I’ve been waiting 21 years to say ‘thank you’ to former Australian Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer. Today I got that chance and bought him an Aussie meat pie to show my gratitude.

In 1996, Australian Prime Minister John Howard and his deputy Tim Fischer acted swiftly and decisively to launch a gun buyback program. Twelve days before they launched the National Firearms Agreement and Buyback Program, Martin Bryant unpacked an arsenal of automatic weapons at the historic site of Port Arthur and massacred 35 people.

It wasn’t a popular move for Tim who was the leader of the National Party. His constituents were gun-loving farmers, ranchers and graziers. It took a lot of political courage for both leaders to take away our guns. But as a result a whole generation of Aussies have grown up without guns in their lives or without having loved ones gunned down in mass shootings.

I was a new immigrant to Australia in 1996 and immediately gained great respect for Tim Fischer and always wanted to somehow let him know that I and so many Aussies valued the steps he and John Howard took.

Tim is my new boss. He was in Bonn this week to assume the role of chair of the Executive Board of the Crop Trust. He is as passionate about safeguarding crop biodiversity as he is about gun control. We’ll be in good hands under his leadership.

I brought Tim to the Tazzy Food food truck, which pulls up to the United Nations Plaza every Thursday. These are gourmet meat pies … a bit fancier than what we’d get at the footy match in Australia. Tim and I stood outside the food truck and devoured our meat pies while a long queue continued to grow as UN workers waited patiently for a taste of Australia in Bonn. And indeed those patrons at Tazzy Food today couldn’t have had anything more Australian than meat pies and Tim Fischer.

It was meant to be a quick lunch for me, but for Tim it was a media event. He promised the food truck vendor that he would drop a line to the Hobart Mercury. I figured that was just a bunch of empty politician promises. But when we returned to the office, Tim followed me to my desk and said ‘start typing’. He dictated a story and a quote and said ‘send it off to the Mercury’. I packaged it up with my pics and sent it off as instructed.

The next day I told Tim what I thought were the hard facts of journalism. ‘Tim, no one is going to pick up a story of you eating a meat pie.’ But Tim insisted someone would. ‘You just wait,’ he said. ‘The rural Australian media are always looking for any kind of filler.’

And he was right. Someone did pick it up and ran our little story in the ‘Back Paddock’ section of the Weekly Times.

I have a lot of respect for Tim Fischer and now I respect him even more for his media instincts.