In an extraordinary development just a day or two before the 2018 Tasmanian state election, the Liberals’ policy to water down Tasmanian gun laws has surfaced. The policy had only been provided to a select group of firearm owners within Tasmania in early February and has been hidden from the wider public. There has been no previous debate about firearms in the course of this election. It is likely that at the very time the Liberal party planned to release the policy, the Florida school shooting occurred.

The lack of debate at this election is unsurprising. Major amendments to the Tasmanian Firearms Act that went through the parliament in 2015, and the final stages of regulatory reform were enacted in December 2017 in the form of much tougher storage requirements.

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Tasmania has an uncomfortable history with firearms and firearm regulation, standing in the way of the introduction of uniform national standards for over a decade. The gun lobby wrote the state’s gun laws. Tasmania was awash with military and military type weapons. In fact, in 1985 the then Liberal government subsidised the establishment of a factory in Hobart to produce semi-automatic military weapons. One of these weapons was found by police in Martin Bryant’s home, after the Port Arthur massacre.

The Liberal’s 2018 plan is to introduce legislation that will unquestionably breach the National Firearms Agreement. They want to extend the period for gun licenses from five years to 10. The NFA stipulated five years for the very reason that a shooter’s mental and physical condition needs to be checked every five years, and that 10 years was just too long.

The Liberals also want to free up restrictions for target shooting to make semi-automatic rifles and semi-automatic shotguns available for target shooting. This breaches the NFA which can claim, as one of its major achievements, limits on the availability of these weapons in Australia. It is that very limitation that is the key reason Australia has not seen any mass shootings in Australia since 1996 with these weapons.

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And the Liberals also want to permit farmers to have silencers on their semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.

The Liberals also want to introduce a new category for prohibited firearms, category E. This would result in otherwise prohibited weapons becoming available to what the policy describes as “certain specialists”. Whatever the Liberals are proposing with this initiative, it will clearly breach the NFA.

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The shooting lobby has been chipping away at the NFA and state legislation since it was introduced in 1996. They want to get one state to water down aspects of the law and then use that as a springboard to attack legislation in other states. Tasmania has largely resisted these forces. It had been thought that the history of the Port Arthur massacre and the previously high rates of gun suicide in Tasmania had stayed in the minds of our politicians. Unfortunately, they seem to have short memories.

The NFA was the subject of a fresh commitment by all state and territory governments (and the Commonwealth) as recently as February 2017. That included the Tasmanian government. Hence, it is an astonishing development that they now want to walk away from it and water it down. It is especially astonishing coming from the Liberal party, who led the introduction of the NFA across Australia in 1996 and who bought in the Tasmania Firearms Act 1996 following the Port Arthur massacre.

It is to be hoped that this late development in the election campaign leads to the broader community – which will inevitably include shooters – telling the Liberal party that Tasmania’s firearms law are not to be traded for votes.