KE­JAN HAYNES

Gov­ern­ment re­lent­ed and re­moved a con­tro­ver­sial clause from the Firearms (Amend­ment) Bill 2022 which both the Op­po­si­tion and In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors were vo­cif­er­ous­ly against.

In the orig­i­nal Clause 10 of the Bill, the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty would be em­pow­ered to ex­tend the va­lid­i­ty of a Firearm User’s Li­cence be­yond the three years spec­i­fied.

Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Wade Mark had raised con­cerns say­ing, “We are ask­ing that this clause be delet­ed, com­plete­ly!”

He said the Min­is­ter should nev­er get in­volved in po­lice busi­ness.

In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Paul Richards was one of the first to raise the is­sue dur­ing the de­bate.

"What are the ex­i­gent cir­cum­stances un­der which the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty is re­quired to do this, that the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice or the Of­fice of the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice can­not en­ter­tain or con­tin­ue as by my un­der­stand­ing, is present­ly the case? So this is a huge red flag for me," Sen­a­tor Richards said.

In wind­ing up his de­bate late Tues­day night Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds said he took spe­cial note of Richards' sin­cere tone, and call for fur­ther in­for­ma­tion.

He ex­plained the thought be­hind the amend­ment came from the Covid-19 Pan­dem­ic where mul­ti­ple ex­ten­sions were re­quired to be made by the Cab­i­net to dri­vers' li­cens­es and more be­cause cir­cum­stances didn't per­mit.  He al­so said as FULs moved from a pa­per book to an elec­tron­ic card, li­cences could ex­pire dur­ing the tran­si­tion process.

"You see the tran­si­tion from pa­per based to card based elec­tron­ic. That could re­quire an ex­ten­sion of the time. Wait and you will see!" the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter ex­claimed.

Hinds not­ed the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice still main­tained the ul­ti­mate con­trol.

"Even if you ex­tend the va­lid­i­ty pe­ri­od from three years to three years and a quar­ter or three years and a half, if any time in­side of that, the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice want­ed to re­voke that li­cence, he or she could do that," Hinds ex­plained.  "It has noth­ing to do with the min­is­ter. And some peo­ple wrong­ly thought in this House that that pro­vi­sion would have giv­en the min­is­ter an op­por­tu­ni­ty to look over the fence in­to po­lice head­quar­ters and say Mr X or Mr. Y  want you to ex­tend his li­cence. Well, that blew my mind. I couldn't un­der­stand that."

The Bill went to the com­mit­tee stage of the Sen­ate af­ter mid­night, in­to this morn­ing, where Hinds of­fi­cial­ly ac­knowl­edged and pro­posed delet­ing the clause.

"As I in­ti­mat­ed in the course of my wind­ing up, that we pro­pose for ease and sim­plic­i­ty, that with some con­sid­er­a­tions made by mem­bers of the in­de­pen­dent bench­es, that we would with­draw that pro­vi­sion and we so sug­gest," Hinds said.

It was then put to a vote where it was unan­i­mous­ly passed that the clause would be delet­ed.

The Bill was passed and Sen­ate was ad­journed to a date to be fixed.