“Democracy”: Comrade Nash offers fake 24-hour consultation period for NZ firearm owners

The NZ Labor government have decided they’d champion democracy and equality like they always do and initially offer a farcical 48-hour consultation period to firearm owners, before they use taxpayer money to steal their property:

“Public submissions are now being called for Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines, and Parts) Amendment Bill

The closing date for submissions is Thursday, 04 April 2019

Make your submission on the bill by 6.00pm on Thursday 4 April 2019. 

The bill seeks to extend the existing restrictions on military-style semi-automatic firearms (MSSAa) to ban most semi-automatic firearms and some shotguns, as well as magazines and parts that can be used to assemble semi-automatic firearms.

Some small-calibre rimfire semi-automatic firearms and lesser-capacity shotguns are excluded from the ban. The permitted firearms are ones commonly used in the farming, hunting, and recreational communities, and have a limited magazine capacity.”

It gets better from Stuart Nash:

“The Arms Amendment Bill will have its first reading tomorrow, and be referred to a Select Committee for a swift public submissions process. It will return to Parliament next week to pass through its remaining stages. It is intended to come into force on 12 April, the day after the Royal Assent.”

Does Stuart Nash even read his own press releases or does he not care? Likely the latter.

However, it got even worse as of a few minutes ago as Stuart Nash and NZ Police decided to change that period to an absolute farce of just 24 hours:

“Gun owners are appalled a parliamentary select committee is giving them just one day to make oral submissions on the government’s fast-tracked gun law changes.

The Finance and Expenditure Select Committee has decided to close written submissions on the Arms (Prohibited Firearms, Magazines and Parts) Amendment Bill at 6pm today and to hold in-person submissions tomorrow.

The committee will request oral submissions from “a representative group”. The timeline shocked Council of Licenced Firearms Owners chairman Paul Clark who said he had expected oral submissions would run for several days.

“It’s appalling. I was brought up to respect the parliamentary system,” he said.

“On something like this, which is fundamental to New Zealand society, you don’t just trample over everybody and then say, ‘well we’ve discussed it’.”

Mr Clark said he had hoped to get a fair hearing but the short submission time shook his faith in the democratic process.”This undermines the whole democratic system that we have in this country, there is no other way to say that. It is destroying democracy.”

Mr Clark said he did not know if his organisation would be asked to make a submission in person, but he hoped it would be.He said the committee would not get a representative view of firearms owners’ views of the bill from just one day of submissions from a limited number of people.

“I thought we would get a fair hearing because that’s the basis of the system we have,” he said.

“The minute you start short-circuiting democracy for political convenience you’re sending out a lot of alarm bells.”

In other words: here’s a 24- hour window (that was originally a ‘generous’ 48 hour window) to lodge your dissent which will go straight into the spam folder, while we rush through laws that we already had drawn up months ago without any meaningful consultation. But hey, we listened.

This is another tried and true method of government worldwide. Offer consultation as an out clause for saying they listened, while carrying out what they wanted anyway.

Ask the Brexit folks how that is going.

That’s not to say don’t make a submission, by all means do, but this 48 hour offer is a farce. COLFO have done an excellent job in working up a submission template which you can find here.

Stuart Nash has got some real explaining to do on how this is democratic and not blatantly communist.

Hand over nothing.