From The Australian:
Liberal Democratic Senator David Leyonhjelm has ramped up his claims the government betrayed him by reneging on an alleged deal over the Adler lever-action shotgun and has argued that lifting the import ban would not have watered down John Howard’s National Firearms Agreement.
Senator Leyonhjelm has also released an email that he claims proves he was misled by the government in August last year over a deal to put a sunset clause on the import ban on the seven-shot Adler, despite former prime minister Tony Abbott telling the ABC’s 7.30 programlast night there were “no deals from me; no deals from my office; no deal.”
Speaking on the ABC’s AM program today, Senator Leyonhjelm said that he was “really arguing for maintenance of the national firearms agreement” and that the deal reached with government was formalised in an “exchange of emails.”
He said the key email confirmed that Immigration Minister Peter Dutton and Justice Minister Michael Keenan had agreed that the “government will amend the customs prohibited imports regulations to insert a sunset clause of 12 months into the recently amended provisions which ban the importation of lever action shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than 5 rounds.”
The original agreement was made under the Abbott regime but that’s not stopping him today, at the AFR:
Tony Abbott has moved to wedge Malcolm Turnbull over guns by demanding he make permanent the importation ban on the rapid-fire Adler shotgun.
Mr Turnbull is open to lifting the ban only if the states can agree how to classify the weapon under the national gun laws. A handful of Nationals and Liberal MPs support lifting the ban and reclassifying the weapon in a slightly more onerous category. But Mr Abbott said there was no cause to import the guns in the first place.
“The federal government controls the importation of weapons, state governments control classification,” he said.
“The federal government should do what whatever it needs to do to ensure that rapid fire guns are not readily available in this country.”
In making his call, the former prime minister revealed he never had any intention of honouring a 2015 deal his government cut with independent Senator David Leyonhjelm to lift the ban after 12 months in return for the senator’s vote on an immigration bill.
Anyone with a political ear knows that Malcolm running guns for policy favours is political insanity.
