Thursday, 3 April 2025

Federal government

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (10:08): Today I want to highlight the outrageous priorities of the Albanese government when it comes to how they spend hard earned taxpayers dollars. Now, they are committed to spending $161 million to the national firearms register to target law-abiding shooters through new surveillance and database tracking. Meanwhile they are actually doing nothing about stopping the real criminals. Now, we have got about 99 per cent of the shooting population, the legal shooting population, who register their guns, paying for 1 per cent of the crooks, who are never going to register their weapon of choice, obviously. But at the same time this Albanese government cannot find $6 million over five years to fund a program at the Royal Children’s Hospital to save young babies coming into it this very day and ongoing for the rest of their lives till they are 18 and they move into the adult care situation – not $6 million for babies, saving their lives and saving their livelihoods and making it better for families. Meanwhile we will spend $161 million targeting the law-abiding firearm shooters of this state and this country who absolutely do the right thing while the crooks are out on the streets every day.