On March 23 2019, a week after the senseless and repugnant terror attack on two Christchurch mosques, I opined in this column that the looming reform of the Arms Act promised in the wake of that atrocity needed to be careful and considered, and that all New Zealanders needed to feel protected by any new laws. What you wish for and what you get are usually two different things, and especially so when it comes to politics. While the House passed amendments to the Arms Act 26 days later, and almost unanimously, some parties were only reluctantly on board. The sole determined stand out to vote against was Act New Zealand leader David Seymour, then the only MP of his party, who said that he believed the rush to enact the Bill had made what was already a troublesome and often unworkable piece of law even worse. While there were other reasons, that stance was influential in Nicole McKee, then a spokeswoman for the Council of Licensed Firearms Owners, joining Act New Zealand. She was elected to Parliament in 2020, and became associate Minister of Justice in 2023 — with an expectation that she would be placed in charge of reviewing the Arms Act, something which made opponents of easier access to firearms more than a little nervous. On Wednesday McKee, recently named her party’s deputy leader, moved in the House that the Arms Bill be now read a third time. While it transpired that this law reform was to be far less unanimous than that enacted by the previous government, McKee does at least get points for review of the Arms Act actually being careful and considered. [Missing Credit]Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee. Photo: RNZ Don’t just take my word for it: many of the opposition MPs speaking in the debate made comments along those lines. Labour’s Duncan Webb said his party supported much of what was in the Bill and that the new rules were ‘‘by and large workable and appropriate’’, while Green Taieri list MP Scott Willis said he would have liked his party to be in full support of the Bill: ‘‘we think there’s been a lot of good work done.’’ That work includes rewriting the Act in plain English, preventing gang members from holding firearms licences, establishing a Firearms Licensing Review Committee to review licensing decisions, replacing dealer licences with business licences and streamlining procedures for established and law-abiding buyers and sellers, setting up an approvals scheme for sellers of ammunition but not firearms, and increasing penalties for not compliance with the Arms Act across the board. However it also, and this is where the opposition’s, well, opposition, stems from, is the Bill’s establishment of a new firearms regulatory agency, Firearms Safety and Education New Zealand. The FSE, as it will be known, is explicitly intended to operate independently from the police, which formerly carried out many of the new organisation’s functions. ‘‘I also want to acknowledge the government members in reining back some of the more extreme aspects, so we do still have the firearms registry, and we have still ensured that semi-automatic centrefire weapons are not freely available,’’ Willis said. ‘‘We have real questions about how much money — the waste; $65 million of establishing a new agency that no one except for a very small proportion of conspiracy-laden firearms owners are calling for, and the minister. This is such a waste of resource. There is no need for it, and this is why we are opposing this Bill despite our desire to make progress in this space.’’ Now before you jump to the conclusion that Willis is simply a rabid, anti-gun Greenie, factor in that Willis is a hunter and a firearms owner himself. The Greens made him their spokesman on this Bill for exactly that reason: it is a subject he knows something about and he does not have a blinkered perspective about what firearms proponents are espousing. ‘‘What I consider nonsense is that firearm owners have been vilified,’’he said. ‘‘As a firearm owner myself, I have never felt under attack by the current regime. That is just a bunch of nonsense, and it really is irritating to hear the type of conspiracy, really, that is festering in the government benches at the moment.’’ A sense no doubt added to by Willis and his colleagues having heard New Zealand First leader crudely disparage one of their colleagues, Lawrence Xu Nan, in the general debate an hour or so beforehand. Willis went on to condemn McKee’s unwillingness to compromise on what he termed an ‘‘irrational approach’’ to managing firearm safety. ‘‘We think it is very clear that the police should have that responsibility, are the right people for it, and can maintain that intelligence sharing that we so need to maintain public safety for all of us.’’ Taieri Labour MP Ingrid Leary spoke soon after, and she touched on why this law reform matters to her electorate: the terrorist briefly lived there, and his attack could easily have happened in the neighbouring Dunedin electorate. ‘‘We had communities directly impacted, who had whānau and so on, and I really want to think of them today.’’ Leary also had the police in her thoughts and echoed the Police Association submission on the Bill which worried that the proposed FSE would be operationally detached from frontline realities. ‘‘It’s easy for us to get very conceptual in this House and to get very academic about where rules and regulations should sit. Often the unintended consequences on the ground are vastly different, and it is my view that we should have really prioritised the voice of the police, not only because they have that operational knowledge and that day-to-day knowledge, but because they are the very people who are probably most at risk with the unintended consequences of the separation of them and that integral part to the system.’’ National Waitaki MP Miles Anderson, on the other hand, found much to like in the Bill, which he believed had struck a balance between safety and firearm use. ‘‘I do agree that ownership is a privilege, but it’s a privilege that comes with responsibility, and that is why penalties have been increased for more than 60 offences, and new offences have been created.’’ Which is all very well, but Willis gave the House fair warning that should the government change on November 7 that MPs would likely be amending the Arms Act again, and he is very likely right. — mike.houlahan@odt.co.nz Otago Daily Times political editor Mike Houlahan writes the Southern Say column for the ODT.
