Australian gun lobby groups pumped more than $500,000 into helping minor rightwing parties win seats in last year’s Queensland state election as part of a growing push to weaken the nation’s strict firearm control laws.
As Australia’s gun laws are again held up as an example to the US following the Florida school shooting, election disclosures reveal the pro-gun lobby is pumping thousands of dollars into the campaign war chests of parties such as One Nation and the Katter Australian party (KAP).
Australian Electoral Commission returns show that since 2010 the state branches of the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia have poured $440,800 into supporting the KAP, the Shooters Fishers and Farmers party and the Liberal Democratic party among others.
And the cashed-up firearm groups are using ballooning membership numbers – ironically won as an unintended consequence of John Howard’s changes after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre – to flex their political muscles.
“The courtship of the gun lobby by political parties is definitely a growing theme,” Sam Lee from Gun Control Australia told the Guardian. “Industry groups, manufacturers, there’s an emerging NRA-style approach to organising which is all about finding new markets and stopping any strengthening of existing laws.”
Last year’s state election in Queensland was ground-zero for an increasingly vocal pro-gun lobby, which flooded the campaign with $500,000 in election campaigning, helping the KAP and One Nation.
Queensland election disclosures reveal shooters groups were among the largest donors, with the bulk of the campaign financing directed to a third-party activist campaign aimed against the major parties.
The Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia – or Sifa – received $550,000 in the lead-up to the Queensland state election, which it spent on the “Flick ‘Em,” campaign using TV, radio and online advertising to push for voters to “put the majors last”.
The campaign aimed to stop either Labor or the LNP forming a majority government. It described itself as a “collective action group” with support from “grassroots, industry and business”. But a Guardian analysis of donation disclosures reveals that the campaign was almost entirely funded by pro-gun groups.
Sifa received more than $500,000 in donations from gun groups including $200,000 from the Sporting Shooters Association of Queensland and $21,500 from the Firearm Dealers Association of Queensland.
Sifa itself tipped $275,800 into the campaign, the largest individual donation in the lead-up to the election.
Laura Patterson from Sifa said the group did not endorse or support individual candidates of parties in the election, and was “pragmatic” in its support.
She said the campaign was aimed at electing a minority government to encourage real debate in the parliament and did not “endorse or support individual candidates”.
But a campaign review published by Sifa revealed all but one of the seats targeted by the campaign benefitted One Nation or KAP candidates, including the four electorates where the two parties were elected.
Sifa was established in 2014 and represents some of Australia’s largest gun importers and manufacturers. Federal MP Bob Katter’s son-in-law Robert Nioa, the managing director of the largest small arms importer in Australia, is a director of the association.
Its website states that it was formed “to represent more effectively the social, cultural, economic and environmental impact of the many thousands of Australians who work in the industry – and of our country’s million licensed firearms owners”.
The group was appointed to the government’s firearms industry reference group to provide advice to the government on the National Firearms Agreement.
It has previously donated $45,000 to the Liberal and National parties, but shifted its support after the byelections in the seats of Murray and Cootamundra last year where it accused the Nationals of having “cynically leveraged the Las Vegas atrocity to protect its seats”.
The review said the major parties had failed to offer “genuine political leadership on firearms policy” and that Australians had been forced to “labour under a punitive firearms regime”.
The Flick Em campaign is part of an increasingly vocal push by pro-gun groups to influence Australia’s political landscape and wind back reforms introduced by the Howard government after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.
Nioa himself has established himself as a major donor in Queensland state politics, pouring $200,000 in donations to the KAP since 2016.
And funding disclosures show the Queensland Shooters Union, an affiliate of the US National Rifle Association, spent $4,200 on One Nation candidates in key electorates including the party’s former state director Jim Savage.
The strategy appears to be paying dividends. In the lead-up to Saturday’s state election in Tasmania the governing Liberal party quietly revealed it would introduce measures to weaken gun laws which critics said would breach the National Firearms Agreement signed at the Council of Australian Governments last year.
Howard reforms contained ‘seed of their own destruction’
Last year Philip Alpers from the University of Sydney’s school of public health published a paper funded by Gun Control Australia that found Australia’s gun laws had been watered down since 1996 by “two decades of political pressure”.
Alpers said the tough Howard-era laws contained the “seed of their own destruction” because one of the key requirements for those applying for a gun licence was to have a “genuine reason” for owning the weapon.
For many people, that is membership of an approved shooting club.
Alpers said that meant a steady stream of membership fees to the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia.
The SSAA now has 185,000 members nationally including 68,000 in Queensland, and in 2016 Alpers published a study that found the seven top branches had amassed a financial war chest totalling more than $34m.
Some of that money has been directed at helping fund the campaigns of rightwing pro-gun parties.
A spokesman for the SSAA in Queensland said the group supported the KAP because the party “support our farmers and understand the issues they face”.
“[A]nd similarly, many KAP members are also competition target shooters so they understand the realities of the shooting sports and the issues facing law-abiding shooters in Queensland.”
He said the SSAA wanted “evidence-based firearms legislation and policy, rather than laws and policies based on feelings or misinformation”. He pointed to the recategorisation of lever-action shotguns such as the Adler 110, which he said was “based largely on a scare campaign undertaken by anti-gun activists”.
“We’d like to see less unnecessary bureaucracy surrounding law-abiding firearms ownership in Queensland, and a greater focus on catching illegal gun smugglers, punishing criminals with illegal firearms, closing porous borders, and a general understanding that law-abiding, licensed shooters are not the problem and should not be used as scapegoats for the actions of criminals,” the spokesman said in a statement.
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