Torpedoed | Blogotariat

After a stupid statement by the silly old fart Bob Katter stating that every school should have an armoury in which each child could store their rifles, I wrote a piece about him and the reason he was so keen to sell more guns to Australians. That reason was that his son-in-law owns a large supplier of arms, ammunition and accessories1. Ever the spiv.

Ever since the National Firearms Agreement (NFA) was signed into law after the Port Arthur massacre, there have been persistent efforts to undermine, weaken and circumvent its provisions by various groups, including the gun lobby and, in some cases, state and territory governments. For instance, audits and reports by gun control advocates and academics have found that no jurisdiction in Australia fully complies with the original NFA standards2. Examples of this include New South Wales allowing wider use of prohibited firearms than other jurisdictions and loosening the 28-day cooling-off period for a second gun purchase2. Similarly, NSW, Victoria, and the Northern Territory, do not consistently require a “genuine need” for certain license categories2.

The gun lobby is active in Australia and has mobilised to influence policy, focusing on sympathetic politicians and pushing against the limits of the NFA. They have won some legislative battles as the number of legal guns in Australia has almost doubled since the NFA was introduced3. The gun lobby also uses the old US National Rifle Association (NRA) chestnuts, that any control of legal gun ownership penalises law-abiding citizens, that the focus should be on illegal gun ownership, and that it should be a right to own firearms4.

Even more disturbing is that a key part of the original NFA, a fully integrated National Firearms Register (NFR), still has not been completed nearly three decades later, a point of significant concern for gun safety advocates as inconsistent state systems hamper information sharing. In 2023, National Cabinet finally decided to implement it. It is expected to be completed by the middle of 20285.

The most recent attempt at weakening gun laws is by the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party (SFF) which is actively trying to get the NSW government to relax certain aspects of gun laws through proposed legislation, primarily the Game and Feral Animal Legislation Amendment (Conservation Hunting) Bill 20256. Advocacy groups and other political parties argue this bill, while presented as a conservation measure, is a “Trojan horse” for the gun lobby designed to undermine the state’s existing gun control framework7.

The specific measures the SFF Party is advocating for include:

Enshrining a “right to hunt” in NSW law, which critics say contradicts the current legal principle that gun ownership is a privilege, not a right.
Establishing a new “Conservation Hunting Authority” that would be controlled by hunting organisations and the gun lobby, effectively reviving the previous Game Council which was disbanded due to governance failures.
Legalising certain prohibited accessories such as silencers and expanding access to night-vision equipment for hunting.
Opening more public lands, including Crown and forestry land, to recreational shooting and hunting.
Introducing legislation for family and home protection as a genuine reason to own a firearm, and removing the recording of ammunition sales7.

The current Minns Labor government has faced significant pressure over perceived deals with the SFF Party to secure support for the legislation. Premier Chris Minns has publicly stated that he will not support the weakening of NSW’s gun laws and reportedly deleted the specific “right to hunt” clause from the bill in September 2025 following public backlash8. The bill recently failed to pass through parliament in late 2025, representing a temporary win for groups advocating for strong gun laws.

The Bondi beach atrocity has changed all this collusion to weaken gun laws. The ‘penalising law-abiding gun owners’ has been shown to be bullshit, because the guns used in the mass murder were legally owned. In fact, the older gunman had six legally owned guns9, and was a member of a gun club10.

New South Wales premier, Chris Minns has said that under the proposed post Bondi tightening of gun laws, recreational licence holders will be able to possess a maximum of four firearms, and owners will need to have their licence reviewed every two years. He also said: “There are other elements of the gun bill that will take a bit of time, but we have to set up and fund the buyback registry, and I’m aiming to do it as soon as possible. But it’s going to take a bit of time”11.

It goes without saying that the SFF Party are ropable that their lovely little plan in cahoots with the NSW Labor government to weaken gun laws has been torpedoed by the very people, law-abiding gun owners, they say are penalised by tighter gun controls. However, that didn’t stop the SSF trying to blame radicalisation and the inability of the ‘authorities’ to pick this up12.

Although firearm deaths had been declining in Australia, after the implementation of the NFA, the rate of decline doubled. In addition, in the 18 years before the gun law reforms, there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and none in the first 10 years afterwards. Furthermore, total homicide rates have also declined. This indicates that removing large numbers of rapid-firing firearms from civilians may be an effective way of reducing mass shootings, firearm homicides and firearm suicides13.

Will Minns, Albanese and the other premiers and chief ministers have the guts to follow this through, or will they succumb to the whining of the gun nuts and the Murdoch media once the raw horror of this massacre has subsided? That is the question.

The constant problem with legislation like the NFA, is the constant white-anting, lobbying, attempts at subversion which, coupled with the gutlessness of politicians, allows such legislation to be weakened over time, such that atrocities like that at Bondi eventually become more likely to happen.

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