I'll respond here as the other thread was locked.
I'm not, at the moment, going to talk about the gun issue, I'm just going to explain why Mr Howard most probably does not support the idea of a Bill of Rights in Australia, and why, I actually agree with him. What people need to get their head around is the very different constitutional situation in Australia, from the US.
The United States needs a Bill of Rights for one overriding reason - it rebelled against the British Crown, and therefore rebelled against English law. If the United States had not established a Bill of Rights, it could have lead to a situation where a future tyrannical government could have argued that none of the common law rights had persisted beyond America's War of Independence. It needed to be restated in a binding document that those rights had survived, and, indeed, expanded (the Second Amendment goes considerably beyond the right to bear arms that did exist under English common law (and which still does, but it's subordinate to statute law, unlike the situation in the United States).
Australia never rebelled against Britain, and so never rebelled against English Common Law, and so all our common law rights persisted into an independent Australia. Those rights are protected under common law, which is part of the Australian constitution and they are (mostly) very well protected. The Australian Constitution did need to state freedom of religion as a new right (and does so in language very close to that of the First Amendment to the US Constitution) because that was the one area where we didn't have a common law, because Britain has a state religion, and laws that limit freedom of religion (very few of these, now, but they do exist).
The one right we do miss out on is the right to bear arms - that is not stated in any document except in the very limited form of the Bill of Rights of 1689 (which does still have relevance to Australian law). Is that a major issue? Yes. Is it a large enough issue that we would want a Bill of Rights for Australia? No.
Why? Because if a government in Australia tried to introduce a Bill of Rights today, it would probably not include a right to bear arms. Any Bill of Rights created in Australia today would be a profoundly left wing document. How do we know this?
Because certain states of Australia (including my own) have already created their own 'Charters of Rights' and they are all very similar.
The movement to establish a Bill of Rights in Australia is overwhelmingly a left wing movement. We'd end up with a left wing Bill of Rights. We would not get anything like the United States Bill of Rights.
What we've wound up with in my state when it comes to our Charter of Rights is a document that prevents capital punishment but guarantees the right to abortion. That means any law that is deemed to discriminate against gays is unlawful (fortunately marriage is defined in Federal, not state law), makes it more difficult than ever before to put illegal immigrants in detention or deport them, creates a right to privacy that allows school teachers to take girls to get abortions without any requirement to inform parents, allows journalists to be prosecuted for offending aboriginals (quite seriously, the right to not be offended trumps the freedom of the press under this charter)... this is what Australia would end up with if we got a Bill of Rights, and that's why most conservatives in Australia do not want one and most progressives do. We would not get anything like that which the US has.
Uh, no. Taxation without representation, secret trials, and other indignities visited upon the colonists by the British colonial government, were violations of BRITISH law.
The American Revolution was not a "rebellion" in the normal sense of the word, it was a LAW ENFORCEMENT action directed against a government which broke its own law.
Mr Howard is also a politician, and he fails to disclose that in the years since the 700,000 guns were handed in, a new 700,000 guns have been imported and purchased..
He may not understand that Americans don’t want to hand their guns over because a)The government works for them, not the other way around b) they don’t trust the government at all, because the government constantly lies, cheats, subverts the law, acts against the constitution, works around the checks and balances, and the politicians make themselves rich at the expense of the people, and exempt themselves and their friends from the laws they enact.
Australians appear to have become complacent, and the government runs rough-shod over them. All they can do is complain, but mostly, it falls on deaf ears.