The 10 May 1996 Police Ministers’ meeting marked the end of a major first stage of the gun control advocacy response that Port Arthur had unleashed. From then on, the goal became one of safeguarding the agreement and preventing backsliding in the weeks and months before each state would eventually pass its individual legislation and accompanying regulations reflecting the APMC agreement. Michael Gordon, political editor of the Australian suggested that Howard’s policy victory owed much to his having ‘seized the moment’ before the ‘shock, pain and outrage of the massacre [had been allowed] to recede.’1 With every day that passed, the potential for the resolve caused by Port Arthur to fade and for the gun lobby to exploit the incoming tide of apathy increased.

There was widespread concern that as time went by without the states implementing their agreed law reforms, and that as the memory of Port Arthur receded, with it would go any passionate conviction among the community and politicians that urgent law reform was required. Gun lobby definitions of the episode as one-off and as something impervious to policy reform risked gaining ascendency. One commentator wrote ‘Recent history … suggests that as time passes, the political pressure of the gun lobbies intensifies, the fervour of community support for gun control wanes the interest of the media diminishes, the nervousness of the politicians grows and in the end little gets done.’2

252The gun lobby organised many public meetings and rallies to oppose the new laws. During the period between the first and the second Police Ministers’ meetings (10 May–17 July 1996) these meetings were reported regularly in the media. Most reports framed these as signs that the initial resolve was on the edge of fragmenting, particularly in rural seats held by National Party members.3

As Rebecca Peters put it on the evening of the agreement, the task was to become one of ‘put[ting] the pressure on state governments to make sure they don’t try to squirm out of this under pressure from the gun lobby’.4

The gun debate presented a dilemma to many rural politicians who perceived that they – far more than their city colleagues – were most at risk of backlash from angry shooters. On 19 June 1996, two rural Labor members of the NSW Government walked out of a party room meeting in protest at what they described as a lack of time to consult their constituents about the planned new laws.5 The publicised walkout bore all the signs of a ritualistic display to signal to the gun lobby in their electorates that they had not passively accepted the process of law reform. The protest came to nothing, as did the support of 12 NSW rural National Party members for a parliamentary amendment moved by an independent rural politician opposed to gun registration.6 Knowing that their combined vote would go nowhere near to defeating the votes in favour of registration, these men may have been seeking to appease their gun lobby constituents while knowing that their votes would do nothing to upset the NSW Liberal-National Opposition’s broad support for the package of reforms. Such gestures allowed them to run with the gun control pack and while hunting with the gun lobby hounds.

253The list of agreements reached at the Police Ministers’ meeting represented, in one swoop, more promise of gun law reform than had ever been achieved in Australia’s entire legal history. Despite the breadth of the reform, many concerns remained. There was particular worry about the gap between the spirit of the new agreement and its translation into state and territory law and especially about the extent to which its various provisions would be actually implemented. There was also concern whether the clause providing exemptions for primary producers who could demonstrate ‘genuine need’ to possess low calibre semi-automatics would allow wholesale abuse when implemented. Police were to be given authority to assess applications about whether the guidelines on ‘genuine need’ were satisfied, and despite the Prime Minister’s assurances that ‘you’re not dealing with a group of people who are going to lightly tick off applicants’,7 there was concern that in many cases, personal friendships with police or cases of police who personally regarded the guidelines as being too tough, might lead to easy access to semi-automatics. In the months to come, data on the number of licensed shooters will become available that will resolve whether or not government policy and practice has allowed carte blanche rubber stamping of existing shooter’s licences, or whether the new criteria have been conscientiously applied causing many gun owners to be refused a license.

In the months that followed the APMC agreement, all states and territories passed legislative acts that embodied the core platforms of the agreement. However, along the way to the final passage of these acts, many amendments were introduced which fell well short of the spirit of gun law reform embodied in the initial APMC agreement. Those interested in scrutinising the detail of the new Acts can find them by searching AustLII Databases.8

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Two years on

As was feared, nearly two years after Port Arthur, there have been a number of disturbing cracks which opened up following amendments to the bills that were introduced following deals with the gun lobby in attempts to pacify rural electoral unrest, particularly in vulnerable seats. In March 1998, intense media debate on gun control erupted with the announcement that the Victorian government planned a series of amendments to its gun laws. The Queensland and South Australian governments also indicated dissatisfaction with aspects of the laws. While the media debate was concentrated on what seemed imminent in these states, it highlighted that slippage from the APMC had in fact already been occurring in all states. The proposed Victorian changes included:

• Allowing members of clay pigeon target shooting clubs to use semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns. The APMC agreement restricts access to semi-automatic (Category C) weapons to clay target shooters who are affiliated with the Australian Clay Target Association (ACTA). However Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory amended their legislation to allow licences to members of approved clay target clubs using an approved club range, regardless of whether they are affiliated with the ACTA. The Western Australian government estimates that less than 100 additional people are affected by this regulation
• Granting minors’ permits to allow children to shoot. This is contrary to the APMC resolutions, in that the minimum specified age for a shooters licence is 18. There is no mention in the APMC resolutions of any procedure for children under that age to be granted ‘junior licenses’ to shoot. Several of the new state gun laws allow children as young as 11 to have gun licences if they are supervised by adults. As the Victorian changes were being publicaly debated, all other states and territories were already breaching the agreement by permitting children under 18 to shoot. NSW, South Australia, Tasmania, and the ACT permit children from 12 years to have legal access to guns via minor’s permits, while in Queensland the minimum age is 11 years. Western and the Northern Territory set no minimum age for shooting. Under Australian laws, children aged under 18 are considered too young to smoke, purchase or be supplied with alcohol, watch violent movies, vote, consent to medical treatment, drive (if under 17), or have sex (if under 16). We don’t for example, issue driving learning permits to children under 16, despite the requirement of a licensed adult driver to be present when a young driver of 16 is learning. If as was so often said, the national gun control agreement had turned Australia away from being a ‘gun culture’, the new laws were an acknowledgment of a sea change in community tolerance of casual gun laws. Part of taking a less casual approach to guns must be to state clearly that guns are not appropriate for children.
• Waiving the 28-day cooling off period for the purchase of second or subsequent weapons. This was a clear breach of resolution No. 7 which stated ‘All jurisdictions to establish a 28-day waiting period prior to the issuing of all firearms permits.’ Again, Western Australia and the Northern Territory were already breaching the agreement on this: police there are not required to wait 28 days to issue firearm permits.

255As the debate increased about the Victorian government’s intentions, on the second anniversary of the Dunblane massacre Walter Mikac wrote an impassioned plea in The Age to politicians to stop the slide. He wrote

256As the drift toward ad hoc amendments appeared to be gaining momentum in March 1998, Prime Minister Howard re-entered the gun debate, using the occasion of a Premiers’ conference on March 20 to bring his concerns to a head. The conference was called in the middle of sustained protests from all states about the poor funding promised to them for health care by the Federal Government. Howard’s intransigence on this issue caused a walkout by all Premiers before the gun issue agenda item was even reached. As they left the room an angry Howard reportedly called out: ‘So what you are saying is that you refuse to discuss guns? This is very important. What you are saying is that I am going to have to address this myself.’ Commentators wrote ‘The public wants service at hospitals. They blame both governments when they can’t get it. Everyone loses on health, always. But on guns, John Howard is on a winner.’10

Days later, Howard acted to ensure that the watered down gun laws being passed by the states would henceforth be meaningless. From midnight on 24 March Howard banned imports of semi-automatic guns. Howard stated ‘with effect from midnight tonight, there will be a ban introduced on weapons designated as Category C under the 1996 agreement’. Exemptions for farmers who could produce police guarantees they were primary producers, and clay target shooters with the written authority of the federal Attorney General were to be allowed. Howard’s action meant that should any state liberalise access to Category C guns, a person thus newly licensed would have very few opportunities to legally

257purchase such a gun unless obtaining authorisation from the federal Attorney General. Only those guns placed on the market by the limited number of persons authorised to have access to Category C guns would be legally available to such shooters.

The SSAA’s website quoted correspondence received on this matter:

Safe storage

As described in Chapter 4, while the new laws specify minimum standards of storage for guns in homes, there is little evidence that these standards are being policed. A 1997 SSAA survey on the buyback reported that only 2% of its self-selected respondents had ‘been subject 258to a search/visit/inspection at your business/home premises by members of your State Police in relation to the firearm buyback scheme’11 Arguments that the sheer number of gun owners precludes any universal system of inspection prior to granting a licence contrasts with the way the state takes seriously building and motor vehicle inspection. Any building owner wishing to alter the structure of a building is required to allow (and pay for) an inspection of whether the alterations meet specifications. If as a community we can endorse the need for user-pays building and car inspections (often for reasons of safety), to deny this in the case of gun storage is to revert to the laissez faire attitude of the pre–Port Arthur days. With unsecure home storage of guns contributing to the frequency of gun theft from homes and the fortunately less common accidental discharges by children, the abject neglect of the implementation home storage regulations remains a major weakness in Australian gun law regulation.

Collector’s licences

The APMC resolutions and the modifications of 17 July 1996, required collectors to prove they were ‘bona fide’. Collector’s licences were intended to be a very limited category of licence covering existing collectors whose guns had genuine historical value. Because collectors were to be allowed to own more guns than other licensees, the need to apply stringent tests for this type of licence is obvious. However, collectors provisions in all states and territories constitute loopholes that can be exploited by those intent on maintaining or building up large stocks of guns. The Queensland Act for example, has no criteria for determining whether someone is a bona fide collector. The term ‘bona fide’ is absent, and there are no requirements to join a collectors’ club or furnish any proof of a history of collecting.

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Variable buyback rates

As shown in Table 4.1, the final results of the gun buyback showed great per capita variation across the country, ranging from one gun surrendered per 41.7 head of adult (15–75 years) population in the A.C.T. to one gun per 10.9 adults in Tasmania, the site of the massacre and the state that along with Queensland, had previously had Australia’s weakest gun laws. These figures though, present a very misleading picture. Recalling our argument in Chapter 5 of the domination of gun ownership by men, we might well divide the final adult per capita buyback figures by two to give a buyback rate per adult (15–75 years) male head of population. Nationally, this would result in one semi-automatic or pump-action shotgun being surrendered for every 10.4 adult males, and in Tasmania, one per 5.5 adult men. While I have been unable to obtain data on the mean number of guns surrendered by those coming forward, it is known that many handed in many more than one gun.

When the gun buyback ended there were 640,401 fewer semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns in the Australian community; a national system of gun registration had been established on 1 July 1997; and judging by the numbers of complaints on shooters’ web pages, many people applying for shooters licences were being rejected as having insufficient reason to own a gun. Moreover, it seemed possible that many gun owners may well have decided that their gun ownership was at an end. In early 1997, the Victorian secretary of the Firearm Traders Association, Robert Brewer said ‘Out of every 100 firearms handed in, only eight are being replaced. That means a massive drop in the number of firearms.’12 By October, this pattern appeared to be well entrenched. In Victoria, only one in 12 shooters surrendering a gun purchased a new, legal replacement weapon. In Western Australia, the figure was one in six.13 The buyback was the largest ever attempted anywhere in the world and by any standard has radically reduced the national gun arsenal.

260In April 1998, Australia’s biggest firearms distributor, Fuller Firearms, announced that it would close at the end of the 1998 financial year. Its owner claimed that national sales had fallen by 80% and that about only 10% of the money paid in compensation during the buyback had been reinvested in legal weapons.14 The Fuller situation appears to reflect the national picture. In late April 1998, the Sydney Morning Herald reported data compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showing that the number of firearms imported in the first nine months of the 1997–98 financial year fell almost 70%.

But how many illegal guns remain in circulation? As detailed in Chapter 4, the Commonwealth Law Enforcement Board advised the Police Ministers prior to the buyback that there were probably 1,488,000 soon-to-be-illegal guns in circulation before the buyback commenced. That would mean that after the surrender of some 631,000 guns that 857,000 illegal guns remain in the community. True to form, John Tingle estimated that in NSW alone, there were 2.5 million illegal guns in circulation16 – meaning that on average every adult male in the state would have had 1.1 semi-automatic weapons, not to mention legal guns as well! But even if the Commonwealth estimates are reliable, such differences speak of massive, widespread and deliberate illegal gun

261retention, particularly in NSW where rifles were not required to be registered. NSW’s rate of 30.2 guns surrendered per adult is 1.65 times less than the national average (after removal of the NSW figures). So much for earnest gun lobby talk about law-abiding shooters.

Australia is now a country where anyone now owning an illegal gun or being an unlicensed shooter faces the prospect of large fines and/or jail sentences; where near universal awareness exists that semiautomatic weapons are illegal; and where community support for gun control remains higher than practically any other single issue in public affairs. Any shooter who has retained such a weapon will need to be constantly vigilant to the possibility that if it is being rapidly fired within earshot of others, that someone hearing the distinctive sequence may call the police. Those who have broken the law and kept these guns will also need to keep their mouths shut. It would seem highly likely that many neighbours, acquaintances, workmates and family members fearful of the potential for these weapons to be used in acts of violence may report these owners to the police (see below).

The NSW police have announced that they will commence checking gun dealer’s sales records against the buyback details. This was the process used to trace the gun used by the backpacker murderer Ivan Milat to a suburban gun shop. In a letter sent to Philip Alpers the New Zealand gun control researcher, NSW Police Superintendent Clive Small confirmed that the Milat case has caused the police to ‘collate importation details from various companies over a period of approximately 20 years in regard to all weapons of the type used in the murders and subsequent inquiries regarding ownership.’ Such a database will be an invaluable tool in tracing many guns still in circulation, should governments direct police to take this issue seriously.

But – thanks to the previous absence of gun registration – there will be thousands of shooters who bought their guns from someone privately or down at the pub and will be feeling smug that there is little chance of a knock on the door from police checking. Unless Australian police are ordered to engage in active rather than passive policing of 262this issue, most of the illegal gun owners’ complacency will be proven justified.

Gun control advocates have repeatedly called for the potential of community concern to be channelled into a highly publicised anonymous reporting or ‘dob in’ scheme whereby people pass information on such gun owners to police. Such strategies are used routinely and successfully in the areas of child abuse, paedophilia, drug dealing, and environmental pollution and are promoted as examples of civic mindedness. If we can give priority to organising anonymous community phone-ins for drugs, child abuse and even poor university teaching standards, a high profile dob-in campaign is surely an obvious means of locating many of these guns. Like Ted Drane who said publicly on 15 June 1996 ‘I’m not gunna give up any guns that they are going to take off me! Are you gunna give yours up?’, many shooters openly declared their refusal to hand in their guns. With guns being so central to these men’s lives, many will have boasted about their weapons to neighbours, workmates and ex-girlfriends. Numbered among these will be many who will share the community’s concerns about the stability of people willing to risk a jail term to retain a rapid-fire weapon. The Tasmanian police have confirmed they will commence raiding homes following tip offs from gun owners who have obeyed the law and are resentful of those who have refused.17

Reforms welcomed by many sporting shooters

With the exception of the politically motivated end of the gun lobby, it seems that many shooters have come to realise that the law reforms may actually prove to be good for their sport. With membership of an established sports shooting or hunting club being one criterion for gun licensing, many clubs have seen booms in membership. Not only does this bring new membership fees, but also it holds the potential to bring some of the ‘cowboy’ element among shooters under the positive

263influence of the many responsible sections of the shooting fraternity. From the perspective of responsible shooters seeking to change the negative image of shooting, the new licensing laws hold promise of weeding out many ‘weekend Rambos’.

Despite the efforts of many in the gun lobby to portray gun control advocacy groups like the NCGC as gun prohibitionists, there was nothing in the APMC package and nothing in any statement made by the NCGCs representatives that could justify this label. The NCGC has never advocated prohibition of all guns and fully recognises the importance of guns in feral animal control and in farming, and is not opposed to target shooting organised under proper controls. Here, it is worth quoting at length Philip Alpers’ speech to the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice meeting in Vienna in April 1998:

267The current leadership of the gun lobby remains apoplectic over the new laws because of its leaders’ political ambitions and because of the involvement in the lobby of importers and dealers who will lose money from the restrictions imposed by the new laws. As I showed in Chapter 4 where I reviewed electoral results since Port Arthur, this end of the gun lobby appears not to have the confidence of even a modest proportion of gun owners or indeed even members of the SSAA. Almost daily, the guest book on the SSAA’s web site (www.ssaa.org.au) features statements from angry shooters saying they will never vote for again for either the Coalition or the Labor party, but will support minor candidates who advance shooters interests. The SSAA’s home page has a web counter underscored with ‘We are aware of [web site count number] who will not vote for John Howard’. Given that people many people working in gun control visit the site often more than once a day, this ‘whistling in the dark’, talking-up self-assurance is revealing of the insecurity the SSAA administration plainly feels.

On 30 September 1997, the final day of the gun buyback, the SSAA published an advertisement capital city newspapers highlighting ‘Responses to an Australian Audit Office requested survey of 80,000 SSAA members.’19 Such was the apathy among the SSAA’s membership that it received ‘more than 5000 responses’ (say 6.3%) and chose to key in only 2,137 (2.7%) respondents from its 80,000 membership. Presumably the 93.7% of SSAA non-respondents had more on their minds.

Getting guns out of homes

Besides working to address some of the shortcomings of the new laws as outlined above, perhaps the Australian gun control’s major policy challenge for the future is to lobby for laws that require gun owners in urban settings to store their guns outside of homes in community armouries. Ex-residential storage of all handguns was a key recommendation made by Lord Cullen after the Dunblane massacre, and was adopted by the

268British government in the interim period before the Blair government banned all handguns. Curiously, Cullen’s recommendation for ex-residential storage only applied to handguns, not to rifles and shotguns which of course are equally capable of causing the sort of carnage that occurred at Dunblane school.20

The main arguments for community armouries are:

• By law, guns cannot be fired in residential settings; hence there is no need to have guns in houses in towns and cities.
• Self-defence is not recognised as a legitimate reason to keep a gun. Therefore any reference to this reason as legitimising home storage can no longer apply in Australia.
• Guns are regularly stolen by thieves, with homes being the most common site for gun theft.21

In Australia, ex-residential storage would only be practical for urban and town residents because of the distances that often exist between population centres. Rural gun owners and those in towns not served by a police station should be obliged to store their guns securely in locked

269cabinets as currently required under the new gun laws. As argued, these should be inspected at a cost borne by the shooter.

Advocates for community armouries typically suggest that the armouries could be licensed gun clubs or police stations. They argue that both of these locations are already or could easily be securely fortified so as to allow for very secure storage. The gun lobby typically responds that community armouries would provide criminals with golden opportunities to steal hundreds or even thousands of guns from one location. For example Neil Jenkins, a target shooter who is one of Australia’s most reasonable spokespeople on guns argues:

In the UK after the passing of the Cullen recommendation on ex-residential storage, many gun clubs not solvent enough to upgrade their security facilities appear likely to close. It seems certain that Australia would see a similar scenario should such a policy be adopted here regarding storage in clubs. None but the more extreme ends of Australian gun control interests are in any way committed to using such a pretext to force the closure of target shooting clubs.

However, Danny Walsh from the Victorian Police Association offered an obvious solution to the very real points raised by Jenkins. On ABC-TV’s Lateline on 9 May 1996 Walsh suggested that licensed

270gun dealers could double as community armouries. Walsh argued compellingly that we already trust gun dealers to securely store guns. Many gun dealerships are open seven days a week to service shooters’ needs. The argument that gun shops would become targets for thieves already applies now. Gun shops are always heavily secured and have not to date been frequent targets for robberies in Australia. Certainly, more guns are now stolen from homes than from occasional robberies of gun shops. Most tellingly, the gun lobby is not on record as arguing that they should be closed because they are accessible repositories of guns for criminals. Gun dealers would doubtless be strongly supportive of such a plan as it would provide them with extra income through storage fees as well as customer traffic (many shooters would probably purchase shooting accessories when collecting their guns).

The NSW Firearm Dealers’ Association has 400 registered gun dealers and predicts that up to 75% of them will go out of business because of the tightening of gun laws causing an expected reduction in the number of licensed shooters and preventing sales to the many unlicensed gun owners in the community.23 If governments were to arrange for gun shops to serve as armouries, the financial impact on gun dealers would be far less, and may well increase their business substantially.

The main problem remaining with gun storage in armouries concerns the duration and frequency that shooters would be permitted to check out their guns. Potential difficulties would arise with shooters who legitimately wanted to go on weeks’ long hunting trips and with those who were determined to beat the system by claiming that they more or less continually needed to check their guns out from armouries in order to go on one such trip after another – all the time simply returning the gun to their home. Challenges in drafting reasonable guidelines to address this problem still remain but are not insurmountable.

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Banning semi-automatic handguns

Thomas Hamilton, the Dunblane killer, used a semi-automatic pistol to kill 16 children and their teacher. The sort of weapon used by Hamilton – who was a licensed pistol shooter – can be commonly found in the hands of licensed shooters in Australia today. As Hamilton demonstrated, these guns are capable of hideous, rapid and lethal firepower. It defies all logic to argue that Australia was justified removing semi-automatic long-arms from all but the few who could demonstrate genuine need for them, while continuing to allow handgun weaponry with the same rapid-fire capability to be available to shooters.

Compared to long arms (rifles and shotguns), Australian laws on handguns have long been much stricter. Handgun (pistol) licences are normally available only to members of handgun clubs and those employed in the security industry. Doubtless the gun lobby will argue passionately that there have been few incidents where semi-automatic handguns have been involved in gun violence and that therefore there is no need to place further restrictions on their availability. However, the facile nature of this argument can be seen by reflecting on what would have eventuated had Hamilton and Martin Bryant (respectively) used a rifle and a handgun, rather than the other way round. The carnage in both cases suggests that the myopia of the Australian law in only outlawing semi-automatic rifles and shotguns and not handguns as well may well return to haunt our legislators. While we can all hope and pray that such a prediction will never come to pass, the failure of even the Howard government to go the whole distance on gun law reform shows there remains much work to be done.

The lasting legacy of Port Arthur remains the way the tragedy all but destroyed the use of gun control as an expedient political bargaining chip that could be used to play one party off against the other. The outrage in the Australian community bound all major political parties in a common bond to move Australia more toward being a safer nation. The glue cementing this multi-party bond appears firm, although by no means permanent. For now, the gun lobby appears confined to the 272largely irrelevant political detritus status it shares with every conceivable shade of right wing extremism. We all must ensure it stays that way and keep alive the memory of the Port Arthur 35 by preserving and strengthening the laws their deaths finally allowed us to have.

Those killed at Port Arthur on 28th April 1996 were: