Last week, two stories concerning political donations by the gun lobby deservedly made the headlines.
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The first story to break, courtesy of Al Jazeera and the ABC, was that One Nation sought millions of dollars from the American National Rifle Association (NRA) to fund its election campaigns.
James Ashby, Pauline Hanson's chief of staff, and Steve Dickson, One Nation's Queensland leader and a Senate candidate for the forthcoming federal election seemingly deliberately journeyed to the US with the purpose of fundraising.
They claim, alternatively, that they were plied with grog and calculatedly set up by Al Jazeera's investigative journalists, which makes these One Nation operatives appear to be drunken, gullible fools. Either way, neither scenario shows One Nation in a good light.
Nor does Ms Hanson's seeming claim on the same video that the Port Arthur massacre was a set up job to facilitate the passing of John Howard's gun laws veers toward conspiracy theory. Ms Hanson has subsequently denied this claim.
Last week a second story broke, showing that the Australian gun lobby is as large and spends as much on political donations and campaigns, per capita, as America's powerful NRA.
They key points were that pro-gun groups have donated $1.7 million to Australian political parties over the past eight years, and that Bob Katter's Australian Party was the top recipient, netting more than $800,000
Australia's pro-gun groups were also mimicking the NRA's political strategies in a "concerted and secretive" effort to undermine Australia's strict gun laws, according to Point Blank: The covert lobbying of Australia's gun lobby report by the progressive think tank, The Australia Institute.
It also tells us that, like the NRA, the gun lobby spends even more on funding specific election campaigns.
The report, obtained exclusively by the ABC, calls for a ban on political donations from the gun lobby. So too did Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, who promptly tweeted "We need to strengthen gun laws as a priority and ban all political donations from the gun industry".
This set me wondering how, in a country proud of its gun laws, this could be possible?.
... no state or territory fully complies with the National Firearms Agreement.
- Bill Browne
The report's author Bill Browne warned that our stance on gun control was being circumvented because the gun lobby was quietly undermining laws introduced since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.
"Most Australians support stronger gun control," the report, commissioned by Gun Control Australia and Get Up members, said.
"Despite this, no state or territory fully complies with the National Firearms Agreement and pressure remains for government to allow the import and sale of more powerful and rapid-firing guns.
"The defiance of the popular will on gun control can be attributed in part to the deep pockets of Australia's gun lobby, which has a much lower profile than the NRA - despite Australia's gun lobby spending similar amounts on political campaigns."
The report found that the Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia (SSAA) had almost as many members, per capita, as the National Rifle Association (NRA), almost 200,000 in fact, which is about 0.8 per cent of the population.
The other big player in the Australian gun lobby is the Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia (SIFA), the peak body for the firearms industry.
The report showed how the gun lobby is able to circumvent our donations laws, which is that much of the gun lobby's political spending is in the form of election campaigns that are not necessarily captured by disclosure laws. For example, though SIFA only donated $64,000 to political parties in the period 2011-2018, it spent $750,000 on two recent state election campaigns alone.
Like political advertising funded by the NRA in the US, the Queensland and Victorian ads did not specifically mention guns, instead covering other hot button issues.
The Australia Institute's report also calls for a list of all members of a group known as the Parliamentary Friends of Shooters (PFS) to be made public. Only its chair, Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie, and its deputy chair, Labor MP Anthony Byrne, are listed.
However, listing the members of PFS would hardly scratch the surface.
We need a full inquiry into how the gun lobby circumvents our political donations regulations if we are to prevent this pernicious activity.