Arms (Licence Holders’ Applications for New Licences) Amendment Bill

Members, we now come to Part 2, and this is the debate on clause 7. The question is that Part 2 stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Minister, this is the clause about email and it’s about allowing email addresses to be used for service of documents. Minister, I found this clause very concerning, because, throughout the select committee process, the advisers had told us that this was in order to help them communicate with people, with the clubs and ranges regulations once they came out. So this clause actually has nothing to do with licensing but has everything to do with being able to email a person with service of any sort of documents. Police indicated that it was about being able to email improvement notices to club secretaries, or whomever is the contact person within a club.

Minister, the clubs and ranges regulations came out the day after we finished going through this with the Justice Committee. In it, it talks about emailing committee members with improvement notices in which they would have, in some instances, only 28 days to comply. These are volunteer representatives of clubs who may not have access to their email. I’m worried about whether or not the 28 days that would be upon them within the clubs and ranges regulations will count from the day that they have been sent the email, not the day that they have received it. That’s of some great concern to me.

Also, Minister, the fact that we only had 24 hours to consult for the community to be able to even get submissions in on this particular clause—and, in fact, I tried to do a Supplementary Order Paper to have the clause deleted, because, while I understand what police are trying to do, I don’t think a 24-hour submission time on this particular clause is beneficial to anybody. The community deserved to have more consultation on that part alone.

The email, of course, when I spoke to the officials at the select committee, they had said that they would go about making sure that they would have somewhere on a form that people would notice that the email address was for service, as well as any other sort of notification, and that did concern me, as well—that someone may fill in an application form online using someone else’s email address, especially if you’re rural and find out in the small print that that email address was actually going to be used for service of documents. Now, police did assure me that they would be able to do something like a check-box specifically for that, which I’m really hoping that the Minister would be able to confirm will occur—I know it’s an operational matter, but with the clubs and ranges regime that came out after this bill had finished at select committee, it’s had quite a number of officials very concerned about whether or not email is going to be the only way they’re going to get information, and whether or not a countdown on days—like some of the 28-day provisions—starts from the moment that email is sent rather than received.

I’m happy to say that I have discussed this matter with police when this amendment was put forward, and I think there’s a few things to clarify.

The first is that this is inserting electronic communication as an option, it does not make it the default, and it will still be up to the club—if we’re talking about a club, or the individual if we’re talking about an individual—to determine how they wish to be communicated with. As part of the process, they will have the ability to identify how they wish to be communicated with. But I would point out that the concerns the member’s raising, of course, are not unique to electronic mail; they apply equally to physical mail as well. Many of the clubs won’t have a letterbox. What they will do is—if required to provide a physical address, they may provide the home address of one of the members of the club, maybe the club’s secretary, maybe the club president, and so on. So there’s no guarantee that, in the case of a 28-day notice, for example, that was posted to someone, let’s say the club member had decided to go away on an overseas holiday for a couple of months, that same dilemma would not apply.

So this is a dilemma that clubs have when they’re required to provide a contact address. It is one, I think, authorities are very cognisant of—not just in this context but, in fact, in every other context as well, and I think there does need to be goodwill there, and I’m absolutely confident there will be. I have had conversations with police about this, that I don’t think there will be a punitive approach taken—“It says you’ve been emailed something 28 days ago, and you didn’t respond, and therefore it’s all your fault”, I think where there’s a reasonable explanation, there’ll be a reasonable explanation as there would be if it was posted to someone and they didn’t get it.

Part 2 agreed to.

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