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Parliamentary Questions


Question Without Notice No. 231 asked in the Legislative Assembly on 6 April 2022 by Mr V.A. Catania

Parliament: 41 Session: 1

FIREARMS OWNERSHIP

231. Mr V.A. CATANIA to the Minister for Police:

I have a supplementary question. Minister, criminals care about where firearms may be, not the owners of them.

The SPEAKER: Sorry, because this is supplementary, you just have to ask a direct question and not provide a preamble.

Mr V.A. CATANIA: Okay.

Firearm owners are not concerned about where firearms are; it is the criminals. How can publishing the locations of where firearms are stored be in any way justified?

Mr P. PAPALIA replied:

It is the same question. The locations of firearms licence holders were not published. Some de-identified maps were published. They demonstrated that every single suburb in Perth, almost every single street in Perth, has a licensed firearm. Licensed firearms can be stolen. They then become unlicensed firearms—illegal firearms—and they are used in committing crimes. That is why it was of interest to everyone in Western Australia that there has been a 60 per cent growth in licensed firearms in the last 13 years. That is of interest, I would expect. I would expect it would be of interest to every member of Parliament that the number of licence holders has remained static, and yet the number of licensed firearms has increased dramatically in that period. Apart from that, the Firearms Act has not been rewritten in Western Australia since 1974 when it was introduced. Every other jurisdiction in the nation has completely rewritten their firearms acts since the National Firearms Agreement in 1996. We intend to do the same.