Piers Akerman: Gun debate distracts from watchdog issue

LABOR MPs, and their allies at the ABC and Fairfax are dangerously distracting the public from the destructive forces of union thuggery eroding the economic health of the nation, Piers Akerman writes.

Piers Akerman.

LABOR MPs, and their allies at the ABC and Fairfax are dangerously distracting the public from the destructive forces of union thuggery eroding the economic health of the nation.

Last week, they trilled when Independent Senator David Leyonhjelm revived claims he had successfully blackmailed the Abbott government into installing a sunset clause on an import prohibition on the Turkish-made lever action seven-shot Adler shotgun.

Senator Leyonhjelm had boasted in the Senate on August 20 last year that “I managed to blackmail the government into adding a 12-month sunset clause to its Adler ban” but it seems he didn’t understand the process by which the ban was installed or the reason.

I’m no gun ban advocate but the senator and the shooters lobby he supports have lost the plot on this one. Professional shooters responsible for suppressing feral animals, pigs, camels or brumbies, don’t bother with shotguns. Rifles are their tool of choice.

There is no suggestion that Abbott or anyone in his office had any dealings with Senator Leyonhjelm over Abbott’s banning of the Adler shotgun.

Senator David Leyonhjelm. Picture: Kym Smith

What is clear is that Abbott made a decision to impose a temporary ban in late July and that the discussions between Justice Minister Keenan, Border Protection Minister Dutton and Senator Leyonhjelm occurred mid-August.

When I spoke to Abbott yesterday he accepted that the relevant adviser in his office might have been kept in the loop about the August discussions but that no deal to ­un-ban guns had ever been made. After all, his July decision was a temporary ban and that’s what happened.

The ministers seem to have made a token concession to the senator in order to pass another bill. But there was never any intention to undo Abbott’s original temporary ban or to let in the Adler guns before they got a proper classification, and that remained the situation after the State and federal ministers met on Friday.

That aside, Senator Leyonhjelm may have thought he had screwed Abbott’s ministers but the reality is the Abbott government never contemplated taking any action that would have let Prime Minister John Howard’s post-Port ­Arthur massacre gun laws leaving Australians less safe.

Senator Leyonhjelm may feel he has been dudded but that doesn’t alter the fact that the federal government correctly acted promptly on the advice of the AFP at the end of July and he was thrown his “sunset clause” bone in August.

It cost Keenan and Dutton nothing to placate the senator because the Adler issue always was to be decided by unanimous decision of the states and federal government.

Labor doesn’t have a good record on guns. It has now, shamefully, voted twice against measures to prosecute those who import illegal weapons but the distraction worked to its advantage.

It took the spotlight off two more immediate matters of public interest which were before federal parliament — the nonsensical debate on the promised plebiscite on homosexual marriage and the far more serious engagement over trade union corruption.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his office could have caught this at the beginning of the week but the response was totally inadequate and permitted Opposition leader Bill Shorten to nimbly divert attention from Labor’s stinking problem — its reliance on funding from the historically corrupt CFMEU and its continuing defence of the construction union.

The issue served Shorten because he has been most anxious to turn attention away from union corruption and his inability to divorce himself from his own history.

He’s a union man through and through and before the last election promised to run the nation as a union boss would.

The record, as produced in evidence before the Royal Commission into Trade Union Corruption, shows that as a union boss he would be prepared to sell the people out.

Take the evidence produced which showed that he accepted a $40,000 donation from the construction company Unibilt when he was representing the interests of his members.

But the money didn’t go to the members he was representing, it didn’t go into any union fund, or welfare trust, it went into his personal campaign coffers and it was used to pay the wages of his election campaign director — and it was kept secret for eight years until just two days before he was due to appear before the royal commission.

But the $40,000 personal donation was a drop in the ocean compared to the nearly $10 million the CFMEU has poured into the Labor Party in recent years, cash that has enabled Labor to keep blocking meaningful measures to bring the rogue union to book through the restoration of the union watchdog, the ABCC.

This is not an exoteric issue. It affects every Australian. The last election — the double dissolution election — was called on the twin policies of restoring the Building Construct-ion Commission Bill and the Registered Organisations Bill.

It was all about ending union thuggery and lawlessness, and with good reason. The union currently has 113 ­officials before the courts for breaches of the law.

In the face of ferocious Labor resistance the Bill passed through the Lower House last week and now goes before the new senate.

If you think your taxes should build schools and hospitals, support the government.

If, like Senator Leyonhjelm, the ABC and Fairfax, you believe the government should be concentrating on the importation of rapid fire shotguns, you’ve lost the plot entirely.

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