I think his point was that Australia does not specifically enumerate a right to bear arms. That makes it much easier for politicians and judges to erode liberties in the name of safety or "think of the children". Eg. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have done mass firearm bans or confiscations in recent years, while the US has largely resisted similar efforts to restrict civil liberties.
The 1973 Act is the part in which we the citizens of W.Australia grant the right for our elected and employed politicians to form regulations wrt firearms.
That can be repealed, if so there is no right for our government to make firearm regulations.
The 1974 Regulations are the evolving regulations, the fine detail about what the licence requirements are, the purchase and sale requirements are, the various classes, storage requirements, and conditions for disqualification.
These can be changed.
Their point was nonsense.
We have a "Washminster" system of government, it's a bit like the UK Westminster system and a bit like the US Washington system .. only it was formed after looking at the shortcomings of both.
> Australia [..] done mass firearm bans or confiscations in recent years
Awww, you read the US NRA dot points on Australia then?
The response here was to unify gun regulations across all states and territories. At the time the bulk of the Australian population had gun regulations .. Queensland (then low population), Tasmania, and Territories (low population) did not.
Once regulation was uniform and gun licencing was taken seriously there were a lot of guns that people didn't want to licence ("we have the three we mainly use and another three out the back that grandad used in the war") - so there was a federally funded buy back scheme "cash for guns" to encourage handing in unlicenced weapons for cash, this resulted in pictures of skip bins full of "confiscated guns".
There are still semi automatics being bought, sold, and used in Australia - these are licenced for feral pig control use.
You cannot get a semi automatic to barrel polish and strut the street in the city with, you can get one if you're going to kill a lot of pigs.
You can get a licence to drive a three trailer prime mover (road train), you are still not permitted to drive these fully loaded on a large number of urban roads.
