ABC; keeping it classy

Several months ago, the public broadcaster and left wing shill, the ABC demonstrated both its class and its idea of how to deal with critics with the photo shopped image of News Ltd commentator, Chris Kenny (Right)

Kenny’s complaint was handled by the ABC’s Audience & Consumer Affairs division, which unsurprisingly came up with the following dismissal:

“A&CA’s assessment is that the skit was likely to offend but the segment was justified by the editorial context.  While strong in nature it was consistent with the Chaser style — one very familiar to its target audience.”

The ABC managing director Mark Scott has been dragged kicking and screaming into an apology after Kenny was granted the right to sue for defamation.

For the benefit of overseas readers, the ABC’s Q&A program is our equivalent of ‘The View’ except it has a varying panel consisting of one rightie up against four lefties and the leftist moderator. When they wish to be really cynical, they have Malcolm Turnbull as the rightie.

Tim Blair informs us that tonight we are in for a real treat with obscure, but foul mouthed playwright Van Badham on the panel:

THE ABC has defended the decision by its Q & A chat program to invite little-known playwright and anarchist Van Badham on to Monday night’s show. 

The ABC will also pay for her flights and accommodation. 

Badham’s Twitter account features obscene attacks on various politicians, including Prime Minister Tony Abbott (‘‘a lying sexist c ...”), former PM Kevin Rudd (“the c ... that caused all these f ... ing problems”), Environment Minister Greg Hunt (“an insult to the word c ...”) and the entire 2013 Labor caucus (“let me into that caucus room to kick the mother...ing sh.. out of the dumb c ... rags in there”). 

Q & A producer Peter McEvoy said his show “aims to provide a platform for as wide a variety of views as possible’’. 

“The point ... is to generate an informed, civil discussion ... By necessity this means some guests will have views others might object to,” he said.

In Douglas Adams book, Life, the Universe and Everything, there is mention of The Rory Award, which is given for category: "The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word 'Fuck' in A Serious Screenplay".

He possibly came up with the idea for this while watching the ABC.

An alternative to Chris Berg’s views on breaking election promises

Statements on a theme:

“Voters need to ask themselves who they trust to protect jobs and guide the economy through a new age of uncertainty.” – Kevin Rudd

"This election will be about trust." – Tony Abbott

This election, like never before, is about who you can trust - Christine Milne

“From this day forth, you put your trust... in me.” – Lord Voldemort.

During the 2013 election, the economically literate were dismayed as then opposition leader, Tony Abbott in question after question ruled out any action that would reduce the profligate waste of taxpayers money that had been occurring under Labor, to the point where he was willing to embrace every big spending ‘initiative’ that Rudd came up with.

The reality was that with Labor less popular than a dose of clap and major concern in the electorate at the ever-increasing deficits and escalating national debt, he pretty much had carte blanche to offer to take the hard decisions necessary to pull the nation back into gear.  He would have been cheered for it.

He didn’t have the courage to do it and now has to tread the tightrope between the need for action, and his ruling out most of those very actions.

Cartoon: By R May 

Chris Berg has offered some helpful tips: 

… Here's one answer. Parties don't see election promises as promises in the plain English meaning of the word. Instead, promises are signals designed to express a deeper character of the political party. When Abbott promised not to change the pension and not to cut public broadcasters he was trying to signal that his would not be a radical government; that he was firmly targeting the median voter. 

After all, why give the SBS promise? Did it win any marginal votes? Surely not. But it did suggest to the electorate he had no secret plan to burn through Australia's institutions. Promises like that increase the political cost of radical action. 

This practice is of course deeply deceptive - election promises as signals rather than genuine commitments - but it's a deception we're used to. 

Voters are rational. We know campaign nonsense when we see it. As this interesting 2004 paper points out, voters infer the true policy position of candidates for office despite the thicket of untruths. 

Obviously Coalition failures deserve to be treated as harshly as Labor failures were. Perhaps more. The Coalition swore to be guided by higher ethical standards than its predecessors. 

But let's not pretend to be surprised. Australia is one of the world's oldest democracies. We've been voting for broken promises for a very long time.

To some extent Berg is correct, although normally incoming governments find an excuse to break their promises as early as possible in their tenure.

Whitlam claimed that the problem with the economy was that we had too much money sloshing around in our pockets and the responsible thing for government to do was to increase taxes to absorb that which we didn’t need.

Malcolm Fraser was too arrogant to give us a reason to break his, but Hawkie and Keating came up with a budget ‘black hole’ and offered us consensus.  Under consensus, the government would negotiate with the opposition in order to decide the position they would like us to be in, and what to do with us when they had us there.  The result was, that rather than being screwed by the government, we were gangied by the parliament as a whole.

It hasn’t gotten any better since.

One of Tony’s options is the use of the term core, and non-core promises.  That though has been done already.

On the serious side though, there are plenty of options available.

While Abbott promised not to reduce the funding for the ABC and SBS, he said nothing about keeping them in public ownership.  Fairfax already provides left wing bias quite effectively in the private sector, so there is really no need for the government to duplicate that service.  There is nothing wrong with the ABC that couldn’t be fixed by Kerry Stokes, James Packer, Rupert Murdoch, or Gina Rinehart.

The Department of Climate Change could be abolished.  It would simply require an acknowledgement that the government hasn’t the competency to change the climate, certainly not for the better.  

While doing this, forget the idiotic climate action plan, abolish the ‘Clean Energy Finance Corporation’, the renewable energy target, subsidies on wind, solar, etc, and mandates on the use of renewables.  This would save billions.

There is considerable scope for the abolition of all federal government departments that duplicate state government ones.  The states themselves can run their own affairs in ways that are better suited to their individual circumstances better and more efficiently than can be done by a distant bureaucracy,

Where coordination is needed, the relevant state ministers can do this.

All of the departments left will probably go out on strike in solidarity with their fellow public servants.  When this happens, the government should examine the effects, and abolish all of those, which cause no inconvenience to the public by their absence.

By this time the budget crisis would be solved and we would be back in surplus again, but we can go further.  The SPC issue proved that there is really no need for taxpayers to pad the profit margins of Coca Cola Amatil.  There is no reason why any corporate welfare should continue; the government having made a nice start here.  It should then look at the inefficient churn of middle class welfare which would no longer be required as everyone would benefit from the substantial tax cuts the above would make possible.

Plain packaging not doing so well

Plain packaging appears to be one of those things that must have seemed like a good idea at the time as a knee jerk reaction by a government that felt the need to be seen to be doing something.

When plain packaging legislation was mooted, it was criticized by the tobacco industry as likely to encourage counterfeiting of cigarettes. This claim was dismissed by the government as ‘big tobacco’ propaganda.

Recent reports indicate that ‘big tobacco’ was right and big government was wrong: 

THE volume of illegal tobacco on the streets of the Sunshine Coast has grown at an alarming rate, according to the results of a new survey. 

Conducted by KPMG UK, the survey looked at the number of discarded illegal cigarette packets on the Coast. 

A sample of 300 packs last year found 6.7% were illegal - up from 0.5% in 2012.The report showed Australia's total consumption of illegal cigarettes had climbed to its highest rate. 

British American Tobacco Australia spokesperson Scott McIntyre said the country's total black market was continuing to boom, with a 20% rise in illegal tobacco since plain packs had been on shelves. 

"If the criminal gangs who illegally imported 2.45 million kilograms of illegal tobacco into the country last year had paid the tobacco excise they should have to the Government, then we would have around $1.1 billion extra in the budget," he said. 

"Due to high excise rates Australia is a very lucrative target for illegal tobacco smugglers and it's made more attractive as there's no real enforcement at the retail level to stop them once they hit the streets. 

"Around 70% of the price of a legal cigarette pack sale goes to the Government in taxes. Criminal gangs obviously don't pay tax, making smuggling illegal cigarettes in from Asia and the Middle East so profitable. 

"It's why dodgy retailers sell illegal cigarettes for around half the price of legal cigarettes.”

The echo chambers of the insular elites ring with self-congratulations at yet another great idea that will stop the great unwashed from harming themselves and make Australians safer in spite of ourselves.  The problem with being insular though, is that you tend to lose touch with the real world and come up with ‘solutions’ that create the opposite effect.

Plain packaging is a boon to those who are prepared to counterfeit the product, while the increases in excise makes the cheaper product even more attractive. 

When will these self righteous idiots ever learn?

Brandis supports limited freedom of thought but not of deed

With the rise of libertarianism the Liberal Party are becoming rather fond of getting back to their supposed roots in classical liberalism.  One of the problems they have in doing this is that they are not very good at it.

In 2010, now treasurer, Joe Hockey gave a speech to the Grattan Institute in which he lauded John Locke and John Stewart Mill and spoke at length on his avaricious reading of everything they had to say.  While there is no reason to doubt his reading of them, given his actions since, there is room for considerable doubt as to whether he had a clue as to what they were on about.

George Brandis is better in his actions on freedom of speech, but in an interview with Brendan O’Neill quotes John Stuart Mill as his inspiration while maintaining that the government has a right to be the arbiter of what people can do: 

So currently, Brandis is on a mission to reform Section 18C. He wants to remove the words ‘insult’, ‘offend’ and ‘humiliate’, but he is willing to leave in the stipulation against ‘intimidation’ of a person or group on the basis of their ethnic origins. … 

… Brandis says there are two reasons he’s bent on overhauling Section 18C. The first is because it expands the authority of state into the realm of thought, where it should never tread, he says. ‘There is a deeper question here, about the role of the state. To what extent should the state be the arbiter of what people can think? 

Now of course, the state is the arbiter of what people can do. The state, to use the most straightforward example imaginable, prohibits murder. It is the role of government to protect the weak from the strong. But this is about whether it is the role of government to tell people what they may think. In my view, freedom of speech, by which I mean the freedom to express and articulate beliefs and opinions, is a necessary and essential precondition of political freedom.’ … 

… As another bottle of wine arrives, he returns to Mill: ‘He said the only limitation on the freedom of the individual should be when he causes harm to others. Hearing views that you find offensive or outrageous or insulting is not a form of harm. If it is admitted to be a form of harm, then freedom of speech, freedom of discourse, intellectual freedom and political freedom become impossible.’

Brandis deserves kudos for his effort to reform the racial discrimination act, even if he fails to go far enough.  There is no real reason why section 18C (the hurt feelings law) should not be repealed in its entirety, however he seems to be hung up on keeping the section relating to intimidation of a person or group on the basis of their ethnic origins.

There are already adequate laws against intimidation in Australia which apply whether there is any racial aspect or not, thus making this section unnecessary.  To suggest that there should be a special one to handle complaints where a racial aspect is claimed means that the court is required to decide what an offender was thinking at the time.  This appears to go against his assertion that the state should not be the arbiter of what we think.

To have special laws, either for or against particular racial groups is a form of apartheid and have no place in a free society.

The problem with George though, is his assertion that the state should be the arbiter of what people do.  He offers no ifs, buts, nor even maybes on this. 

His statement on the right to regulate murder is a no contest, but harks back to the arguments of the religious right that were the state not to enact the ten commandments in full, then murder and theft would be legal.

The state has a right and function in preventing coercive acts in society but that is where the right to regulate human actions ends. From a libertarian perspective, we are OK with laws that prevent murder, theft, or the bearing of false witness, but we would have problems were it to enact them against adultery, graven images, or working on the Sabbath.  This does not indicate that we support such behaviors, but they are moral decisions that are not the place of the state to govern.

The Brandis/Hockey state sees no reason to steer clear of regulating our personal behavior. The mere fact that someone somewhere can do something without a license and without breaking a law, is seen as a compelling reason for an act of parliament to correct this.

Brandis is moving in the right direction, but needs to totally reevaluate his commitment to classical liberalism and try to go the whole hog.

Palmer, libertarianism, you’ve got to be kidding

Cartoon: By Pope 

It would be difficult to come up with a word that causes more confusion as to its meaning than libertarian.  To actual libertarians it’s relatively simple; a belief in fiscal conservatism, social tolerance, individual freedom, and limited government.

Among outsiders it varies from a reasonable understanding of the above, to right wing fanatics, hopeless utopians, selfish pricks, right through to the left wing journalistic interpretation; a suitable alternative to the adjectival use of the F word in polite society.

Peter Van Onselen of The Australian though, appears particularly confused on the issue when referring to the politics of Clive Palmer: 

… Equally, Tony Abbott must contend with the newly formed PUP, which primarily challenges the conservative side of politics. 

Clive Palmer is an odd mix of conservatism, libertarianism, social liberalism (witness his advocacy for onshore asylum-seeker processing) and self-interest. 

Nevertheless, there should be little doubt that his supporters hail more from the Right than the Left, and with that Palmer becomes Abbott’s problem, not Bill Shorten’s. PUP picked up a senator last weekend, which takes its Senate total to three, four if you include the deal done with motoring enthusiast Ricky Muir. …

There isn’t much to be confused about in Clive’s positions if you consider his origins and history.

Clive is an old-fashioned rump National Party dropout conservative and crony capitalist, who has created a populist party based on telling every audience what it wants to hear.  There is nothing whatsoever that is libertarian in Clive.

PUP lists five policies on it’s website: 

(1)          That his party officials may not be lobbyists;

(2)          Abolishing the carbon tax.  Libertarians would give this one a tick;

(3)          A nebulous statement on refugees that says nothing substantive;

(4)          A bizarre statement on ‘creating mineral wealth’, and;

(5)          A feel-good statement on wealth flowing back to where it’s created.

In the case of (4) and (5) he reveals his statist, big government agenda.

In the case of ‘creating mineral wealth’, he wants to utilise the minerals of Qld and WA, but wants to send them to the southern states, far from their origins and process them there. Apart from increasing transport costs to get them there, typically, he then expects incentives from big government to do it,

Libertarians tended to support the Lang Hancock concept of a privately funded railway from WA to Central Queensland, with processing plants and ports on either end, with Qld coal going west and WA minerals going east.

In the case of created wealth, a libertarian would favour not taking it out in the first place, rather than Palmer’s idea of taking it to Canberra, churning it through the bureaucracy, then sending what is left back to where it came from.

For the patient with time on their hands, PUP also has a huge quantity of press releases from the party for perusal.  It’s actually fun to go through and find out how many are contradictory.  This is probably the result of a knee-jerk desire to get something, anything, out there in relation to any piece of information in the hope of sounding good, or at least concerned in relation to it without really thinking it right through.

Van Onselen is probably a little justified in being confused; Palmer does that to people.  There is however, no excuse for observing an odd position or two that may gain the approval of some libertarians and assuming that this qualifies as part of that philosophy.  A broken clock gets the time right twice a day.

Libertarianism is a consistent philosophy of liberty and as result all policy positions are consistent with that condition.  If this is not the case, then the person or party is not libertarian.

Food Free Fridays Coming?

Cartoon: By Jerry Holbert  

Another Issue of "Carbon Sense” prepared by The Carbon Sense Coalition. 
 

Once again, the high priests of the UN/IPCC have forecast world starvation unless we mend our wicked ways. 



According to them, unless we curb our use of oil, gas, coal and meat, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will soar, the globe will heat up, and food production will plummet. 



This is just a rerun of their previous failed forecasts based on academic theories and computer models. 



They should have asked practical nurserymen, farmers and meteorologists. 



Nurserymen would tell them that if you pump carbon dioxide into a greenhouse the plants grow faster, bigger, more drought-tolerant and more heat-tolerant. Therefore more carbon dioxide will produce more food. 



See this Time-Lapse video showing effect of carbon dioxide on plant growth: 


Farmers would tell them that plants grow faster in the warmth of spring and summer and slower in winter. Any warming by carbon dioxide would tend to warm the higher latitudes so the snow line will shift, thus creating more arable land. It would also tend to produce warmer nights, thus reducing frost damage to crops and opening more land to frost-sensitive crops. 



Meteorologists would tell them that if global temperatures increase, evaporation from the vast oceans must also increase. What goes up with more evaporation must come down as more rain or snow. While some areas may become drier, a warmer world is on average a wetter world, producing more food. 



There is also no evidence that extra carbon dioxide and warmth will make weather more erratic – in fact the reverse should occur as the global temperature gradient, which drives winds, and storms will be reduced with more warming at the poles. 



Finally, there is no evidence that their climate scares will occur “much earlier than expected”. With global temperatures flat for 17 years, how can warming occur faster than in their previous failed forecasts? 



There is no rational basis for claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will add to world starvation – history and science tell us that it would produce a productive green and bountiful world. It is global cooling we have to fear. 


Image: By Steve hunter

 On the other hand, there is no doubt that foolish climate POLICIES will produce less food. Policies on ethanol, biomass, carbon-credit forestry and the Kyoto bans on regrowth control, either directly consume food, or reduce the land available for food production. 

Encouraging and protecting trees at the expense of grasslands is threatening the production of low-cost food from marginal grazing lands and water restrictions are driving irrigators out of business. 

And to top it off, their taxes and regulatory wars on carbon energy will push marginal farmers and fishermen out of production. The world may indeed see hungry years, but carbon dioxide will not be the cause. 



Already they advocate “Meat-free Mondays”. Their anti-food anti-carbon policies will soon result in “Food-free Fridays”. 




If you would like to read more see: 



The Beneficial Effects of Global Warming for the Biosphere: 


Blaming mankind for floods: 


The Food production lies of the IPCC: 


Alarmists admit that they exaggerate damage caused by climate change. It’s OK to lie: 

Climate change will reduce crop yields sooner than we thought: 


Grass, Trees, Climate and Food: 


The Twilight of Abundance with the Cold Sun?


If you would like to comment on this article: 


Antony Green seeing libertarians everywhere

Like Frank N. Furter of Rocky Horror fame, Antony Green, the ABCs election guru, is not backward in his desire to show us his favorite obsession.  In Frank’s case, it was making a man with blond hair and a tan, in Antony’s it is minor parties.

The rise of minor parties has driven him to distraction to the point where he rails against them at every opportunity, real or contrived.  One of his serious bugbears is the success that some of them have had since they started sticking together and preferencing each other ahead of the majors in elections.

The thing that really gets right up his nose though, especially since the 2013 election of LDP senator elect, David Leyonhjelm is libertarians in general and the LDP in particular.  During the cold war the Liberal and National Parties saw reds under the beds, Antony is seeing libertarians every where, tens of thousands of them, running rampant across the entire political landscape that he knew and loved, like a plague of rabbits:

It appears there is a growth industry in libertarian parties. One of the consequences of the Senate's registered ticket vote system is that it is possible for multiple parties to occupy the same area of the political spectrum without hurting their chances of election. 

In every other electoral system in the world, the current batch of libertarian political parties would be cutting their own political throats by running against each other, but ticket voting allows multiple parties to swap preferences with impunity, having first expanded their pool of first preference votes by standing multiple parties. 

At the 2013 election, the Liberal Democrats, as well as the advantage of a name that could be confused with the Liberal Party, and the advantage of the first column on the NSW ballot paper, also boosted their chances with other parties feeding them preferences. …

What bastards!  Can you imagine the Libs, Labor, Greens, or Nationals being so unprincipled as to attempt to maximize their vote?

Not likely; they would be too couth and cultured to do such a thing other of course, than granting themselves an unlimited pit of taxpayer dollars via the electoral funding scheme that hands them funds in the tens of millions.  In addition to this, they have a mutual grooming relationship with big business, (You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours) that brings even more in via corporate sponsorship.

Antony is looking at single-issue parties and assuming that those who are based on wanting their cause liberalised are libertarian.  This is a common error, also made by ‘glass half full’ libertarians who see any party or person holding a policy that they agree with as a sign of them being libertarian.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  Most of the single issue parties tend to be quite authoritarian but feel that the government has gone too far in relation to their particular cause. Rather than questioning whether the government has a place in it at all, or in any of the other causes SIPs represent, they accept unlimited government authority as a fact of life and only want changes to what their own problem is.

Some treat the concerns of other SIPs with the same contempt and disdain that ruling classes have traditionally held for their downtrodden minorities in the past.  Few of them did the LDP any favors and most of them preferenced as part of the minor party coalition which the LDP were not part of, and away from us in strange and counter productive ways:

Shooters and Fishers; at elimination their votes went to HEMP, which has no policy on guns. Considering their leftist inclinations, they are probably opposed.  When Hemp was eliminated, SFP preferences played a large part in electing PUP which is definitely anti- firearms.

Sex ; their votes went to ALP.  Labor has no history of support for Eros Foundation (neither do we, but we have libertarian outlook which addresses most of their concerns)

Voluntary Euthanasia; went to HEMP which has no policy on VE.  We support it directly.

Wikileaks; votes went to HEMP after the Greens which has no policy on government transparency.  Assange claims to be a libertarian.  

Motoring Enthusiasts; votes went to Shooters then PUP.  Libertarian, ORP have directly supportive policys.

Fishing and Lifestyle; votes went to the Liberals, then to the Greens ahead of the LDP.

If Green were to take his job seriously, he would do a bit of basic research and discover what the term ’libertarian’ means, and do a proper analysis of the nature of the parties that he assumes fall into that category. After that he would issue an apology for his stuff-up.

Irony; Shooters Party votes for gun control in WA senate rerun

Now that the red dust has settled in the rerun of the Western Australian senate election, it is time to digest some of the results and consider some of the deals which brought it about.

The Liberal Democratic Party, like most of the minors suffered a fall in primary votes, due in no small part by the massive spending of billionaire, Clive Palmer in support of his Palmer United Party.  Despite this, we have maintained our position of first among the minor parties right behind the majors and big money ones.

The first thing that springs out to meet the eye is the deals done by the Shooters and Fishers Party.  S&F is something of a mixed blessing to shooters, offering a forum to bitch against the draconian Howard gun laws and occasionally gaining minor concessions for shooters in New South Wales owing to their balance of power position in the upper house there, but otherwise, they have achieved precious little.

The main reason for this is that rather than adopt the libertarian position that all law abiding citizens have a right to gun ownership for whatever non-coercive purpose they wish, the SFP accept the status quo and essentially bargain for whatever scraps the NSW government is prepared to toss them from the big table in order to keep them quiet.

Worse still, their leadership have a habit of regarding shooter friendly parties as competitors and preferencing away from them in elections.  Despite the fact that the LDP have better policies on firearms than SFP and more rational arguments in favour of them, SFP normally preference the coalition which took their guns off them in the first place.

This time they became truly bizarre, in that they not only preferenced the Palmer United Party, but were instrumental in getting their candidate elected.  They actually expended 91% of their votes to do it.  This would not be that much of a problem if PUP were likely to support their position, but the opposite is the case as Clive Palmer opposes gun ownership: 

"The Katter Party is an extreme right party and our party is a more centre party."And we disagree on certain things, such as guns ... a whole lot of things Bob's in favour of." 

Mr Palmer said the leaders might like each other personally, but a political party had to share the same beliefs. 

"There's more chance of us merging with the Labor or Liberal parties than with Bob."

Shooters tend to be very responsible people, they have to be as each carries on his shoulders a responsibility for the rest of the shooting community.  The leadership of their party though, is clearly incompetent, out of its depth, inarticulate, lacking in judgment, and need replacing.

In addition to this, whatever drop-kick did this preference deal needs to be drummed out at the first opportunity.

Sporting Shooters deceives its members AGAIN

Image: SSAA response to Liberal Democrat gun policies

The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia has a habit in federal elections of sending out questionnaires to candidates asking them to respond to a number of policy positions that are in the interests of members.  They also have a habit of only publishing a selective list, consisting of the Shooters and Fishers Party, and a few others with worse policies.

The Liberal Democratic Party has responded in the 2007, 2010, 2013, and again in tomorrow’s Western Australian half senate election re-run.  This will make the fourth time that SSAA has refused to publish the LDP response: 

Liberal Democratic Party policies – recreational firearm use

 What is your party’s policy on recreational sports shooting? 

The Liberal Democrats fully support the responsible use of firearms in all sporting contexts as well as for self-defence, collecting, agricultural purposes, and any other non-coercive use.   

We have a high proportion of firearm owners among our members owing to our firearm-friendly policies. These are found at: http://www.ldp.org.au/index.php/policies/1152-firearms 

Recreational sports shooting is a legitimate, healthy pursuit enjoyed by large numbers of men and women.  It is safe, can be undertaken by people with disabilities, and offers all of the benefits of other sports including family participation and social opportunities. 

What is your party’s policy on recreational hunting? 

Our attitude towards recreational hunting is the same as toward sports shooting. It is a legitimate and safe activity. 

Hunting for food is also a natural activity, older than civilization itself. 

What is your party’s policy on utilising trained and competent hunters to cull introduced species on public lands? 

We fully support the use of volunteer hunters to cull introduced species on public lands. Volunteers are essential to the control of bushfires and in responding to natural disasters, and they could also become integral to feral animal control. 

Do you have any policies that assist or support the sport of shooting and the recreation of hunting? 

Liberal Democrat policies are friendly to all forms of shooting related sports, including large and small bore, rifles, and pistols, single shot and semi-automatic, as well as paintball and airsoft.  

Our elected representatives will oppose any attempt at further restricting the rights of law-abiding and responsible shooters and will support any measure to roll back existing restrictions. That includes abandoning the National Firearms Agreement. 

The Liberal Democrats are also opposed to the absurd laws that make it illegal to own firearms for self-defense, or even non-lethal items such as mace and pepper spray. 

The police simply cannot be there to protect us every time there is a threat, and few of us would like to live in the sort of society where they can.

After the 2013 federal election in which New South Wales elected David Leyonhjelm of the Liberal Democrats to the senate, the media was obsessed with his firearms friendly attitude.  David proved himself to be the most articulate advocate for firearms owners in the country.

As result, we were inundated with calls from angry shooters who were unable to understand why they were not informed of our position and policies.  Many of them are now members of our party.

It is now quite apparent that SSAA is little more than a shill for the SFP and are not interested in providing its membership with any genuine information on alternatives to that party.  Worse still, the SFP has in previous elections habitually preferenced the Liberals ahead of us, despite that party being responsible for the 1996 gun confiscation.

Regardless of who wins tomorrow, shooters will need the support of our senator or senators when firearms related matters come up.  The hostility of the SSAA towards our party is going to make it extremely difficult to work with their representatives.

Fortunately, there are other organisations such as the Shooters Union who appear to be more willing to listen to us.