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

I move:

That the Customs (Prohibited Imports) Amendment (Firearms and Firearm Magazines) Regulation 2015 made under the Customs Act 1901 on 6 August 2015 and presented to the House on 10 August 2015, be disallowed.

Those of us—and there seem to be very few in this place—who read history books know the great march of history. There are some leaps forward. And one of the greatest leaps forward in the history of liberty and freedom was the writing of the Magna Carta by that wonderful man Bishop Langton. Heaven only knows what we owe to the Christians. In the Magna Carta, he said that it is the right of an Englishman to bear arms and the Crown has no right to take away an Englishman's right to bear arms. That was in the Magna Carta in 1215. In the Bill of Rights which delivered democracy to the people of the world—it was in 1660, or whenever the hell it was—they enshrined the right to bear arms. These are the greatest documents in human history. The greatest minds in all of human history have sat down and thought about government—unlike the pygmies that populate this place in a passing moment. These are things that have lasted for a thousand years.

As to Thomas Jefferson, who will forget that phrase of John F Kennedy's when he had the Nobel Prize winners at the White House? He said, 'This is the greatest aggregation of intellect in the history of the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.' Jefferson, and those other great men who wrote the Declaration of Independence, wrote into the Declaration of Independence the right to bear arms, for, without that, the individual has no rights; the rights of power lie exclusively with government.

There is a great debate over fishing closures in Queensland. In Queensland now, the only people with the right to bear arms are the people in uniforms. It is pretty scary when you live in a society where the only people with the right to bear arms are the people in uniforms.

Those who are of a conservative bent—and that most certainly does not include the Liberal Party—believe in certain inalienable rights and freedoms. They believe in the right of the individual and that it prevails over the right of the Crown. We are the inheritors of the English-speaking cultures—no matter what our racial backgrounds are. In fact, the English-speaking peoples are led by a person whose forebears come out of Africa. When the rights of individuals were taken away from us and delivered to the Crown, we had a very good habit of cutting off the head of the person who wore the Crown—in fact, the great bard said, 'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,' and well he might have said that, because we did it again and again, when they tried to take away our fundamental rights.

When we say 'the right to bear arms', some conjure up spectres of revolution. I do not. I conjure up spectres of my home. I look out at my backyard and I see beautiful gum trees and nice paintings from some artists that I love. I see the grass on my little football oval and my pointer dogs hopping around. I think, 'This is my home.' I have a right to defend my home. No-one has the right to take away from me the right to defend by home.

In the great debate in the Queensland parliament, I asked Peter Beattie, later to become the Premier of Queensland, 'Who is going to defend my home when the monsters of the night invade?' He said, 'The police, of course.' I said: 'I was waiting for that. The official response time is 50 minutes, so I think she is all over red rover by the time that 50 minutes is up, mate.' And that is if you are fortunate enough to be able to raise the police immediately to get them to come to you. My experience is that it takes you about 10 minutes to explain what the address is when you ring up triple 0. In my family there have been 13 break-ins for close and immediate family members, and in our personal experience it has been a little bit over two hours. So saying that the police will defend my home is a silly thing to say. We love the police and we feel very comfortable that they are there, but to say that they are going to defend my home is simply insulting my intelligence, when they arrive two hours later. By the way, with those 13 cases, I did not include the case where it took two weeks before the police arrived. I fully documented these cases, by the way.

So you have taken away my right to defend my home. You have taken away my right to be the king in my little castle, and if ever there is a great cry for those of us who come from English speaking cultures it is that an Englishman's home is his castle. A castle is of its very nature—the meaning of the word—defence. It is mine to defend and protect, and you take away my right to defend and protect. Those of us who are my age will recall that we were at war with our neighbours in Indonesia. They outnumbered us 20 or 30 to one in those days, and I was at an age where I was going to go to war. It gets you thinking very clearly. When we faced off we had 300,000 self-loading rifles and over a million semiautomatic rifles. My brother and I had one each. It is not good to pick a fight with people who have 1.3 million rifles. If you asked me, 'What is the only country in Europe that has not been invaded in the last 150 or 200 years?' I would say that the only country that has not been invaded is Switzerland. Why? Because every single home has an automatic rifle with nine rounds, by law. And if you say, 'Gee whiz, there must be a lot of deaths over there', ask me what country has the lowest death rate in Europe. Almost invariably it is Switzerland. The highest death rate in Europe was in East Germany whilst it was still East Germany. The neighbouring countries have an almost identical language, but if you ask me who had the highest death rate in Europe, it was East Germany, where all guns were banned by the communists.

We all know the hallmark of totalitarian regimes is that only the men in uniforms have guns. You say to me, 'We are not a totalitarian regime.' Well, start looking in the mirror, my friend. But for those of us who come from northern Australia—and I speak to Western Australians here as well, because the Brisbane Line was not a Brisbane line but was a recommendation by General Mackay to the parliament of Australia—Australia could not be defended. If they took Port Moresby—the Japanese were 10 days away from taking Port Moresby—the air cover would go over the top of Australia. We could not stop the invasion. There would be no way, with the troops we had, that we would be able to defend anything else except what I call the golden boomerang—Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and up the coast to Brisbane. That was all that was to be defended. All the rest, including Western Australia, was to be handed over to the enemy. It was delightfully called the Brisbane Line. So maybe the attitude of people from North Queensland is slightly coloured by the fact that the last time we had a serious stoush with our neighbours we had 1.3 million rifles. And for those who say, 'In modern warfare what use is a rifle?' Tell that to my friends who fought and died in Vietnam, where a bunch of people running around in pyjama coats with AK-47 rifles beat the devil out of the greatest military machine that the world had ever known. Wellington gave independence to Ireland because he said he would never see Great Britain go through the trauma and horror of the guerrilla warfare that he had experienced in Spain.

One of the greatest things I ever saw on television was about the Barbarossa campaign, on SBS. They were interviewing this little old lady, and Ian Causley, one of my great colleagues from this place, rang me up and said, 'Turn on the television.' I said, 'I'm already watching.' He said, 'Barbarossa?' And I said, 'Yes.' They were interviewing this little old lady and they said: 'So the Germans had taken three quarters of your army. They were in control of more than half of your population and the war was over. You had lost.' She said: 'Well, I didn't know that. I didn't know what was going on.' They asked her, 'So what did you do?' She said, 'I got my family hunting rifle and shot a German soldier.' They asked, 'They retaliated?' She said: 'Yes. They just grabbed two people in the street and shot them dead by way of retaliation.' The interviewer asked, 'So you stopped shooting German soldiers?' She said, 'No, I went out and shot two German soldiers.' They asked, 'And they retaliated?' She said that they put a cordon around a village of 102 people and slaughtered everyone inside the village.' They asked, 'So then you stopped shooting German soldiers?' She said, 'No. I got six of my schoolmates, and then we became 12, and we all got our family hunting rifles and shot 100 German soldiers.'

There is a message there for a little, tiny country like Australia. There is a message there for those of us who love our country and want to protect our country, for those of us who love our home and our family and want to protect our home in our family and not give that power away to the state, the people in the uniforms, the King, the Crown. Those are wonderful, high-flying, philosophical points that I make and, if I may say so, I make them with force.

Let us come down to reality. In Queensland we had no gun laws. In 1988, the year of the much maligned Bjelke-Petersen, we had no gun laws whatsoever. None. There were considerable numbers of firearms but no gun laws. You could have whatever rifle you wanted any time you wanted. I walked in off the street and bought an AK-47 one day because I thought it would be very useful, and anyone could to that any time they liked. We had eight deaths from guns. That is all.

New South Wales, with very stringent laws on firearms, had 38 deaths from guns. With draconian laws in Victoria, a state 50 per cent the size of Queensland, there should have been 12 deaths from guns. They did not have 12. They did not have 24. They did not have 36. They did not have 48. They had 54 deaths from guns. For years after the gun ban there were more deaths than in the years before the gun ban. I am not going to go into the psychological reasons why this occurs and why it is a phenomenon that occurs throughout the world. All I am going to say is that we are here today because there are further bans on guns.

I must declare a pecuniary interest. I have a relative who is involved in the Adler shotgun that is being banned under this regulation. I asked myself: why would I withdraw from the battle and from things I profoundly believe in? Is it because I have a relative involved? No way! It does not muzzle me. In fact, the opposite may well be the case.

This is where you see the ridiculous nature of government. People here think they are governing. But I compare it to the government that I proudly was a part of that ran Queensland for $8,000 million. The LNP could not run the same state for $51,000 million. It would be a good comparison of our relative intelligences and capacity levels. The ALP could not run it for $49,000 million. We ran it for $8,000 million. Maybe we had some good ideas when we were governing Queensland.

People have said that this lever action process is a new technology. (Time expired)

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