Newly elected Tasmanian MP for the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, Carlo Di Falco, has criticised the politicisation of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, telling Sky News that former Prime Minister John Howard had been opportunistic in taking advantage of it.
Within days of being elected, Mr Di Carlo is calling for similar pro-hunting law reforms to those being tabled by the SFF in NSW, which would enshrine the right to hunt, open public land for hunters, provide easier access to suppressors and permit night-vision and thermal technology to be used on public land.
His comments have stirred the angry hornets of the anti-gun lobby, which were already on the attack — and using Port Arthur to politicise and poison the debate.
As always, the anti-gunners are conflating murder and gun crime with hunting and recreational shooting, ignoring the realities of Australia’s law-abiding firearms users.
Mr Di Carlo’s statements come days after the anti-gun lobby rallied against the SFF’s NSW hunting proposals, garnering a front-page headline on the state’s Daily Telegraph newspaper saying, “Don’t change our gun laws” with the subheading “Port Arthur father’s plea to Premier”.
Walter Mikac, whose wife and two daughters were killed at Port Arthur, has called the proposed hunting bill “the most regressive firearms legislation proposed in any Australian parliament since the tragedy at Port Arthur”.
The Telegraph quoted him as saying the laws represented “a slippery slope to carnage and mayhem” but included no indication this might be the case.
The Tele repeated factually incorrect propaganda peddled by the anti-gun lobby that night-vision and thermal equipment is restricted or prohibited from use by shooters; the truth is that they have long been used legally and without any form of licensing on private land in NSW.
The anti-gun lobby also keeps painting suppressors — or silencers, as they prefer to call them — as weapons of great public danger, ignoring the fact that Australia is getting further out of step with the rest of the world in maintaining heavy restrictions on them.
The SSAA this week put out a press release with a title that stated its case in clear, simple terms: “Nothing about the NSW Hunting Bill undoes the National Firearms Agreement”.
SSAA accused the anti-gun lobby of making statements that were “unnecessarily alarming and devoid of awareness in relation to how hunting and associated conservation programs are administered”.
That’s a polite way of putting it!
Long-time anti-gun advocate Roland Browne knows how to alarm the public and wasted no time doing so in response to Mr Di Carlo’s statements.
Browne introduced the dreaded spectre of American gun culture to the discussion, characterising Mr Di Carlo’s position as “a contagion from the United States”.
He and his ilk learned long ago that mentioning American gun culture was like shouting boo while telling ghost stories to little kids.
As we approach the 30th anniversary of the Port Arthur massacre, we must brace ourselves for more of this garbage, which has not let up in all that time.
However, we should remember that some sense has returned to the public’s perception of shooters and shooting, and that we are no longer seen as quite the pariahs that John Howard turned us into.
Most reassuring of all is the fact that the various groups representing Australia’s hunters and shooters are probably more organised, professional and united than they have ever been, as evidenced by SIFA’s successful efforts to bring them together.
Our sport has been politicised for too long. We have made good ground in a long and difficult journey back to respectability and we will only advance further for having a supportive lobby that is intelligent, well prepared and pro-active without waving guns in the air.
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