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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 2062 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for Police) (12.28), in reply: Mr Speaker, I will make a few brief comments in closing this debate. I repeat how gratified I am to have support from all members of this Assembly for the legislation which has been passed and for the thrust of the decision made by Ministers on 10 May. In that sense, the ACT is uniquely privileged in having such a strong and solid support base for this legislation. I suspect that some of my other colleagues around the table on 10 May would very much envy us because, clearly, the legislation has been difficult in other jurisdictions. Indeed, only one other jurisdiction has enacted legislation, which, as Mr Wood rightly pointed out, was pioneered by the ACT. I suspect that there will be some more traumas, wringing of hands, tears and so on before the legislation is uniformly in place around the country. I am travelling to Brisbane next week for a meeting of the Australian Police Ministers Council at which we hope to bed down some of the other details of the legislation, and I trust that other Ministers will retain the resolve that they showed last month in Canberra.

I have a couple of brief comments to make about some issues raised in this debate. Mr Kaine raised the argument that people are criminalised, so-called, by having this legislation imposed on them, and the feeling that comes through that people have an entitlement, a right, to bear these arms, and that by being forced to surrender them pursuant to the legislation the legislation "makes us criminals". I have heard that argument quite a few times and it is a misconception. It is probably a deliberate furphy, created by elements of the gun lobby, to suggest that this is all about stigmatising people who presently own guns. That argument makes as much sense as an argument 20 years ago that because we were requiring people to mandatorily wear seat belts we were implying that they were bad drivers. In fact, we are dealing with an evil which is probably not an evil that would be perpetrated by the vast majority. In fact, it certainly is not an evil that would be perpetrated by the vast majority of gun owners in this country, even those who own the high-powered weapons we have now banned. We are dealing with a problem for a small number of people whose capacity to inflict harm on our society is so much greater because those weapons exist in our society.

I have met a large number of gun owners in the last eight or nine weeks, Mr Speaker. I attended a "Meet the Minister" meeting the other day with a new member of my staff and he asked me what was likely to happen there. I said, "Well, sometimes the meetings can be fairly quiet, and we do not have too many people through the door. Sometimes they are busy". We arrived at the Ngunnawal neighbourhood centre and the building was literally surrounded by people. There must have been at least 100 people around the building, and it turned out that they were there to see me and complain about the gun laws that the Assembly had enacted. So many people were there, in fact, that a police car had been despatched for crowd control. In the course of the next three hours, Mr Speaker, I had a succession of people coming through the door and telling me how much they resented the fact that the Assembly was taking from them the theoretical right to use their guns.

There was an interesting thing about that exercise, Mr Speaker. I saw everybody who was there. As they came through the door I asked them why they individually needed an automatic or a semiautomatic weapon. What did they do with their weapons that required them to keep them? The interesting answer, Mr Speaker, in most cases was:

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