Tasmania is in the throes of a wild State Election campaign at the moment, and it is an absolute mess. With people across the beautiful island state – the best state in the country, FYI – set to head to the polls tomorrow, all indications point towards the incumbent Liberal Government under Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman being returned to power with a slim majority over a potential Labor/Greens coalition. And it’s on the back of a campaign that’s as bizarre as it is utterly cooked.
Anyone within cooee of Tasmanian media will know that the Liberal Party has been throwing everything but the kitchen sink at this election, leaping on Labor’s proposed plan to remove pokie machines from pubs and painting themselves as the party that backs in the state’s hospitality workers. This despite being the same party that pushed for those same workers to lose their penalty rates. It’s had the beyond-bizarre end result of having pubs across the state emblazoned in pro-Liberal Party banners. All of which paid for by those with extremely vested business interests in pokies remaining in pubs, it should be said.
The Government has also waged a campaign virtually in direct opposition women’s health, refusing to fund public facilities providing abortion procedures for women in the state, forcing women in need of the procedure to travel interstate to receive treatment, despite the fact that it’s legal in Tasmania. The last clinic in Tasmania that provided subsidised abortion services for women closed in January, with the Government instead offering an incredibly weak travel assistance scheme for women to venture to the mainland for treatment. It’s a baffling out of sight/out of mind solution for a party too blatantly chickenshit to admit they’d prefer to see abortion recriminalised in the state.
But by far the most intensely bizarre policy announcement from the Hodgman Government has come at the extreme eleventh hour – right on election eve, when all is practically said and done.
Hodgman, and the Tasmanian Liberals, have very, very quietly revealed plans to relax gun control laws in the state significantly, in a move that is being widely hounded down as tone-deaf, opportunistic, and fraught.
As the state heads towards the 22nd anniversary of the Port Arthur Massacre this April, Hodgman’s proposal would see the limit on gun license duration extended from five to ten years, despite all medical wisdom asserting beyond doubt that mental health can drastically change in that time period, extending ownership of Category C firearms (which includes pump-action and rapid-fire shotguns) to a broader range of “sporting” shooters, and introducing a new Category E gun ownership class that would allow previously banned weapons – namely, semi and fully automatic rifles – to be legally possessed by “specialists” who have “lawful reasons” for owning them, terms which are incredibly vague and almost certain to be poorly defined by any first-run legislation.
While these significant relaxations have been predictably heralded by shooters and farmers, anti-gun officials have asserted that the proposals stand in direct breach of the Howard-era National Firearms Agreement, which was brokered by the then-Federal Liberal Government in collaboration with the states in 1996 in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre. The very same agreement held up internationally as a standard of gun control legislation.
Relaxing gun laws in Tasmania is baffling exercise in general, let alone trying to sneakily pass it through the day before an election. And it’s one that’s particularly ill-timed given recent events in the US.
The Tasmanian Liberal Party did not announce the policy publicly, according to The Australian. Rather, they very quietly forwarded it on to the pro-gun Sporting Shooter Association.
State Government officials have stringently denied attempting to avoid scrutiny by quietly issuing the policy on election-eve. But regardless, the optics on the whole thing are incredibly shady.
Good luck tomorrow, Tasmania. Lord knows what’s to come.
