After the terrorist attack on December 14th at Australia’s Bondi Beach, it was revealed that one of the two alleged perpetrators, Naveed Akram, had come to the attention of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in October 2019 for ISIS-related links. He was alleged to have been under law enforcement investigation for several months while living in the same house as his father, the other alleged attacker, “but there was an assessment that he posed ‘no ongoing threat.’ His father Sajid, who was shot dead by police at Bondi Beach, had legally owned six firearms.”
In the wake of the attack, the national and New South Wales governments hurried to fix the blame on insufficient gun control laws. Three days after the tragedy, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was quoted as saying, “We can’t get around the fact that a fellow was able to get a gun license, have six guns, four of which were used in this attack.”
A press release Mr. Albanese issued soon after shifted the focus away from addressing the poisonous extremist ideology motivating the alleged perpetrators and onto the weapons involved. He announced that a new “National Gun Buyback Scheme to purchase surplus, newly banned and illegal firearms” would be established, “the largest since the Howard Government[’s] in 1996,” because the “deadly ISIS inspired antisemitic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach highlights the need to finish the job the Howard Government started on gun reform.”
The Australian government will introduce legislation to partially fund the mandatory buyback, with the costs to be split 50:50 with the states and territories. “Consistent with the approach taken in 1996, the Government propose[s] that states and territories be responsible for the collection, processing and payment to individuals for surrendered firearms,” with the federal police overseeing destruction of the surrendered firearms.
The government also proposes that “states and territories agree to ambitious new gun law reforms no later than March 2026; and that reforms [be] legislated no later than 1 July 2026,” while signaling that the federal government would support limits on the number of firearms an individual could possess and limits on “open-ended firearms licensing and the types of guns that are legal;” requiring Australian citizenship as a condition of firearm licensing; accelerating work on the National Firearms Register; and authorizing “additional use of criminal intelligence to underpin firearms licensing.”
Rushed legislation was enacted soon after by the New South Wales (NSW) parliament. Premier Chris Minns called the measures, introduced on December 22 and passed two days later “the toughest gun laws in the country.” The omnibus law, Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025, included a hodgepodge of amendments on firearms, the freedom of public assembly, and the public display of “prohibited terrorist organization” symbols and was imposed after little consultation or engagement with stakeholders.
The new law caps the number of firearms an ordinary individual may own at four (with an upper limit of ten for certain occupations); reclassifies and restricts ownership of “straight-pull/pump action and button/lever release firearms;” reduces magazine capacity for certain classes of gun licenses and prohibits firearms using belt-fed magazines; cuts the general term for a firearms license from five years to two; and curtails appeals from refusals to grant a license. Licenses and permits held by non-Australian citizens generally “cease to have effect,” with no compensation payable.
Previously, Australia’s 1996 gun control and National Firearms Agreement included a ban on possession and use of automatic firearms, and restricted (based on magazine capacity) self-loading centerfire rifles, self-loading and pump action shotguns, and self-loading rimfire rifles to government agencies, occupational (professional) shooters and primary producers. The firearms now being restricted (elsewhere called “high risk” firearms) are “button/lever release firearms” (legally described as “a self-ejecting, lever, button or similar release repeating firearm that operates using the energy of the firearm discharge to perform some of the cycle of operation”) and “straight pull/pump action firearms” (“a straight pull or pump action repeating rifle, shotgun or other firearm in which the action is cycled using a linear motion using the shooter’s hand on a handle, bolt or other part, and that does not require rotation during unlocking and locking as in a traditional bolt action repeating firearm when cycling the action”).
The NSW Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party and the NSW Nationals led the opposition to the new gun law. Member of Legislative Council (MLC) Mark Banasiak of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party said “[l]icensed firearm owners did not radicalize the [alleged] offenders,” yet the government “chose to point the finger at 260,000 law-abiding firearm owners [in NSW], Australians who do the right thing every single day, farmers, sporting shooters, hunters, collectors, regional Australians, people who comply with the law, people who submit to background checks, to inspections, to licensing requirements, to ongoing scrutiny, people who are already the most regulated citizens in this state.”
Besides legitimate objections that the knee-jerk legislation misses the real problem, questions are being asked about how the buyback of hundreds of thousands of guns will be paid for. The 1996 mandatory “buyback” and amnesty resulted in 659,940 shotguns and semi-automatic rifles being surrendered, along with accessories and ammunition. The government of the day increased the Medicare levy (a tax on income) from 1.5% of income to 1.7% to raise the AUD$367 million needed to cover the cost. As the latest buyback is to be funded on a 50:50 cost split between the Australian government and the states and territories, it remains to be seen whether the Medicare levy will again be used to cover the government’s share and which state-based taxation mechanisms will be used for the remaining contributions. The extent to which the scheme will burden individual Australian taxpayers overall is another unknown. The Shooting Industry Foundation Australia (SIFA), representing Australia’s lawful shooting industry, estimates that the new gun buyback would conservatively cost AUD$15 billion, but could be as much as $20 billion.
Graham Park, the president of Shooters Union Australia, a national advocacy group for sporting, recreational, and occupational shooters, observes that the government “could build five, six regional hospitals with that money and actually save lives,” but instead, the “Prime Minister wants to use that money to buy guns from people who don’t commit crimes.”
Meanwhile, a Sydney law firm, McDonald Law, is reportedly raising funds in preparation for a legal challenge to the NSW law. Although Australia does not have constitutional protection of firearm rights, a spokesperson for the firm explains that responsible gun owners are being treated “as (if) they were responsible for the Bondi attack” and that the issue is more broadly framed as one of government overreach. “The challenge is about whether the state can actually implement these law reforms in a way that is jurisdictional, procedurally fair, and consistent with the constitutional and administrative law constraints that protect every person from arbitrary executive power and erosion of democratic freedoms and the separation of powers.”
Unfortunately for Australia’s law abiding gun owners, all signs point to still more gun bans and restrictions. NSW Premier Minns has already warned that his government is “not done with reform and we’re not going to be done until we’ve done everything possible to keep the people of this state safe.” Australia’s Sporting Shooter news source predicts that “similar laws are now likely for most Australian states and territories.”
If the goal of terrorism is to use fear, intimidation, and violence to turn a population against each other and abandon its values and freedoms in a desperate bid for safety and appeasement, it appears the perpetrators of the Bondi Beach atrocity can claim “mission accomplished.” The Australian government has found its scapegoat in the law-abiding gun owner, with norms of culpability, due process, vested rights, fairness, and proportionality additional collateral damage in the scheme.
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