Well, my is ass sure red. :=O
As for guns what a heard was, correct me (but spare the whip please!) if I wrong, what I heard was you needed a reason to own one “other than self-defense” and the National Party leader got himself burned in effigy over supporting it.
Sort of.
But a lot of this is confusion between terminologies used in different countries, and also in what the law says and what is actually enforced.
How to explain this...
In Australia, it is perfectly legal to use a gun in self defence as long as you genuinely believe you are facing a threat that involves a danger of death or serious injury - you can also use a gun to defend another person from death or serious injury.
But there is not and never has been a specific general right to carry any weapon for self defence. That right didn't exist prior to the 1990s, and nothing changed with regard to that in the late 1990s.
Now what did happen in the late 1990s and the early 2000s is guns were divided up into different categories and the rules for owning particular categories of firearms changed.
The most common guns - basic hunting rifles and shotguns are category A/B - and while technically speaking you do have to provide a reason for owning an A/B firearm, in practice, as long as you are a law abiding citizen without a recent or serious criminal record, in most parts of the country, it's easy to provide a reason as long as you're not stupid. You just say "I want to go hunting."
You want to own a basic handgun, it's a little harder. But there you say "I want to go target shooting" (if you don't have a clearer reason like being a security guard or something).
What you do not do is say "I want to own it for self defence." Never say that or you will screw yourself.
Getting more 'powerful' weapons, things are a little different - it's actually a little difficult to get any sort of semi-automatic rifle (although not impossible) - you will need to give some sort of reasonably credible reason and they may check up on it. And it is genuinely hard to get a high capacity semi-automatic of any sort.
But relatively few Australians ever owned weapons like that unless they needed them professionally, so it doesn't have that much impact.
We have plenty of dumb laws over guns - lots of bureaucratic hoops to jump through - but they're a long way from banned.
And, yes, the Nationals leader was burned in effigy but at the time that happened, it looked like the laws were going to be much stricter than they actually wound up being. And also enforced a lot harder than they wound up being. John Howard was a city based man who had no understanding of firearms - his initial plans would have been much stricter. Fortunately he actually did listen to people like his Deputy Prime Ministers from the National Party who had a more realistic understanding of things.
I'm a gun owner myself. I think the laws are overly strict in some areas, but it isn't really that hard to navigate them. And, fortunately, common sense is generally applied to enforcement - if they wanted to, they could enforce them a lot more strictly.
But we try to keep a little quiet about that, so the lefties who would push for it, don't start kicking up a fuss.
Australians who don't understand it, annoy me. Americans have no real reason to and it's hardly surprising people might assume the Australian government is actually in charge of everything that happens in Australia.
I do get annoyed at some Americans who won't listen when it's explained and still insist they know better, but you're not in that category.