Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I dearly wish I had an hour to speak on this, but I will do the best I can in the short time I have. A person whom we will call Mr Henley—that is not his name—was given the opportunity to use the Steyr rifle. I was a weapons instructor in the cadets and then in the Army after that for some eight years. I shot a possible in the Earl Roberts shoot for the British Commonwealth in my final year at school, and my brother cleaned up the entire program for clay pigeon shooting, which is not surprising in a family who has lived on Australia’s frontiers for four or five generations. We would pride ourselves on knowing a lot about these things. My father was the Minister for the Army and served in the Second World War, as did some eight of his cousins and my mother’s cousins—or uncles, brothers-in-law—so we have had a lot of exposure to these sorts of situations.

Mr Henley rubbed sweat away from his eyes when he was shooting the Steyr rifle—but it was not sweat; it was blood. He looked up at the range commander, who said, ‘Steyr eye. You realise that the telescopic sight is far too close to the eye.’ A very experienced person, this Mr Henley! I must emphasise to you—and I plead with you, Minister, to listen to me and to the member for Cowan—that it is not that military personnel are deceiving you or that they even want to mislead you; it is that they are brought up to have loyalty, and loyalty is absolutely necessary to them. They have to believe in their officers. They have to believe in their equipment. They have to believe in their armaments. It is very rare for any of them to question any of these things. Grunts might complain about everything, and you might say, ‘But, but—’. But that is not the overall situation from my experience with the Army—and I will come to that in a second. Let me just go back to the rifle.

Of course, I know that when you fire a rifle the stock is there—in this position—and your hand must fit around the trigger, like that. That is a rifle that is the right size and suitable for you. Of course, the butt fell three or four inches short of the bicep, where it should have been, in Mr Henley’s case. The telescopic sight was far too close to the eye.

When he finished shooting, he proceeded to make safe the weapon. He looked in and could see nothing in the chamber, so he said, ‘I can’t see,’ and the range commander said, ‘No, you can’t.’ Mr Henley said, ‘How do I make safe the weapon?’ The range commander said, ‘You’ve got to take the barrel off.’ Mr Henley said, ‘No-one will do that.’ The officer said, ‘Yes, they don’t, but maybe that’s one of the reasons we have had accidents.’ At that stage the Steyr I think had shot three Australian troops and no enemy.

That is not the end of it. Mr Henley then asked, ‘Where do I rest my finger, because there is no trigger guard?’ There are probably not a lot of people these days in this place who do any shooting, but, for a person who has done a lot of it, a trigger guard is absolutely essential; you have to rest your finger somewhere. If you rest it around a pistol grip, it takes you a split second to move it from the pistol grip onto the trigger—and you do not have split seconds in warfare. The range commander said, ‘Where do you think you rest your finger?’ Mr Henley said, ‘Yeah, right. The finger rests on the trigger.’ The reason for this, which was mentioned before by the member for Wakefield, is that a lot of our equipment comes from Europe. The Steyr rifle comes from Europe. When I asked about the finger, I was told that it is a European weapon, an Austrian weapon, and it is made for gloves. You cannot fit gloves into a trigger guard. But a trigger guard is absolutely essential from the point of view of security and safety.

You snap-shoot in warfare. You cannot aim with a telescopic sight. It is great to have a telescopic sight when you have time to aim, but I was trained to understand that warfare is about snap shooting. I was on 24-hour call-up to go to Indonesia and then Vietnam. I was a trained platoon commander and I had done the course to go to Indonesia and to Vietnam. You cannot snap shoot with telescopic sights. There are no sights with which you can snap shoot with this rifle. My information is that the SAS refused to take this weapon to the Gulf War. They took the American Armalite rifle.

Finally, on the issue of rifles, when I signed up—I volunteered; we were at war with Indonesia—and lined up against Indonesia, we had 250,000 SLR rifles. Standing behind them were one million semiautomatic rifles, which we had in this country. This time when we line up, we will have 50,000 of these rifles, which is a substandard battle combat rifle, and there are not one million semiautomatics standing behind them. We have gone from 1.3 million rifles to defend our country to 50,000. As I have said many times in this place, there will be the day when people will curse the name of the people who voted for that to happen in this country.

If the minister believes everything that he is told, then it behoves him to reflect upon this fact: I was at a function and got talking to two blokes about how it is in the Army. They work with the Black Hawks. They did not answer my questions but I pushed them and pushed them, and eventually one of them said, ‘Hardly any of the Black Hawks are serviceable and we’ve had only six hours each on them this year.’ This is a very sophisticated piece of machinery.

I was a state member of parliament then and we had lost government, we were on the nose and we could not get anything into the media. I do not know whether they are excuses; maybe there was something I could have done—I have questioned in my mind a thousand times whether there was anything I could have done—because some two years after that discussion took place, 23 people, I think it was, lost their lives. There were officers there that were telling their superiors that everything was all right. There was no way that any officer had told his superiors about those problems and put it into the system—into the RODUMs that they are talking about here. My experience in the Army is that if you start making RODUMs you can kiss your chances of promotion goodbye and increase your chances of being sent somewhere extremely unpalatable.

I plead with the minister to remember the Black Hawk incident. I also ask him to remember that in the Second World War the people in this place were told that we had adequate abilities to meet the Japanese. The Owen gun was trialled in November 1939 by the Army. It was vastly superior. On a scale of one to 10 it came off at about an eight or nine. The Tommy gun came off at about two. As for the Sten gun, the trials could not be continued because it broke down three times; there were no real trials on the Sten gun.

It was only because this place insisted that eventually the Owen gun was sent up there. So we went up with Tommy guns that did not work in jungle warfare and that weighed in at 40 pounds with 400 rounds of ammunition, versus an Owen gun at 28 pounds. Frank Ford in this place said, ‘I’m overruling you people in the Army’—and these were the experts; Frank Ford knew nothing about weapons. He overruled them and insisted on the Owen gun. In the meantime, Billy Went-worth, who was then out of the Army—I don’t know the circumstances; well, I do know the circumstances, actually, as it is a matter of history—went on a speaking tour, saying, ‘It is an absolute disgrace that our men are up there without any submachine guns that will work in the conditions in which they are fighting.’

Mr Deputy Speaker Jenkins, I say to the minister through you: there are some precision-guided munitions out there but there is not anything like the number that should be there. Automated grenade launchers are not available. There are some there but they are not available. To me, it is a magic weapon.

Many people I speak to—and, of course, I have a lot of Army people in my electorate, which takes in part of Townsville—have insisted that we make available again the .50 cal machine gun. They are simply not there. The Bushmaster—the recce vehicle—has no provision for carrying machine gun weaponry. In the old days the Bren Gun Carrier was the name for what we call an APC or armoured personnel carrier. There is no provision on the Bushmaster for .50 cal machine guns or to carry into combat any of these things that are too heavy for individuals to carry. (Time expired)

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