Mr LAURIE FERGUSON(4.15 p.m.) —As a person whose maiden speech in 1984 in the state parliament dealt very specifically with this issue, I am pleased to associate myself with this gun control motion and with the effort of the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) to make overdue changes to gun laws in this country. I also wish to deal with a few aspects of what is being claimed.

One of the points being made by the gun control opponents is that the broad mass of Australia has been overwhelmed by emotion and there has been no logical thinking on this matter. The reality is that what Australians say now is what they have consistently said over the past few decades. In September 1995, 93 per cent of Australians supported a gun register. In 1978, 78 per cent of Tasmanians supported gun licensing. A New South Wales Department of Health survey earlier this year indicated that 92 per cent of the urban population and 80 per cent of rural residents supported compulsory annual registration of weapons.

In August 1991, the Sydney Morning Herald published a poll that indicated that 90 per cent of those surveyed would support the banning of semiautomatics and 67 per cent believed that only those people who absolutely need them for their employment should have guns. So there is a long, sustained support in the Australian electorate for restrictive gun laws.

I am afraid to say that, if we fail this time, the situation will only deteriorate further. There are some very important statistics from the United States in regard to a distinction between gun owners and the mass of the population in what they think about this issue. A United States report of 15 August 1994 polled people according to various categories—males, females. The poll indicated that only 42 per cent of the people who owned guns supported gun licensing whereas those who did not own guns had a 58 per cent support for licensing.

So there is a growth spiral of more and more people feeling threatened, more and more people seeing that others in their suburbs have guns, more and more people owning guns and more and more people with a very strong, sustained vested interest in the proliferation of guns. The average person is essentially against gun ownership, wants licensing and wants restrictions. As I say, as more and more people have this vested interest, the situation deteriorates.

One of the great furphies exposed over a decade ago by people like Frank Zimring is the concept that if you have a gun in your home you will be able to use it against an assailant or against burglars. The sad fact of life is that that gun is more generally used on the householder than it is on the burglar.

Dr Arthur Kellerman's analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine of Seattle homicides over a six-year period concluded that, for every case of self-protection homicide involving a firearm kept in the home, there were 1.3 accidental deaths, 4.6 criminal homicides and 37 suicides involving firearms—an overall ratio of 43 to one. In other words, for every time that a burglar might have been shot by a person half asleep in bed, if they actually managed to get hold of a gun, 43 people were suicide victims or accidentally shot—10-year-old kids shot by their seven-year-old brother, for instance. These are the kinds of realities that exist out there.

It is also worth indicating from Kellerman's work, which has been verified by a number of private corporation surveys of Canadian gun laws, that one of the great comparisons in this respect is that between Canada and the United States. As an island continent, Australia does not have a lot of similarities with the United States, but Canada shares a mainland border with the United States and has a lot of similar patterns. Yet there is a very clear differentiation between gun homicides in Canada and in the United States.

Kellerman indicated in 1988 after a seven-year study of Vancouver and Seattle that there were similar crime levels in all offences, bar those involving guns. In that situation there was a 4.8 to one—nearly five to one—difference in regard to the risk of being murdered with a hand gun. It is clear from the evidence from Canada, which has opted for restrictive gun laws and has strengthened them on a number of occasions—mostly recently in the last year or so and, earlier, in 1991—that gun laws do matter, that they do change things and that they do protect the population.

I associate myself very clearly with this motion. I commend the Prime Minister for his efforts. It is quite clear that the Australian electorate in overwhelming numbers not only endorses this legislation but has been consistently calling for it over the last few decades.