Firearms Act 2024—Standing Committee on Legislation recommendations

Motion 23rd October 2025

Hon Dr Steve Thomas (10:46 am): I start by saying that all my opposition colleagues and I believe in having good firearms legislation in Western Australia that underpins the safe handling of firearms. I think we all do that.

It is highly appropriate on a Thursday morning to sit here and listen to the political spin and outright lies of the Labor Party. I think we could only do that on a Thursday morning.

Hon Jackie Jarvis: We only lie on Thursdays!

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: I am just warming up, minister.

Hon Julie Freeman raised the point of why the government did this on that timeframe. I will give Hon Julie Freeman the obvious answer: it was politics; there was an election coming up in March 2025 and this is one of the things the government wanted to beat the drum over.

I have to re-educate the Minister for Agriculture and Food and, from yesterday, Hon Dan Caddy on their absolute nonsense around the operations of the committee. The minister has probably got an excuse because she had barely served on a committee before she was zoomed up the ranks to minister. Hon Dan Caddy has served on a range of committees, so he should know better than most people the absolute rubbish that the government has come out with. Let me give them a few basic lessons in parliamentary process. When members join a committee that has been formed, they are covered by parliamentary privilege. If they discuss the contemplations of the committee with their political colleagues, with their party, prior to the release of the report, they are in breach of parliamentary privilege. For the member to stand up and say the opposition endorses this because it had a member on the committee and the crossbench endorses the report because it had a member is absolute rubbish.

Hon Dan Caddy: This is a vote of no confidence in your member.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: You know better!

The President: Order, members.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: You know better, Hon Dan Caddy. He understands this because he has experience on committees.

Hon Dan Caddy: Is this a vote of confidence in your member?

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: This committee report is not an endorsement.

The Acting President (Hon Andrew O'Donnell): I know it is Thursday morning and it is a highly emotive topic, but can we please, for the benefit of Hansard, keep the volume at an acceptable level.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: Thank you for your strong protection, Acting President.

For those who understand the committee system, it does not get discussed and it is not a party political decision. Perhaps it is for the Labor Party, because the Labor Party seemed to indicate that is what is going on. Someone who accepts the argument of the minister and Hon Dan Caddy that the parliamentary committee system is a party political process could accept their arguments. Otherwise, they should accept the lies and nonsense for exactly what they are.

Let us address a couple of these things, because I do not have enough time to get through all the issues I need to get through. I thought that finding 1 was interesting. Members can find that on page 9. Part 1.52 of the report reads:

The Committee is satisfied that, through its Westminster style committee system, the Regulations were sufficiently subject to the scrutiny of the Parliament.

I am going to talk about the regulations. I heard some nonsense from the minister about the bill. Out of 486 clauses in the bill, 18 clauses were looked at in detail. The regulations contained 312 clauses and, yes, initially there was a debate around a disallowance motion. If we did not have a disallowance motion, Hon Dr Brian Walker, we would have had no debate on the regulations, but there was a debate on disallowance in both houses. In the lower house, they debated the disallowance for two hours and 20 minutes; in the upper house, they debated it for three hours. That is five hours in total to discuss and work out the benefits of 312 clauses. It is not much of a debate, is it? One has to remember that almost nobody read the regulations. The debate last year on the bill was the one in which we could debate the clauses that the government gave us time to debate, which was 11 in this house. But we table the regulations and, generally, nobody reads them. I do not know how many people read the regulations. I read them. Hon Dr Brian Walker read them. We have four members of the committee. I assume that all the committee members read all the regulations; is that a fair comment?

Hon Dan Caddy: I would have assumed so, too.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: Did the members who were on the committee read all 312 of the regulations?

Several members interjected.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: Stony silence.

Several members interjected.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: There is a good question. Did the committee—

Hon Dan Caddy interjected.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: I have already upbraided you once, Hon Dan Caddy. Do not make me do it again.

Out of all the committee members who recommended that the regulations were sufficiently subject to the scrutiny of Parliament—the reason the minister said that is because it went to the committee—I cannot get an answer about how many members of the committee read the regulations. Did they read them? I ask the Chair of the committee: Did they read them?

Hon Dr Katrina Stratton: I have done nothing but read for the last few months.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: Have you read them all? That is what I am going to ask, because you think that it has had adequate scrutiny.

Hon Dr Katrina Stratton: Of course I read them. You have already questioned whether or not I breached parliamentary privilege. How dare you question me on this as well.

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: Has it had adequate scrutiny?

The Acting President (Hon Andrew O'Donnell): Order, members!

Hon Dr Steve Thomas: I am trying to find out. Was there adequate scrutiny? That was the first finding. Once I read that, I thought, okay, almost nobody has read the regulations. We did not debate them in the house. The members of the committee hopefully read them; I hope they did, because that would at least underpin their position. I disagree entirely. Even if all members of the committee read them, which I think would have been the right thing to do—they may well have done; I hope they did—that is five members out of 37 in this house. How many other members read them? Not many. Did those regulations get the scrutiny of the house? What a load of rubbish. The first finding of the report says that there was sufficient scrutiny of the regulations in this house. It is not true. Hon Dan Caddy got up and said that if there is not a minority report, the whole party suddenly agrees with the report. That is not true either. It is just not true. It is a fraud perpetrated on the house.

There are a couple of other issues that we should probably address. We should have a much longer debate on this but we are stuck with this. When we look at the misrepresentation that has gone on here, we should go back to why it was delivered the way it was delivered. The portal was a joke because the government had to rush it through to get everything prepared to get a political benefit in March 2025. We understand that. The government was targeting a group of people that it probably did not have a connection with. We understand that as well. It is natural for the left wing of politics to be more centralist. They believe in communal responsibility and communal acceptance of responsibility. The right wing does not; we believe in the individual. One would expect that difference and I understand that.

Why are we doing it? Let me tell members this. I have now put in a freedom-of-information request to the police for the report, because the government keeps mentioning the incident perpetrated by Mark Bombara, which was an awful thing. It was a disgrace, and nobody has anything but the utmost horror for that incident. I put in a freedom-of-information request because the police had the power under the previous act to seize his guns and they did not. The police not only did not seize his guns, but also had to acknowledge publicly that there were eight instances of them doing the wrong thing. What happened? The government and the police are using and weaponising this as an opportunity to attack and undermine honest law-abiding right-doing members of the community who happen to be firearms owners. The government is weaponising this.

If the government believes that this is something it should reference in the debate, it should put the report on the table. It can take the names out. I do not want to crucify any police officers. Take the names out, redact the names of any police officers, but tell the community how it went wrong. The government did not. The members of the committee got up there and said, "Here is a set of recommendations; we have tabled the report." No, they have not. I sought an FOI request. It was rejected. I appealed the FOI request internally to the police. It was rejected. I am appealing it to the Information Commissioner. I imagine that will be rejected as well, because we cannot actually get the truth out that the police failed eight times, here is the way they failed, they could have used the previous legislation and they did not. It was a horrendous incident, but the way the government is weaponising it to attack honest people is not much better. I would ask the government to please stop. I know it is politically expedient, I know that the government would like to jump up and down on that, but it just does not work.

I will finish with this. I have finally got an answer back to a question I have asked a couple of times. We are used to the government refusing to answer questions. On Tuesday, I asked how the portal process has been going, and I also asked, funnily enough, how many complaints have been received about the portal. On Tuesday, the responding minister on behalf of the Minister for Police said that they would provide the answer the next day. Yesterday, it came out. How many complaints have they had? Here is the answer. The minister said that the transition of a Firearms Act licence to the new 2024 firearms authority occurs outside of the firearms portal. Interestingly, how often can one get a new licence without using the portal? But the actual answer that we received basically said that the number of complaints is so high that the minister cannot give us an answer. There are so many complaints that the government cannot even answer the simplest of questions.

Of course, at the other end of this, I asked how many licences have been processed. There have been 60,000 applications—at about seven a month, that is probably about right—of which, 32,600 have been determined and 26,600 have failed to be determined, so 55% have been determined and 45% have failed to be determined. The government is months behind. Of those applications, 80% got through, 20% gave up because the process was too difficult, and the government managed to find 13 licences that were referred—that is amazing.