a bona fide participant in those competitions and not just a participant on paper. Any watering down of those ways of demonstrating that you are a bona fide participant in sports shooting competitions is a concern.
Not that long ago we saw reports on police discovering guns in cars every two days in some Melbourne suburbs.
Mr Dalidakis interjected.
Ms PENNICUIK — Mr Dalidakis might not think this is a serious subject, but I do.
As I was saying, the police are reporting that they are routinely discovering guns every two days when they are searching cars. That is one of the reasons the recent introduction of the Firearms Amendment (Trafficking and Other Measures) Bill 2015 was supported by the Greens, because it assisted police in dealing with this problem. Ron Iddles, the secretary of the Police Association Victoria, has said that it is a concerning development and that it puts at risk all police officers who may be required to stop a car, be it for a routine inspection or for a breathalyser test, for example. Finding firearms in cars is a major concern to the police, particularly when looked at in the context of the rising number of firearms in circulation in the community.
The police have reported that there are firearm incidents — such as drive-by shootings — happening every six days, as well as there being an increasing trend of children as young as 16 years old carrying guns. They have reported that they regularly find guns, including sawn-off shot guns and automatic machine guns, during routine car intercepts. According to the Australian Crime Commission there are more than 250 000 longarm firearms and more than 10 000 handguns in the illicit firearms market. Some experts believe that many of the firearms on the black market were never handed in when the national firearms agreement was established. Former Greens Senator Penny Wright said after the recent Senate inquiry into illegal firearms, which she chaired, that it was clear:
… firearm theft from registered owners is a significant contributor to the number of illicit firearms on Australian streets.
The need to improve our gun control laws was recently highlighted by the siege in Sydney's Martin Place. A review into that incident by the New South Wales and commonwealth governments revealed weaknesses in Australia's national system for maintaining and sharing firearms information between jurisdictions. These are problems which are expected to be addressed with the introduction of a new national tracking system. As I mentioned earlier, there have been ongoing problems with that particular tracking system. That review also recommended that the state and territory police forces conduct an urgent audit of their firearms data holdings and urged governments to consider more measures to deal with illegal firearms.
In April the Senate committee also recommended an ongoing Australia-wide gun amnesty. Nick O'Brien, the former head of international counterterrorism at New Scotland Yard and now an associate professor at Charles Sturt University, agrees that there should be another firearms amnesty. He said that Australia risks losing its reputation for world's best practice in gun control if it does not do more to control the number of firearms in circulation now. Australia's firearms laws and the national agreement that underpins them have been very effective in reducing homicides, suicides, mass shootings and accidental shootings. While more needs to be done to address the theft of firearms, which is linked with the number of illegal guns in circulation, and the importation of firearms, there is a need for another guns amnesty. There are still areas that need tightening.
The Greens would like to see a ban on handguns and all semiautomatic weapons, and we have serious concerns about the Adler self-loading gun, which is not the sort of weapon we want to see circulating in the community. We need to ban semiautomatic handguns. Another area where improvement needs to be made relates to caps on the number of guns that any one person is able to possess. In Victoria there is no such cap, but there are caps in some other jurisdictions.
The security and storage of registered firearms is an ongoing issue that was revealed by the Senate inquiry, and the Australian Institute of Criminology and other sources also revealed that firearms that are not securely kept are stolen and are in circulation. I went into some detail about that when we were recently debating a firearms bill in the Parliament and talked about how certain criminals in fact target private residences or other places where guns are kept. I mentioned the national tracking system.
On the issue of new models of guns, just because they are available and people might want to possess them does not mean that they should be available and able to be possessed.
We know there is a process underway at the moment where the justice and police departments are reviewing our national firearms agreement and our national and state laws. We know this is an issue that is going to go to the Council of Australian Governments next year. Those are the forums that have been established over the last almost 20 years in Australia to deal with firearms and firearms regulation and laws, and we do not see any reason why that should be also examined at state level. In the way Mr Bourman's motion is actually structured and expressed, you can see that Mr Bourman is suggesting that we need to relax the registration of firearms, the permit system, the classification system, handgun regulation, regulation of suppressors, storage of ammunition et cetera, and the Greens cannot possibly support a motion that has those purposes.