Former National party leader asks: ‘Do we want to import the NRA terminology and the poisonous policies of that in Australia?’

The former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, who helped the Howard government introduce sweeping gun reforms in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre, has warned against “chipping away” at gun ownership laws.

On the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday, Fischer and the other panellists were told by an employee of the Sporting Shooting Association of Australia that the country needed to “have a look at some of the bureaucratic overregulation of law-abiding firearms owners”.

But Fischer, who urged the US president, Donald Trump, to look at Australia’s gun laws in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting, said there had been a reduction in gun deaths in Australia since the legislation passed in 1996 and a buyback took place.

“Yes, it’s been chipping away since by degrees but are we in a better place than the USA?” Fischer said. “Do we want to import the NRA terminology and the poisonous policies of that in Australia? I don’t think even you want to do that and I will certainly stand up against that.”

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Last week Fischer and the former prime minister John Howard signed an open letter to voters in the New South Wales state seats of Cootamundra and Murray during the byelection warning them the Shooters party’s “first priority” was to weaken existing firearms laws.

“We can’t take a risk on a party with such dangerous policies,” said the letter, which ran as a newspaper advertisement and was authorised by the Nationals state director, Nathan Quigley.

Fischer told the Q&A audience that he had signed the letter because there had been a clear reduction in gun deaths since the reforms were introduced.

“I support the right for Olympic shooters, farming shooters, to have guns properly but I’m damned if we will have automatics and semiautomatics in the suburbs and towns of this country,” he said.

A fellow panellist and Victorian National party senator, Bridget McKenzie, said she would not want to see Australia’s gun laws “tightened at all”. The laws were “recognised as being strict across the world”, she said. She added that Australia was different culturally to the US and that the two countries could not be compared.

“We don’t have a constitution. We don’t have a second amendment-enshrined right to bear arms,” she said, arguing it was time to have another look at gun laws in Australia.”

ABC Q&A (@QandA) Shouldn’t we limit how many guns a person can own? Tim Fischer, Anne Aly @senbmckenzie & @arcanakhalil respond #QandA pic.twitter.com/QH2P4yGTfA

She said she supported weakened gun laws similar to those in New Zealand, where there is gun licensing but it is not a crime to be in possession of an unregistered firearm.

“I think the New Zealand and Canadian systems deliver the same safety and security for the community … with the same outcome,” McKenzie said.

Her comments drew criticism from the Labor member for Cowan and counterterrorism expert Anne Aly, who responded that Australia’s gun culture was different to the US but largely because of its strict gun ownership laws.

“Countless lives have been saved because of the gun laws that we have here that are the envy of many other societies,” she said. “And I also pay due credit to Tim and to John Howard when they introduced those gun laws in response to that terrible, terrible tragedy in Tasmania. And I think we’ve always had a bipartisan approach to public safety in keeping the public safe.”