Firearms Ownership
[4.07 p.m.]
Ms BURNET (Clark) - Deputy Speaker, this has been quite the ride with this motion, but it's an important topic, so I thank Mr Di Falco for bringing it to the House, although it has been said quite clearly the concerns it has for people who have been directly impacted by gun violence and families and the general community in Tasmania. I won't keep prosecuting that argument, but it is palpable and the contributions have really shown the depth of concern of various members. I thank them for their contributions and raising the issue of how this can be seen as a very insensitive approach to talking about gun law reform.
We have the honourable member for Lyons, Mr Di Falco, talking on behalf of a constituency and that's fair enough. We all talk about various parts of our own constituencies, but this is a really small part of his overall Lyons constituency. I will prosecute that with plenty of facts and figures and I will talk to Ms Badger's amendment as well.
I think it's worth remembering that while the number of firearms licence owners is growing, it's still a very small proportion of Tasmanians. According to information released last year, there are 36,834 firearms licence holders in Tasmania, or to put it another way, there are 540,000 who don't hold a firearms licence. To put things into context, there are approximately 412,000 registered voters in Tasmania, so that means that less than one in 10 registered voters is directly impacted by any changes to firearms licencing or firearms caps. When it comes to restricting access to five firearms, there are only 9000 people who are impacted by this. That's one in 40 voters, if you make that correlation. You would expect they would oppose these caps because it would directly impact them. But what about the 540,000 Tasmanians who don't own firearms, whose safety is threatened by the increasing number of firearms in Tasmania?
I want to challenge some of the claims in Mr Di Falco's motion, in (1)(a), that Tasmania has a strong culture of lawful firearm ownership. Ms Badger has made this point. It needs to be counterbalanced with the fact that Tasmania still lives in the shadow of the single worst gun‑related massacre since the end of the frontier wars.
At (1)(b), which was removed, I do have some concerns about what requirements or checks there are on firearm-owners, particularly where there are changes in their cognitive capacity over time, which does occur, as you'd know, Professor Razay, which I need to inform myself of. I have some reservations about that paragraph - the concern about gun-ownership and determining who is fit and proper to own a gun. We still have to have that debate, and I don't want to bring that forward before we talk about any bill that's before us.
I'm a little concerned about paragraph (1)(d), 2(a) and (c). I'm not an expert in this area and I haven't been provided with any evidence or information by Mr Di Falco to persuade me that these assertions are correct. I have done some of my own research, and what I found is quite staggering. I want to put on the record today a comparison of police data from 2014‑15 with data from 2024‑25 regarding to firearms‑related incidents in Tasmania. I seek leave to table the following documents containing this data: the Tasmanian Police Annual Corporate Performance Report for 2015 (June) and Tasmanian Police Annual Corporate Performance Report for 2025 (June).
I provided these documents electronically to all members of the crossbench, opposition, and government liaison this morning. The relevant pages for those in the media or following along at home are at page 35 in the 2025 report and page 31 in the 2015 report.
I seek leave to table these two documents.
Leave granted.
Ms BURNET - In 2014‑15, firearm injury incidents were nine. In 2024‑25, they were 14. That's a 64 per cent increase. Firearm used as weapon incidents in 2014‑15 were 39. In 2024‑25 it was 170, which is a 336 per cent increase. The total firearm-related incidents in 2014‑15 were 186. The 2024‑25 comparison is 380, which is a 104 per cent increase.
These are extremely concerning statistics, and they demand a very serious and urgent response from the government. I want to make the obvious point that we don't know how many of these firearm incidents were caused by licenced firearm holders, but I can understand why the Tasmania Police Commissioner took the significant step of formally writing to the Police minister in February to highlight that there are now more guns in circulation than there were in 1996, significantly more. The Police Commissioner writes:
That we as a society face a growing risk posed by firearms in our community, and based on the data, I'd say that's an understatement. [tbc]
The point made by the Police Commissioner stands to reason. The more firearms you have in Tasmania, the more risk you face that they will get into the wrong hands. There were 46 reported incidents of firearms' theft in Tasmania in the last financial year, up almost 25 per cent on the previous year. We should be concerned about this. Who could dispute the reasonableness of such a request, and so when the commissioner provided her explicit support for proposed firearms cap, we need to heed that call.
This motion is about encouraging public discussion, if you want to look at it in a good light, and how many firearms a person should be able to possess in Tasmania. There does need to be genuine discussion though about what an appropriate number would be, and the discussion needs to involve those directly impacted by this, as much as it should involve the other 520,000 people in Tasmania.
I want to know why a firearms owner would need more than five firearms and I would like to know what regulatory checks are in place when a person seeks more than five firearms. I don't have any great difficulty with the person owning more than five firearms, but there has to be good reason. The fact that there are almost 160,000 registered firearms in this state should be one of real concern. That equates to an average of four firearms per licence holder. I'm not persuaded of the correctness of the claims made in the motion, so I will not be supporting it, although I do support -