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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 (Hansard) 16 May) . . Page.. 1399 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

I just want to say a few things in relation to some comments that have been made in the media and to my colleague, me and other members of the Assembly by people in the gun lobby. Ms Follett quite correctly referred to the nonsense of the freedom to bear arms. This is something that comes out of the gun lobby in the United States, and I think it relates to a misconstrued idea of the freedom to bear arms which went back to their militia in the eighteenth century. It had nothing to do with civilians. It was a ridiculous sort of misconception, I think, by that particular lobby, and it is even crazier in Australia. Whilst having the potential to go down the American track, we have quite clearly turned away from that. We see the tragedy that unfolds every day in the United States as a result of misconceived notions such as that.

There were other things that I thought were rather pathetic when I read them in the paper - comments such as, "If you take away all these arms, what are we going to do if we are invaded?". That is why we have an army; that is why we have a navy; that is why we have an air force. Those people are properly trained. To a lesser extent, I suppose that is why we have a police force. Those are the proper authorities to bear these types of weapons. If anyone needs to have that brought home, I recall a couple of years ago, during the transition in South Africa, a carload of cowboys going off to one of the black African homelands, as they then were, and being absolutely routed by one trained soldier. I think that shows what a nonsense it is to say that civilians carrying these sorts of arms can do anything other than get themselves very severely hurt, in terms of defending their country. There is a place for that, and the proper people to defend your country are members of the armed services. I think those are crazy and invalid arguments.

One thing that has been put up in a number of circles and has been very clearly addressed by my colleague Mr Humphries and his colleagues and by the Prime Minister is adequate compensation. We need a stick in the form of legislation; certainly, in the other States many of these weapons are underground, so you do not know how many there are. Compensation, hopefully, will bring a meaningful surrender of a lot of these semiautomatic weapons, and I was pleased to see that issue being addressed.

The numbers in the ACT are relatively low and they are documented because, even before this Assembly was in business, we had each weapon as well as the shooter licensed, unlike a lot of the other States in the Commonwealth. So, whilst we know that the numbers here are relatively low, I think the matter of compensation is terribly important, especially in those States where only the shooter is licensed and not the individual weapon. I commend my colleague Mr Humphries and, indeed, all members of the Assembly, for the promptness with which this historic piece of legislation will pass.

MR WOOD (5.12): Mr Speaker, this is momentous legislation, and it needs to be. This is legislation which takes as large a step as I have seen in changing a culture, the culture that allows people to believe that they may have firearms and use them as they wish, that they may kill things as they wish. It is a very difficult job to change a culture. As I follow the national debate on this issue, it seems to me that some gun owners are acknowledging that the change needs to be made. I hope that they all do. Obviously, that is not going to be easy to achieve; we will see how far it goes with the success or otherwise of the surrender of weapons.

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