If you’re a farmer or licensed shooter, you probably already know Queensland Labor is deeply anti-firearms. You probably also know Labor are pretty crafty at doing favours for mates. There’s an art to doing deals that benefit your friends and hurt your opponents. Queensland Labor are pulling just such a stunt at Brisbane’s Belmont range complex, which is home to about a dozen sporting clubs. This is your last chance to write to the Ministerial consultation and oppose Labor’s crafty destruction of an irreplaceable rifle range in the heart of Brisbane.
Belmont has some unique ranges, such as this 300m rifle range (pictured below), which Queensland Labor propose to cut back to a 100m range with a view to shutting it down altogether. Labor would do this to retain a ‘temporary’ shotgun range that was constructed for the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Labor propose to spend millions of dollars to keep and expand this shotgun range, which at the same time will destroy the 300m range.
Looking carefully at the range locations and notes, you’ll see anytime the shotgun range is in use, no one will be able to shoot at the ranges in front of it. Who does this affect?
The 300m range is home to the largest club on site (except perhaps the SSAA): Queensland Military Rifle Club. A few thousand different people shoot at QMRC each year. QMRC has about a thousand members. It runs military rifle and long range shoots and has a very large pistol section, with hundreds of pistol shooters attending its competitions each week.
Expanding and keeping the ‘temporary’ shotgun range will also affect the following users:
Mount Petrie Bowmen – This Archery Club will lose many of its bush lanes to make way for parking and a shotgun clubhouse.
Tattersalls Shooting Club – This club has 130 members and is affiliated with the QMRC and sponsored by them.
Queensland Police pistol club – Its members will not be able to use their club range when the shotgun range is in use.
QPS Special Emergency Response Team – Regularly use the 300m range for practising rapid response policing.
The Queen Victoria Rifles – A re-enactment group.
Australian Federal Police – Also use the range as a training venue.
Cannon Hill Rifle Club – This club uses the 300m competition.
Security Guard training – Use the 300m range.
QRA CATTS ‘Come and try target shooting’ and school cadets – Use the 300m range.
QRA Field Class Group – Use the 300m range.
QRA Hornets Club – Use the 300m range.
Queensland Labor is prepared to disenfranchise all these users and spend $millions of your tax dollars to benefit a handful of relatively fuddish shotgun shooters, some of whom have been quietly lobbying for this outcome at the expense of thousands of other range users LIKE YOU.
Help stop this. Write a short email to the consultation TODAY (infrastructuredesignation@dsdmip.qld.gov.au) and express your displeasure, as a shooter, with this wasteful and expensive anti-gun outcome proposed to be delivered by Queensland Labor. The full consultation is available here and scroll to the bottom of that page.