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

To begin with, I want to deal with the last part of what the shadow Attorney-General was saying. Of course I completely and utterly reject the ridiculous assertion that this government in any way, shape or form has sought or would seek to water down Australia's gun laws. That is complete and utter rubbish. I am very happy to go through what has been going on with that. The government has been taking proactive action to ensure that lever action shotguns over a magazine capacity of five are not allowed to be imported into Australia. The shadow Attorney-General was the Attorney-General for a short and rather inglorious period, but I would still expect him to know something about the way we govern gun laws in this country and the way we regulate guns in Australia. It has been absolutely clear to me, from the questioning in the House—not by him, admittedly, but by others on the opposition frontbench—that they would not have a clue about the way we regulate guns in Australia. I am happy to provide a very quick crash course, given I have got limited time. This is a very important question.

Ms Butler interjecting—

I would be very happy if you were to ask me a question about that. I will go back to what I was saying before I was rudely interrupted. Under your protection, Deputy Speaker Kelly, I will continue. The way we regulate guns in Australia is very simple: the Commonwealth regulates the import of guns and the states are responsible for the classification of guns. This is, of course, where we have our leverage; it is in relation to the import of guns. As the Minister for Justice, I have used that to ensure that we would not have a large-scale import of lever action shotguns with a magazine capacity of over five. That is in keeping, I think, with the spirit of the NFA even though the original NFA and the NFA that Labor presided over for six years put all lever-action shotguns into category A—the least restrictive category available of licensing around the country. The thing about category A is that all lever-action shotguns were placed in there regardless of their magazine capacity. It is also the case that in category A you could own as many of these guns as you like. Category A is the same category that we categorise air rifles in.

I did not think that was acceptable, so we took actions to limit the import of lever-action shotguns whilst we had a conversation with the states about where we should ultimately classify these guns. That has taken longer than I would have liked; I would have like to have concluded that conversation before now. But the reality is that not every jurisdiction agrees, and so we have been using our good officers to try and get a national agreement. There are nine jurisdictions in this country. To keep the NFA intact, we all need to move together. That takes a little bit of patience and understanding, but I do feel very confident that over time we will get the states to agree amongst themselves about where to classify lever-action shotguns with a magazine capacity of over five and also with a magazine capacity of under five. Again, I want to explicitly reject the suggestion that the member for Isaacs just made that we would seek, or have sought, to water down Australia's gun laws. It is nonsense, and I am sure he knows it is nonsense.

He raised questions about the Solicitor-General. I might just ask him—there was another issue that he raised in between, which has now escaped me. There were three issues he raised in that question. If the member for Isaacs is paying attention, could he remind what the third one was?

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