The New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has continued to walk away from a controversial bill from the Shooters and Fishers party establishing a right to hunt on public lands, while also claiming that Labor backed it being sent to a parliamentary committee.
On Tuesday, Minns claimed Labor had supported the referral of the conservation hunting bill for an inquiry and indicated he would look at the committee's report, but Hansard showed Labor opposed the referral.
Minns said he had met gun control campaigner Walter Mikac and explained that the proposed legislation "was not our bill".
"It's an independent bill, anyone can put a bill to parliament, and all parties, not just the Labor party, but every political party, said we'll put it off to a committee to examine it, but there are some aspects of the bill we can't support," Minns told 2GB radio on Tuesday.
"My challenge is that we've got forests and feral animals that we largely rely on hunters to keep the numbers down in, [which] wouldn't be commonly understood, but that happens every day ... so I need to make sure that that's done in a safe way." he said.
In question time, Liberal MP and opposition whip, Adam Crouch, challenged the premier's version and asked Minns why he had voted with the Shooters against the referral.
Minns did not directly reply to Crouch's question, but a spokesperson for Minns later said Minns may have misspoken when he said the government had voted for the inquiry.
Hansard shows that on 4 June, during the second reading debate of the bill, the agriculture minister, Tanya Moriarty, made the government's position plain. "The government opposes the amendment moved by the Hon. Scott Barrett, which seeks to send the bill to a committee," Moriarty said at the time.
Greens MP Sue Higginson, who has led opposition to the bill, said it had been a hard-fought battle to garner the votes to refer the bill for inquiry because the government had sided with the Shooters.
Minns on Tuesday also hinted that the draft legislation, which was due to be debated next week, may be delayed.
"It's an upper house bill," Minns said. "I don't expect it to be voted on or even debated imminently. We're going to have to assess it."
The government can control the speed private members' bills progress through parliament.
On Monday, Minns said "on reflection" he did not support a legislated right to hunt, and that it risked sending Australia down the path of the US, where there is a constitutional right to bear arms.
He revealed he had met with Mikac whose wife and two daughters, Alana and Madeline, were killed in the 1996 massacre at Port Arthur. The premier said Mikac had raised "a lot of good points".
Minns had initially given broad support to the bill - although he had said early on that he would not support parts of the bill that liberalised the use of silencers and night vision goggles.
During radio interviews in May and June, Minns described a bounty scheme to encourage the shooting of feral animals as a "novel idea" and spoke of recreational hunters playing an important role in controlling feral pest populations, even though the Natural Resources Council had cast doubt on the effectiveness.
The conservation hunting bill is proving contentious for the NSW opposition, too.
At a shadow cabinet meeting on Monday, the Liberals agreed to oppose the bill, including a provision that would have established a government-funded Conservation Hunting Authority, arguing that it would amount to creating "an NRA-style gun lobby". But several Nationals MPs have said they supported the bill.
The issue threatens to become another point of friction within the Coalition and a minefield for the opposition leader, Mark Speakman, who is under pressure from within his own ranks.
The Nationals are also threatening to break ranks over net zero targets and the great koala national park on the north coast. Late on Tuesday, the Liberals abstained from supporting a motion by the Nationals calling on the government to shrink the size of the park.
If the Minns government does not support the Shooters' bill, it could put in jeopardy other parts of its legislative agenda, particularly reform of the state's workers' compensation scheme
The NSW Greens have accused the government of supporting the private member's bill in order to win support from the Shooters for the compensation overhaul, which aims to curtail claims for psychological injury.
The government denies there is such a deal but it needs crossbench support, or support from the Coalition, to pass the reforms through the upper house. The two Shooters' votes would be a start.
The workers' compensation bill was stalled after the upper house voted to send it to an inquiry. This prompted the government to take the highly unusual step of introducing a second, almost identical bill.
The government says the changes to workers' compensation are needed to prevent huge rises in premiums or the collapse of the scheme.