Speaker 1: If we crack down on cynical, greedy reptiles who sell
Speaker 1: cheap and nasty weapons to bad kids, it can only help.
Speaker 1: You could buy a handgun, a revolver, or a semi
Speaker 1: automatic cult pistol for that matter, in a hardware shop
Speaker 1: or any gun shop or anybody that basically wanted to
Speaker 1: sell them. They stopped that, and obviously it didn't remove
Speaker 1: every handgun from every street in Australia, but it cut
Speaker 1: down the number of them. I'm Andrew Rule. This is
Speaker 1: life and crimes. A lot of interest in recent days
Speaker 1: about machetes and the machete ban, the attempt by the
Speaker 1: state government to impose a ban on sales and machetes. Now,
Speaker 1: I think we shall get a few things straight about
Speaker 1: what this salesman is and what it isn't. It is
Speaker 1: clearly a cynical and insincere moved by a literally and
Speaker 1: morally bankrupt government whose real attitude is revealed by the
Speaker 1: fact it's done nothing about this in thirty odd years
Speaker 1: since the late Les twenty men started agitating for controls
Speaker 1: on edge weapons to cut down on gang violence. Now
Speaker 1: Les twenty men, most of us will know, started up
Speaker 1: as a youth worker out in the western suburbs. Back
Speaker 1: in the eighties and certainly by the early nineties he
Speaker 1: was calling for controls on eedged weapons because of the
Speaker 1: increased use of knives and similar things by youth gangs,
Speaker 1: mostly out in the West and the North and elsewhere,
Speaker 1: and he didn't really get a big response from his
Speaker 1: very good friends in the government, the state government. It
Speaker 1: was only recently, in recent weeks that the state government,
Speaker 1: this is the state government that has governed Victoria for
Speaker 1: twenty two of the last twenty six years, that state
Speaker 1: government has finally decided it would bring in a ban
Speaker 1: on selling machetes or controls on selling machetes. And as
Speaker 1: I've just said, I think it's insincere and to some
Speaker 1: extent it won't be effective. But the government's motives and
Speaker 1: perhaps lack of honorable motives, does not alter the fact
Speaker 1: that this is a step in the right direction. So
Speaker 1: we can bag the government for not acting for too little,
Speaker 1: too late, for not really meaning it. We can beag
Speaker 1: the government for letting repeat offenders out on bail, and
Speaker 1: so we should. But a ban on the sale of machetes,
Speaker 1: although it is doomed to some failure because the people
Speaker 1: that use machetes to try and kill others and cut
Speaker 1: their arms off and fingers off and so on are criminals,
Speaker 1: and they aren't necessarily buying these things, they're stealing them.
Speaker 1: But a ban is the right way to go because
Speaker 1: in the end, it's the only way to start the
Speaker 1: ball rolling. And let's look back at our own history
Speaker 1: and see some other examples of that. So, as some
Speaker 1: critics have pointed out, and I think they're largely right
Speaker 1: as far as it goes the mere active banning sales
Speaker 1: of machetes and edge weapons over twenty centimeters long, it
Speaker 1: won't end the bad behavior that led to the ban,
Speaker 1: because criminals steal rather than by because they're by definition
Speaker 1: people who break the law. Otherwise, as one wag said
Speaker 1: the other day, the Premier could just quote ban crime unquote.
Speaker 1: That would be easier. But you know he was being funny.
Speaker 1: Given that this government has run the state for most
Speaker 1: of the last quarter century, it's fair to say that
Speaker 1: when things are going wrong, perhaps it should be sheeted
Speaker 1: home to that government. And this government has ignored this
Speaker 1: sort of thing, this rising tide of violence and gang
Speaker 1: warfare and so on, and they've largely ignored police views
Speaker 1: for most of that time. Now know that the government
Speaker 1: won't agree with that, and the Police Minister won't agree
Speaker 1: with that, and possibly some tame police commissioners might not
Speaker 1: agree with that. But it's fair to say that there
Speaker 1: are people in cabinet and in the bureaucracy, and possibly
Speaker 1: some in the judiciary who are deep down, if not
Speaker 1: anti police, at least suspicious of police motivations and police
Speaker 1: activities and police views of the world. Now, some of
Speaker 1: those people have their reasons. Many of them have been
Speaker 1: defense lawyers and have seen the dark side of police work,
Speaker 1: let's say, But they and we should be careful not
Speaker 1: to throw out the baby with the bathwooter, because the
Speaker 1: police are, for all their faults, perceived alleged faults, they
Speaker 1: are at a sharp end of this. They are on
Speaker 1: streets coping with people that are killed, people that are disfigured,
Speaker 1: people that are put in hospital with terrible wounds from
Speaker 1: all the violent things that happen, from gun crime through
Speaker 1: to machete crime, and people driving cars too fasten running
Speaker 1: over each other. And so their views should be respected
Speaker 1: at many levels. Now, regardless of the government's lack of
Speaker 1: conviction on this issue, it ultimately works to some extent
Speaker 1: because it ultimately will get fewer large knives, machetes and
Speaker 1: similar weapons you know, samurai swords, whatever they might be.
Speaker 1: It ultimately gets fewer of them on the street. Because
Speaker 1: if there are fewer of them in the community, there
Speaker 1: will be a trickle down effect that will at some
Speaker 1: point help us in our quest to make the streets safer.
Speaker 1: If we crack down on cynical, greedy reptiles who sell
Speaker 1: cheap and nasty weapons to bad kids, it can only
Speaker 1: help chop it off at the sauce, chop off some
Speaker 1: of it at the source. If we can get all retailers,
Speaker 1: legit retailers of knives and axes and all those things
Speaker 1: to have them under lock and key, that will cut
Speaker 1: down theft opportunistic theft by lunatic teenagers who aren't deep thinkers.
Speaker 1: They can't plan anything, they're not heavy thinkers. And if
Speaker 1: you can block them at the spot where they might
Speaker 1: steal something and then run outside and hit somebody with it,
Speaker 1: that is a win. It's just like the big effort
Speaker 1: that was made, it has been made and continues to
Speaker 1: be made to cut down the sails and the theft
Speaker 1: of spray paint cans to beat the graffiti boom. If
Speaker 1: you walk into Bunnings or any big hardware shop, the
Speaker 1: spray cans are locked up behind the mesh cabinets there
Speaker 1: and you have to go over and ask an assistant
Speaker 1: who makes an assessment of your age and propensity for
Speaker 1: doing the wrong thing, and then unlocks it and you
Speaker 1: buy what you want. But it means that a you've
Speaker 1: been sort of looked at, and b you're not stealing
Speaker 1: it because it's behind a padlock. This sort of restriction
Speaker 1: makes it harder for essentially lazy, stupid kids who act
Speaker 1: on impulse. Now let's have an example from the past.
Speaker 1: It's about one hundred years since my great grandfather was
Speaker 1: a policeman between the wars in Melbourne, and in that time,
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties, post World War One, there were
Speaker 1: a lot of guns around, a lot of handguns around.
Speaker 1: And one reason, of course was that there'd been World
Speaker 1: War One and before that the Boar War, and Australians
Speaker 1: went to the war and they came home with servannirs
Speaker 1: and many of them brought home army pistols. They brought
Speaker 1: home pistols they'd servenired from the enemy. You know, we've
Speaker 1: talked about this on this show before. I remember a
Speaker 1: family in Gippsland that had, you know, half a dozen
Speaker 1: lugers or something from World War One. This was a
Speaker 1: pretty typical thing in the bad old days or the
Speaker 1: good old days. Guys would come home from the war
Speaker 1: with the pistols and all sorts of weaponry. And in
Speaker 1: the twenties, the governments of the day around Australia, I think,
Speaker 1: were a bit worried about certain things. They're worried about
Speaker 1: the rise of communist activism and are worried I think
Speaker 1: about probably a rising crime. Because twenties was a pretty
Speaker 1: willing time. A lot of people who've been in the
Speaker 1: war were disturbed by it. They were the prayers, They
Speaker 1: were angry, they were injured, some of them were suicidal.
Speaker 1: They were aggressive. And for those guys to have you know,
Speaker 1: forty five caliber Webly pistols under their pillow was not
Speaker 1: always a great thing because it could lead to many
Speaker 1: bad things. And so the government said, okay, let's cut
Speaker 1: down on these, let's register handguns. And also they brought
Speaker 1: in a law that said you can't go selling handguns
Speaker 1: in hardware shops, which they used to be sold, you know,
Speaker 1: from the gold rushes. Until nineteen twenty five or nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty seven or something. You could buy a handgun, a revolver,
Speaker 1: or a semi automatic cold pistol for that matter, in
Speaker 1: a hardware shop or any gun shop or anybody that
Speaker 1: basically wanted to sell them. They stopped that, and obviously
Speaker 1: it didn't remove every handgun from every street in Australia,
Speaker 1: but it cut down the number of them. It made
Speaker 1: it harder to get them, and it meant that every
Speaker 1: time the police arrested someone in the street with a handgun,
Speaker 1: which was you know, it was then illegal to carry
Speaker 1: a concealed weapon, they had the law to back them
Speaker 1: to remove it and confiscate it, and that was one
Speaker 1: less handgun on the street. We saw the same thing
Speaker 1: applied seventy years later in nineteen ninety six post port Arth,
Speaker 1: when the governments around Australia more or less held and said, okay,
Speaker 1: finally we're going to bite the bullet and we will
Speaker 1: essentially ban semi automatic weapons and these sort of semi
Speaker 1: military type weapons, which should become pretty common in Australia
Speaker 1: posts World War Two right through to the nineties because
Speaker 1: a lot of people weren't hunting and so on, and
Speaker 1: you could buy semi automatic weapons, and so many people
Speaker 1: had them. Funny thing in my own family, my mother
Speaker 1: and my grandmother both handed in semi automatic twenty two rifles.
Speaker 1: My grandmother earlier than that, back in the seventies, had
Speaker 1: handed in several handguns because her father, the old retired copper,
Speaker 1: had kept several that clearly he had taken away from criminals,
Speaker 1: and he'd forgotten to hand them in, and so when
Speaker 1: he died, she found an x amount. I don't know
Speaker 1: if there were two or three or what they were.
Speaker 1: She handed them into the police, and I suppose they
Speaker 1: were logged properly and disposed of or else the police
Speaker 1: just put them in their glove foxes. I don't know.
Speaker 1: But anyway, the point is it did help remove guns
Speaker 1: from the community. And if you cut the numbers down,
Speaker 1: it means the opportunity for opportunistic theft is cut and
Speaker 1: it means, yeah, sure, cashed up crooks they can buy handguns.
Speaker 1: We all know that if you've got five grand, six grand,
Speaker 1: eight grand, ten thousand dollars or more, you can contact
Speaker 1: underworld sources who can obtain any sort of weaponry for
Speaker 1: you at a price, and you pay the money and
Speaker 1: you get the gun. That's true. However, every silly kid
Speaker 1: from out in the burbs that's running around fighting each other,
Speaker 1: they haven't got that sort of money and they can't
Speaker 1: access that sort of firepower. What the laws did was
Speaker 1: remove thousands of handguns and tens of thousands of long
Speaker 1: arms from the community, so that it meant that every
Speaker 1: idiot burglar, every idiot kid couldn't just push open a
Speaker 1: shed door or somebody's back door and put their hand
Speaker 1: on a weapon and steal it, because suddenly those weapons
Speaker 1: were either handed it during an amnestem, weren't there, or
Speaker 1: what's just as effective, probably they were locked up in
Speaker 1: secure safes, which made it a lot harder to steal them.
Speaker 1: And therefore it's clear and this is not a popular
Speaker 1: view among shooters because they get stirred up about these things,
Speaker 1: but the reality is that the tougher rules have made
Speaker 1: it harder for idiots and thieves to put their hands
Speaker 1: on guns at the drop of a hat. It's made
Speaker 1: it that much harder. It hasn't made it harder for
Speaker 1: cashed up crooks, sophisticated crooks, no, no, no, But it
Speaker 1: has at least made black market weapons extremely expensive, and
Speaker 1: that in itself isn't a bad thing. What's better an
Speaker 1: illegal handgun for sale for ten thousand dollars or for
Speaker 1: sale for two hundred. Well, I think that ten thousand
Speaker 1: dollars options better. It just reduces the numbers. Now, we
Speaker 1: can't prove a negative. You never can, so we'll never
Speaker 1: know how many lives have been saved by the laws
Speaker 1: that have removed all those handguns and all those many
Speaker 1: more long arms from the community, leaving thinner pickings for
Speaker 1: the crooks. But have no doubt that it has saved lives.
Speaker 1: It must have saved lives, probably scores of lives, in
Speaker 1: some way or another, because we have a bigger population
Speaker 1: than we ever had. We've got a pretty excitable population.
Speaker 1: We've got ethnic groups that staying to dislike each other intensely,
Speaker 1: and the easy availability of weapons would only tend to
Speaker 1: accelerate our society into becoming more like America and South
Speaker 1: America and various other places where there are too many
Speaker 1: guns and too many angry people. There's another similarity between
Speaker 1: those sort of band or semi band controlled weapons and
Speaker 1: the machetes now they aren't essential. The reality is this,
Speaker 1: regardless of what we all think our rights are. And
Speaker 1: I mean, if I've got a semi automatic and I've
Speaker 1: got a machete in the boot, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: cause much harm because I'm a very respectable, middle aged
Speaker 1: man and I'm not inclined to go, you know, down
Speaker 1: the street chasing other people and entering into gang warfare
Speaker 1: and trading in drugs and all the rest of it. However,
Speaker 1: people like me are not the problem. The problem is
Speaker 1: all the other guys that do the bad things, and
Speaker 1: in the real world, we don't need to make it
Speaker 1: easy for them by having all these things at their fingertips.
Speaker 1: In the real world, semi automatic weapons are not that
Speaker 1: essential to farmers or even professional shooters. To be fair,
Speaker 1: of course, many farmers and professional shooters and other sporting
Speaker 1: shooters did have semi automatic weapons back when it was
Speaker 1: legal to have them. As I just said, my mother
Speaker 1: and my grandmother handed in semi automatic rifles post nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six. Most families, farming families and others did do that.
Speaker 1: Many truckloads of them were handed in. But were they
Speaker 1: really needed. Well no, because you can use a bolt
Speaker 1: action rifle effectively. You've got to kill a sheep or
Speaker 1: a cow or a horse or something on a farm,
Speaker 1: or shoot at kangaroos, or shoot it whatever it is
Speaker 1: you're shooting at, you can use a bolt action rifle
Speaker 1: very effectively. Really, is it vital to have a semi
Speaker 1: automatic I have said they're back in the drought of
Speaker 1: sixty seven. Ye oh, such and such a farm I
Speaker 1: had to shoot three thousand sheep. And you know he
Speaker 1: would have got tennis elbow if he'd had to cock
Speaker 1: the rifle with a bolt each time. Maybe so, but
Speaker 1: that is a once in a lifetime event. That isn't
Speaker 1: really an issue for which you need an automatic rifle.
Speaker 1: It's just not true. Really. Besides which, most good hunting rifles,
Speaker 1: deer rifles and the like, most of them are bolt action. Anyway,
Speaker 1: because semi automatics to some extent are derivative of military use,
Speaker 1: one could make a sweeping assertion and say that semi
Speaker 1: automatic weapons are derived largely from a military background, and
Speaker 1: therefore to some extent are anti personnel weapons. Now, we
Speaker 1: want our army to have those, we want some people
Speaker 1: in our police force to have those, but we don't
Speaker 1: want every Tom Dick and Harry to have them for
Speaker 1: a good reason. But every Tom Dick and Harry should
Speaker 1: be entitled to have a bolt action rifle or something
Speaker 1: if they have a legitimate reason, if they're sporting shooters
Speaker 1: or farmers or hunt you know, professional hunters, whatever, of
Speaker 1: course they should. Now, what's this got to do with machetes, Well,
Speaker 1: got a bit to do with the Machetes are no use.
Speaker 1: Let me say this and I will argue with anybody
Speaker 1: about this out in the real world, in Victoria, in
Speaker 1: Southern Australia, in Tasmania, in New Zealand. Machetes are no use.
Speaker 1: They are a nasty thing that is neither one thing
Speaker 1: or other. It's not a farm tool. You go to
Speaker 1: a farm where they've got trees and they've got bush,
Speaker 1: and they've got all sorts of things to cope with.
Speaker 1: They have full size axes. Yes, they have chainsaws. They
Speaker 1: have hand saws. They have pole saws for cutting branches
Speaker 1: that are above your head. They have shovels for digging.
Speaker 1: They have fern hooks and to implement now, but I
Speaker 1: grew up with them. Fern hooks and long handled slashes.
Speaker 1: These are for cutting thistles, for cutting ferns, and they
Speaker 1: have hoes for cutting thistles and things, but not machetes.
Speaker 1: They just aren't much use. You want to cut kindling,
Speaker 1: you use a real axe. Some little old ladies might
Speaker 1: use the tomahook. But I can recall my father, who
Speaker 1: was an expert axeman, saying tomahawks are no use except
Speaker 1: to cut your fingers off or you know, maybe it's
Speaker 1: the sort of thing that people who couldn't lift a
Speaker 1: full size act can lift a tomahawk. But they're really
Speaker 1: not much use. You could kill a chock with one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can cut your fingers off with one accidentally while
Speaker 1: you're trying to split kindling, because they're not particularly good
Speaker 1: at that. They're not heavy enough. Machetes are even worse.
Speaker 1: They've got this long, sharp blade that's effectively very dangerous
Speaker 1: for you to use when you're handling it yourself. And
Speaker 1: what do you do with it. Well, they're made for jungle.
Speaker 1: They're made to slash your way through the jungle. They're
Speaker 1: made for cane cutters. Cane knives we use for cane
Speaker 1: cutters to cut cane. They're made to cut bamboo again
Speaker 1: in the jungle. Now have been some use for them
Speaker 1: are in the cane fields of course of northern Australia
Speaker 1: and other places, and those sort of machetes bush knives
Speaker 1: call them what you like, they are and were useful
Speaker 1: in that sort of jungly setting where there's undergrowth that's
Speaker 1: very thick and heavy and you've got to hack your
Speaker 1: way through it and you want to something in your hand,
Speaker 1: if there's snakes, et cetera. But I have to say
Speaker 1: that in all these years of traveling around and seeing
Speaker 1: other places seeing what people actually use, the only place
Speaker 1: I personally have seen machetes alias bush knives in use
Speaker 1: is in Papua New Guinea, and that is where people
Speaker 1: use them for a lot of things. Really, they're a
Speaker 1: very handy thing around the villages in Papua New Guinea
Speaker 1: where there's continual undergrowth and where they like to hack
Speaker 1: stuff away. Also I noticed another thing in Papua New Guinea.
Speaker 1: Hundreds and hundreds of people have very nasty scars on
Speaker 1: their heads and on their arms, and I saw a
Speaker 1: lot of disfigured people who have been badly cut. And
Speaker 1: there are also quite a lot of dead people there
Speaker 1: who have been very badly cut. So even in those
Speaker 1: few countries where those instruments, or those implements or those
Speaker 1: weapons are in use, they're used more often for bad
Speaker 1: purposes than good ones. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes
Speaker 1: is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia.
Speaker 1: Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more,
Speaker 1: go to Heraldsun dot com dot au forward slash andrew
Speaker 1: rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news podcasts
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