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It was Sea Turtle Week last week in North Queensland. We have a great affection for our turtles. The figure for pigs in North Queensland is four million. I, like all of north Queenslanders, have a great love of nature; that’s why we live in North Queensland. If you have four million pigs and each female pig has a three-month gestation period, that’s two litters a year of—let’s be conservative—six. It could be as many as 10 but we’ll say six. That’s one million female pigs having 12 pigs each a year, which is 12 million pigs. I don’t know why they’re not exploding more than they are but the figure of four million is probably very conservative.

Where I live, we love our cassowaries. In fact, the name of our council is the Cassowary Coast Regional Council. The dunnart is a cute little kangaroo about that high; he’s doomed. The turtles are doomed, the cassowaries are doomed as are numerous species; they cannot possibly survive in the face of the pig explosion.

There are three ways of dealing with pigs that we know of. There may be others, but I never heard of them. There is baiting, trapping and shooting. Baiting: 40 per cent of our bird life in Australia, including cassowaries, are carnivores, so I have always strongly opposed baiting of pigs because of the threat that it poses to bird life. Trapping: well, I mean, seriously, are we going to trap 10 million pigs?

I don’t think so. Which brings me back to shooting. Instead of the louts and the hoons—like most young blokes in the bush, I was one of them once upon a time—playing up and causing trouble as all young people do, we could do what we did since time immemorial in this country.

We could take our rifles and go pig shooting on the weekend. If we took a carton with us, well, that was good too. It was a lot of fun and it had a great social value to our country, pig shooting. Without a semiautomatic-rifle, it is a bit of a joke.

In Queensland, we had no restrictions on firearms at all. There were no laws against firearms. I was with a gentleman today and he said, ‘I just walked in off the street and bought an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammunition and walked out.’

I said, ‘I did exactly the same thing. I saw it in the window and bought it and took it away.’

There was no, ‘Oh geez, what would happen if we had no restrictions on firearms?’ Queensland had eight deaths with guns. New South Wales with 50 per cent higher population and stringent gun laws didn’t have 16, didn’t have 26, didn’t have 36; they had 38 deaths with guns. Victoria with Draconian laws—we had no laws at all and eight deaths—have 50 per cent more population than us, so as we had eight deaths, they should have had 12. They didn’t have 12, didn’t have 24, didn’t have 36, didn’t have 48; they had 54 deaths with guns. And similarly those countries like Finland and Switzerland and Sweden, where everyone has a gun, it might be an idea. With the imperialist totalitarian government in China, we might think again. As a kid of 12, I joined the cadets, as every other kid in Australia did when they were 12 years old.

This was 12 years after the Second World War. We took our 303 rifles home with us! All of us had a 303 rifle, and we took them home with us. But the pigs are going to destroy our wildlife. Unless something is done, it is going to happen as sure as the sun rises. We love our wildlife and our nature. That’s why live in North Queensland, nature’s wonderland.