The Port Arthur massacre was at least the fifth tragedy in recent years to expedite reform of a country’s gun laws. In August 1987, after Michael Ryan shot 16 people at Hungerford, Berkshire, UK, the British Government introduced the Firearms (Amendment) Act 1988 which effectively prohibited the private ownership of most self-loading rifles and shotguns in Britain. In 1989 Patrick Purdy, 24, returned to his elementary school in Stockton California and fired at least 105 rounds from an AK–47 military-style semi-automatic rifle with a 75-round drum magazine. He killed five children and injured another 30 before killing himself. The outrage over these killings is widely held to have precipitated the eventual banning of newly manufactured or imported assault rifles in the US on 13 September 1994. (This law did not prevent the possession or sale of any such weapons already in the country, nor of the vast numbers of them stockpiled by gun dealers before enactment of the bill).1

The 6 December 1989 shooting murder of 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique also set in train what eventually became gun control Bill C–68, passed in the Canadian Parliament on 6 December 1995. Among its most important provisions, this law required the registration of all firearms – something always implacably opposed by gun lobbies throughout the world.

100The Dunblane Primary School massacre on 13 March 1996, when Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and their teacher, prompted the British Government to ban all handguns of a higher calibre than .22, and ban people from keeping any handguns in the home.2 This was subsequently extended to a ban on all private ownership of handguns.

Like the Hungerford, Californian, Canadian and Dunblane shootings, the Port Arthur massacre became the catalyst for a quantum leap in gun law reform. Australian gun control groups had long advocated the measures agreed by the Australasian Police Ministers Council (APMC), both in the media and in representations to politicians. But before Port Arthur, national uniform gun laws based on the registration of all guns and banning all semi-automatic rifles seemed only a remote possibility.

Advocacy for gun control before Port Arthur

The gun control movement in Australia had its first manifestations in the Committee to Register all Guns, set up by families and friends of two teenage girls, Margaret Bacsa and Ella Rosvoll, shot dead in the late 1960s in Victoria. In 1981 Professor Richard Harding of the University of Western Australia published his pioneering book, Firearms and violence in Australian life,3 and convened the first Australian conference on the subject.4 Around this time the Council to Control Gun Misuse was established in Victoria and began lobbying the state government there.5 Advocacy for gun control accelerated after the shooting murder of four

101teenage girls in the Sydney suburb of Pymble in 1987, followed by a spate of mass killings in the late 1980s in Sydney, Melbourne and South Australia. Coalitions for Gun Control were established in Tasmania (1987), Victoria (around 1988), and NSW (around 1990). Another group, Gun Control Australia, formed under the leadership of John Crook, a retiree who had written a masters thesis on the subject.

By the time of Port Arthur, these years of advocacy, supplemented by efforts from a diverse range of health, legal, academic, church, trade union, women’s and community groups, had established widespread public support for the main platforms of gun control. Table 3.1 sets out some recent opinion poll data on gun control in Australia, showing the consistently huge community support for stronger controls. But progress had been slow and ad hoc, with isolated legal reforms made by individual states and territories. A rational, comprehensive and national uniform gun control scheme was urgently needed.

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A National Gun Summit convened by then Prime Minister Bob Hawke on 22 December 1987 – after the Queen Street massacre in Melbourne – failed to achieve consensus on national gun laws or even a national ban on military-style semi-automatics.⁹ The most entrenched opposition came from Tasmania and Queensland. Ironically, as it transpires, NSW Premier Barrie Unsworth walked out of that meeting declaring with disgust: ‘It will take a massacre in Tasmania before we get gun law reform in Australia.’10 Victorian Premier John Cain echoed this: ‘I hope it’s not true that some other disaster has to occur, maybe to our south [that is, Tasmania], to try and make those people understand the gravity of the problem we have.’11 (After Port Arthur, Unsworth commented on the huge advances that had occurred: ‘It has been remarkable how [Tasmania’s Premier] Rundle has changed [his mind] so quickly, because back then Tasmania did not care what happened … these things did not happen in its backyard.’)12

From 1987 most jurisdictions did make some improvements in their gun laws. For example:

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• Victoria tightened restrictions on semi-automatic long-arms after the 1987 Hoddle Street and Queen Street massacres.
• The ACT introduced a new Weapons Act in 1991, requiring firearm registration and (in some cases) proof of reason for ownership.
• In NSW, the Labor Government completely overhauled the gun law between 1985 and 1988. (Ironically, Labor’s legislation at that time was very similar to the scheme established after Port Arthur by the APMC.) Labor’s law was overturned when the government changed in 1988; and the new Liberal-National Government waited until 1992 to introduce a few improvements such as compulsory cancellation of gun licences for domestic violence offenders.
• In 1990 the Queensland Parliament enacted that state’s first law regulating rifles and shotguns – henceforth a licence was required to own or buy guns.
• In 1991 Tasmania passed a similar law. The Bill was still before the Tasmanian Parliament in September 1991 when Wade Frankum killed eight people with a military-style semi-automatic in Sydney’s Strathfield shopping mall. The Tasmanian Parliament responded by giving the Police Minister the power to ban rapid-fire centre-fire weapons. He did not use that power until one week after the Port Arthur massacre.

Gun control had been on the agenda of 20 out of 29 meetings of the nation’s police ministers’ conferences, and two previous special meetings had been held on the subject.13 Despite the efforts of some states and individual police ministers to broker a workable agreement on uniform laws, in early 1996 Australia seemed no closer to achieving it. The most fundamental element of any uniform scheme had to be universal firearm registration, and the refusal by NSW, Queensland and Tasmania to cooperate over this left Australia with a legal patchwork of astonishing inconsistency.

104For example, the differences between the states meant that guns declared illegal in one state could be purchased in another and then taken back over the border. With no requirement for gun registration in the first state, there would be no record of the guns bought, or taken out of that state. In Australia as in the US, this inconsistency allowed people to exploit state laws by freely moving banned weapons interstate.14 In 1995, a journalist from Channel 9’s A Current Affair, who did not have a shooter’s licence, travelled to Tasmania, looked in the ‘for sale’ section of the Hobart Mercury for a military-style semi-automatic, bought two (plus ammunition) with consummate ease and then handed the guns to the Tasmanian police – all on national television.15 The embarrassed Tasmanian Government threatened to charge the journalist with obtaining a gun without a licence. The Police Minister ordered an investigation into the matter, and police interviewed the journalist and gun control activist Roland Browne (who had been interviewed on A Current Affair). This was the same Police Minister who had refused to ban military weapons, while Tasmania had banned free access to fireworks in 1992 because of the annual injury toll to children.

After the Strathfield massacre in 1991, the military-style semi-automatic rifles Bryant used at Port Arthur were banned from sale in all jurisdictions except Tasmania and Queensland, where they remained freely available. Tasmania even had its own gun manufacturing industry: Hobart boasted Australia’s only private factory, Australian Automatic Arms, producing military-style semi-automatic rifles until 1993 for export and local sales. Anyone travelling to Queensland or Tasmania could readily purchase such a weapon from a local gun owner and take it to their home state where, though technically illegal, it would be unregistered and therefore highly unlikely to come to the attention of police.

Just a month before the Port Arthur massacre, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the findings of a state-wide public opinion poll

105conducted for the NSW Health Department.16 Three questions on attitudes to gun control were asked among some 90 covering a wide range of health issues. In the developmental stages of the survey, I had been invited to submit questions on gun control that would be important to future policy debate. The number of people questioned (2,251) made this the largest Australian sample ever invited to answer questions on gun control. As with the previous opinion polls shown in Table 3.1, a large majority of those interviewed (90%) supported gun registration. Support was also very high among rural respondents (83%) and among gun owners, or at least those who reported having a gun on their property (69.3%).

Despite these figures, Health Minister Dr Andrew Refshauge publicly dismissed the study and its findings, claiming it to be ‘no better than an opinion poll’ – referring to the very same tool political parties routinely use to guide policy-making in most fields of government. He told a news conference: ‘It is not found that there is any link between gun control and reduction of gun violence.’ I learned that Refshauge’s office had angrily demanded an explanation from Health Department officials: Why had the gun questions been included in the questionnaire? Why had their release not been cleared through his office? This strongly implied an intention to suppress release of the results, given an opportunity. NSW Labor still feared upsetting the gun lobby or having to take positive steps about gun control.

In NSW the gun control campaign focused on universal firearm registration, without which other gun control measures are doomed to fail. The Carr Labor Government, like its immediate predecessors (the Fahey and Greiner Liberal governments) had been constantly pressured to introduce registration. Almost every reported shooting brought a reiteration of public and media criticism of these governments being ‘soft on guns’. The standard policy response from governments was an amnesty allowing shooters to surrender their guns. Voluntary, uncompensated amnesties prompt a relatively small number of gun owners

106to hand in their weapons’, but there are usually enough to create public relations opportunities for governments to boast that they are ‘doing something’.17 NSW Police Minister Paul Whelan admitted as much on ABC TV’s Lateline:

In NSW the latest amnesty began seven months before Port Arthur, in response to the shooting of two police at Crescent Head. On 21 September 1995, an ebullient Premier Bob Carr sat in the parliamentary press room next to Police Minister Paul Whelan and the Shooters’ Party’s solitary MP, John Tingle, to announce an all-new amnesty for unlicensed shooters. Under the plan, unlicensed gun owners could shuffle their feet over the next 12 months and ponder surrendering their weapons to police or selling them to gun shops. Backed with a K-Telstyle offer of a $15 smoke detector voucher from a hardware chainstore – a set of free steak knives was seen as inappropriate – this, in the words of Carr’s press release, was ‘action’ to reduce guns in the community.

But wait! There was more! Without presenting a shred of evidence, and notwithstanding that licences were already free for farmers, Tingle had convinced the Government that the $75 licence fee should be dropped during the amnesty. Designed as an incentive to encourage

107unlicensed shooters to go legal, the free licence would also have been a huge incentive for thousands of low-income youths to consider buying a gun for the first time. No wonder Tingle looked chipper.

At 2.15pm Carr told the House that the plan followed ‘extensive consultations’ with Tingle and the Coalition for Gun Control. In fact, CGC representatives had been told of the forthcoming announcement by Paul Whelan only an hour previously. The group had not been consulted at all, and told Whelan the plan was pitiful, refusing to endorse it.

The day before, on 20 September, the parents of 15-year-old Dali Handmer-Pleshet, shot dead near Mudgee in June 1993, had called for stronger gun laws based on gun registration.19 A week earlier, Australia’s first referendum on gun control, held during the North Sydney local government elections, resulted in 93.1% support for registration of long-arms – the same sort of system that had operated smoothly since the 1920s for handguns.20

In Parliament, Carr said further progress would depend on bipartisan support from the Opposition. Opposition leader Peter Collins immediately got to his feet, supported the campaign and soberly endorsed the need for bipartisanship. If ever there was an opportunity for a leader to seize the day and accept the offer, here it was. Yet minutes later, Carr resumed the circus that passes for parliamentary process, launching into an extended ridicule of Collins’ performance as Treasurer in the previous Government. Carr basked in vainglory and Collins sat glumly. Carr’s minutes-old condolences to the families of Dali Handmer-Pleshet and the Crescent Head police were dutifully recorded in Hansard, but were already out of political sight.

This sort of tokenism led some in the NSW Labor Party to become critical of the party’s performance on gun control. Just weeks before Port Arthur, one of Carr and Refshauge’s parliamentary colleagues, backbencher Ann Symonds – who had a long record of gun control advocacy – led factional criticism in the Labor Party about its poor

108record on the issue and its willingness to appease the interests of the Shooters’ Party MP, John Tingle.

Tingle was a strident opponent of gun registration; instead he championed the rights of crime victims and advocated stiffer penalties for crimes involving guns.21 In promoting these two issues, his position was consistent with that of gun lobbies around the world, relying on the basic premise that there are two sorts of shooters: the responsible ones and the irresponsible criminals, with little or no overlap. Like most gun lobbyists, Tingle framed the gun control issue entirely in law and order terms, rather than seeing guns as in any way relevant to public health and safety. For Tingle, it followed that any measures designed to make guns less accessible to the general population should be opposed, while measures designed to punish those who had already misused guns should be supported. As discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, this convenient division of gun owners into safe versus dangerous, good versus bad, bears little resemblance to the facts about gun violence.

Early in 1996, another NSW parliamentarian, Alan Corbett of the Better Future for Our Children Party, announced his intention to introduce a comprehensive private member’s Bill on gun control.22 Corbett had extensively consulted the CGC on the content of his Bill. Without the support of the Government or the Opposition – none was expected from either – there was no chance that his Bill would be passed. Nonetheless, two hopes were held for it: it would represent a model Bill lying ready for action in the right political climate; and it would temporarily resurrect the debate in the media, thereby accelerating growing public cynicism about the mainstream political parties’ cowardice before the gun lobby (see Chapter 5).

In early April 1996 Professor Fred Stephens, an eminent Sydney surgeon, spoke for many in the community when he wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald:

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Just three days before the Port Arthur massacre, the Sydney Morning Herald published an article from the CGC arguing for universal gun registration. The article anticipated the imminent findings of a coronial inquiry into the fatal shooting of two police at Crescent Head, NSW, in 1995.24 The coroner had received submissions from hundreds of health, legal, and community organisations advocating firearm registration, and we believed his report would include this recommendation. We also expected the Carr Government would try to dismiss or shelve the recommendation, and we wished to shame such a move before it happened. In fact another month passed before the coroner’s report was released, but it vindicated the CGC. The report recommended the two most important propositions in the CGC’s submission to the coroner: not only registration but also that proof of reason for gun ownership should be required for all gun licences. By that time the coroner’s inquiry had been overtaken by the APMC agreement.

Even before taking office in March 1995, Bob Carr’s public position had been consistently opposed to registration, because the gun lobby had threatened political retaliation against any government considering such a measure. These threats dated from a resounding defeat suffered in 1988 by a previous NSW Labor Government after then Premier Barrie Unsworth had introduced tougher gun controls. His massive defeat was seen within Labor circles as a prime example of the gun lobby’s power to direct votes away from anti-gun candidates. After the 1988 defeat,

110the NSW Labor Party hierarchy proclaimed that any talk of serious gun control a political no-go zone.

In 1994, when Carr was Leader of the Opposition, a coroner recommended tightening the gun laws in his report on the murder-suicide of twin three-year-old girls by their father. Carr responded: ‘After our experience in gun laws in 1988, we will take no initiative that doesn’t reflect the consensus in Parliament.’25

The view that Unsworth’s stance on guns led to his Government’s defeat has been criticised as superficial and expedient, insofar as it avoided a more searching examination of the public hostility to many initiatives of his Government linked to politicians still highly placed in the Labor Party in the post-Unsworth years. At worst, one analyst argued, only five of 20 seats lost by Labor at the 1988 election could have been affected by an anti-gun control vote.26 Any power the gun lobby had was due to the lack of bipartisanship on gun control in NSW state politics, which allowed the gun lobby to play one party off against the other. The gun lobby would typically threaten any politician or party supporting gun control, urging shooters to direct their preference votes away from that candidate.

These developments illustrate the climate of gun control in Australia’s most populous state just before the Port Arthur massacre. In summary, apart from the publicity potential of Alan Corbett’s Bill, and the possibility that the State Coroner might table a set of strong recommendations on gun control, there was no tangible prospect of substantial law reform on the political horizon.

Meanwhile in Tasmania, the Parliament had struggled with gun laws for almost a decade. Green Independent Dr Bob Brown’s Dangerous Weapons Control Bill, which provided for gun licensing, registration, safe storage and a ban on military firearms, was defeated in 1987. In 1988 the Liberals introduced a Guns Bill modelled on a ‘prohibited

111persons register’ (see Chapter 6). It was passed but never proclaimed. In 1990 Dr Brown tried again with his Firearms Bill. It was again defeated, though in 1991 Tasmania finally enacted the Guns Act 1991, the weakest gun law in Australia. All this would change radically after Martin Bryant’s rampage on 28 April.

Just 12 days later, in what was universally described as an historic moment, the APMC released its agreement at 6.20pm, after meeting for more than seven hours. Previous parliamentary opponents of gun registration, notably NSW Labor leader Bob Carr and Tasmanian Premier Tony Rundle, rushed to proclaim their passionate support for the Prime Minister’s initiative. There had seldom been greater chameleon acts in Australian political history.

Media interest in gun control

Port Arthur and the many facets of its aftermath will probably rank, after the two world wars, as one of the largest news events in Australian media history. In terms of volume alone it is likely to rival the 1991 Gulf War, the 1975 sacking of the Whitlam Government, and the 1974 destruction of Darwin in Cyclone Tracy. It will quite easily surpass reportage of several Olympic games.

Multiple murders, particularly of people unknown to the gunman, unleash huge news media interest. Debate on gun control receives most prominence in the days after mass shootings or poignant individual homicides, particularly if these occur in public settings. Table 3.2 lists some mass killings by civilians in peacetime that attracted heavy media coverage.27

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When the Port Arthur massacre occurred on 28 April 1996, the Australian public and the media were already concerned about gun violence. In the Dunblane massacre in Scotland on 13 March, 16 small children and their teacher were killed in a school gymnasium, a tragedy that flooded the Australian newspapers with articles and letters to the editor. One week later, extensive coverage was given to the shooting of Jean Majdalawi (Lennon) by her former husband outside the Family Court at Parramatta, Sydney, where they were due for a child custody hearing.28 The letters editor of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that the

114volume of letters about the Majdalawi murder

A Sun Herald editorial yet again called on the Carr Government to ‘stop fudging the issue of gun control’ after the Majdalawi shooting.30 The week ending 28 April was National Stop Domestic Violence Week, and the issue of domestic gun homicide weighed heavily on the minds of everyone, including journalists, who took part in rallies, vigils and meetings around the country. Proposals for gun control had also received prominence after the discovery of large caches of armaments, publication of reports on the rising rate of youth suicide involving guns, and after reports about controlling violence in the community.

In the ten years before the Port Arthur massacre, Australia and New Zealand had 13 mass shootings in which five or more people died, sometimes including the perpetrator.31 Consistent with the overall homicide pattern in the community, nine of these incidents involved men shooting people known to them (usually family members or neighbours). In the other incidents, gunmen ran amok in public places or stalked and killed total strangers over a number of hours or, in two cases, days.

These latter incidents (particularly Queen Street, Hoddle Street, and Strathfield) received huge media coverage compared to that given

115to family and neighbour killings. The number of people shot in family massacres has often equalled or exceeded the numbers in public incidents, but they tend to attract less media interest and seldom provoke political comment or action. The same can be said about media and political interest in the most common forms of gun death – suicides and family murders of individuals. If reported at all, they tend to be reported briefly without major display. Yet cumulatively, each year these deaths far exceed the annual death tolls from mass shootings. For every victim of a mass shooting in Australia and New Zealand, nine more died in a less newsworthy gun murders. Every one of these deaths leaves a trail of grief. The NCGC refers to these other gun deaths, which receive little media coverage, as ‘the slow massacre’ in which hundreds of people die each year.

The disparity between the coverage of stranger killings and reports of domestic homicides is often remarked on by domestic violence agencies. It may be that journalists are susceptible to society’s general discomfort about confronting the reality of domestic violence; or that they believe domestic homicide is a ‘private’ matter; or that the victims have somehow provoked their own deaths; or because of the ‘there by the grace of God go I’ factor – the possibility that they could have been victims themselves.

The sheer magnitude of the Port Arthur massacre – described as the ‘biggest’, ‘worst ever’, ‘monstrous’ and so on – was reflected in its media coverage. The event and the discussion of gun control became the leading news item in both print and electronic media recorded by monitoring agencies. Even in late June, gun control remained the ‘most discussed’ news issue on NSW radio and TV stations,32 and letters to the Sydney Morning Herald were still flowing in steadily, ‘most of them in favour of Prime Minister Howard’s plans.’33

Almost universally, the Australian media’s editorial line on the issue supported the NCGC’s gun control platform. Much of this support was

116confined to the commentary and opinion sections of newspapers, but it was occasionally revealed in news headlines, for example: ‘Amnesty reaping an ugly harvest’,34 ‘Modest heroes defy the bullies’.35