Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

This is not a new piece of information. It has been out in the public domain for some time, and Senator Leyonhjelm, of course, has mentioned it many times. In fact, he has released that correspondence on many other occasions, but apparently the Labor Party has never seen it before today. So, let me repeat: we will keep the ban in place until the states come to an agreement about where they are going to classify these guns. You can keep asking me about the sunset clause. The explanation remains exactly the same. And, as I said, this is not a new piece of information, but apparently Labor has been completely asleep to do with anything about guns.

Let me just go through what the record of the Labor Party was, when they were in office, about guns. They cut the ability of Customs and Border Protection to detect illegal guns coming into this country. They slashed the resources of the Australian Crime Commission by fully one-third and the funding of the Australian Crime Commission by fully one-third—our criminal intelligence agency that helps us detect illegal guns. We will continue to do what we have always done, which is crack down on the illegal market whilst maintaining John Howard's gun laws— (Time expired)

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