Proposed new legislation

[John E]

I attended a meeting of the Shooting Sports Council of Victoria last night.
An item of major concern is that the Dept of Justice is presenting proposed new legislation covering firearms ownership to the Victorian Parliament, and one item on their wishlist is to make it manditory to install an alarm system if there are more than five firearms stored at an address.
Currently the law says that if you have more than 15 firearms at the one address, you must have an alarm system. If this move is successful, it will mean that thousands of firearm owners will be up for a major expense, possibly around $2000, and this will be another hurdle to firearm ownership.
The Dept of Justice presented a discussion paper to our representatives, who were vehemently against this particular proposal, and then, when the bureaucrats have prepared the final document for presentation to Parliament, giving their reasons for each point, they have blatantly lied, and said that there was no opposition to this point, obviously hoping that it would slip into Legislation unnoticed.
The SSCV is today sending a letter to the Minister, the Premier and Deputy Premier, alerting them to this underhanded behaviour.
SSCV will also send a notification of this to its member organisations today, and hopefully they will also send letters of protest to the appropriate Government officers.
John

[AlanF]

This sort of thing happens all the time. It happens because the ones who make the regulations don't have to provide the cost of the changes - nor do the politicians. So there's no real incentive to get the details right - just shove it through, and move on to stuff something else up.

I agree that lobbying of the politicians is the best way to make them do the right thing.

Alan