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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 (Hansard) 16 May) . . Page.. 1397 ..

MR SPEAKER: It being 5.00 pm, I propose the question:

That the Assembly do now adjourn.

Mr Humphries: I require the question to be put forthwith without debate.

Question resolved in the negative.

Debate resumed.

MS TUCKER: For many of us, the idea that anyone would want to own an implement that has as its main function to cause death or injury to living things for recreational purposes is indeed very hard to understand. Of course, if the aim is to shoot at clay targets or in the course of rural work in the country, there is more justification for owning such implements. We claim to be a civilised society, and it is hard to understand why we have weapons of this nature in the suburbs, especially in the face of the terrible misuse and innocent human casualties.

What we see today in response to the massacre at Port Arthur is a proposal to give a greater degree of control for particularly dangerous weapons - dangerous in terms of their ability to kill many people quickly. We must also acknowledge, though, that this legislation will affect only 3,000 or so weapons in the ACT, leaving, out of a total of 18,000, approximately 15,000 in homes, and this is only the registered weapons. In Australia over a four-year period between 1989 and 1993, 260 women were killed in domestic violence incidents and one-third of those women were killed by firearms. The weapons used were more often .22 rifles or shotguns, not automatic or semiautomatic guns. Another worrying statistic is that approximately 80 per cent of gun deaths are suicides, and we do have a worryingly high suicide rate right throughout Australia as well as in the ACT. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that, if guns were not available, some of these suicides might not happen, because they are often done on impulse under the influence of alcohol or other substances. If we are going to debate issues of gun-related violence, we have to acknowledge these other facts and look at tighter regulation across the board.

This matter has been discussed for a long time; I noted that in Mr Humphries's statement he referred to the political situation in Tasmania and the changes that have occurred there. I would like to acknowledge the work of our colleague Dr Bob Brown, who initiated a dangerous weapons Bill in 1987. It was not even allowed to be debated at that time; but its function was to regulate the purchase, possession and use, carrying, storage and sale of weapons. It would have prohibited the possession of automatics or semiautomatics. In 1990 another attempt was made by Dr Brown to prohibit semi- and fully-automatic weapons. That Bill was rejected. In 1995 Christine Milne attempted to

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