What if I told you NSW Premier Chris Minns, after the terror attack, copied former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern?
After speaking with NZ firearms advocate Hugh Devereux-Mack, the similarities between the post-Christchurch and post-Bondi political responses became impossible to ignore.
I’m not suggesting Minns literally picked up the phone and asked Ardern what to do. But after interviewing Mr Devereux-Mack from New Zealand’s Council of Licensed Firearms Owners, it was difficult to ignore how closely the two political responses followed the same playbook.
First, a terrorist attack shocks the country. Then serious questions emerge about what the authorities knew, which warning signs were missed and how the attackers slipped through the system.
Before those questions can be properly answered, the government announces sweeping new firearms restrictions.
The licensed firearms community pays the price while the institutional failures are investigated later.
Not a single public servant loses their job in the wash up.
Sound familiar?
THE CHRISTCHURCH PLAYBOOK
The Christchurch terrorist attack occurred on 15 March 2019. Six days later, Jacinda Ardern announced sweeping restrictions on semi-automatic firearms. Legislation was introduced on 31 March, received royal assent on 10 April and commenced the following day, less than four weeks after the attack.
Ardern was celebrated around the world for acting quickly and decisively. But Hugh remembers it differently.
He said New Zealand firearms owners knew within days that serious questions existed about how the terrorist had obtained a firearms licence.
Instead of confronting those questions first, the government made the firearms laws the immediate focus and, by extension, blamed the wider firearms community.
“We knew within days that it was an individual who’d been improperly given a firearms licence due to shortcutting of police processes,” Hugh told me.
“Instead of stepping up and owning that mistake, the Ardern government and police said our firearms laws were the things that needed to change.
“I think you’ve seen a very similar thing after Bondi in Sydney.”
Years of inquiries would follow, but the laws came first.
The New Zealand Royal Commission eventually identified serious deficiencies in the way police administered the firearms licensing system. These included inadequate guidance, training and oversight, as well as insufficient consideration of whether the terrorist’s referees knew him well enough to provide reliable information about his suitability.
Those referees were an online gaming friend and that person’s parent.
That finding matters. It showed there had been genuine failures within the very system New Zealanders relied upon to determine whether someone was fit and proper to hold a firearms licence.
Hugh said police later apologised to the victims and their families for failures in the licensing process.
“They have never, not even to this day, apologised to the licensed community for essentially blaming and scapegoating us for their mistakes,” he said.
THEN CAME BONDI
The Bondi Beach terrorist attack occurred on 14 December 2025.
Five days later, the Minns Government announced what it called the “toughest gun law reforms in a generation”.
On 24 December, just 10 days after the attack, the laws passed following an emergency recall of Parliament and a marathon debate stretching into the early hours of Christmas Eve.
Once again, the government was able to stand before the cameras and say it had acted.
But acted against whom?
The legislation imposed firearm caps, shortened licence periods, expanded mandatory club membership, increased police powers and introduced further restrictions affecting hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with the attack.
Meanwhile, the harder questions remained unanswered.
What did our intelligence agencies know? What information was shared? What warning signs were missed? How did the licensing and counter-terrorism systems interact?
Most importantly, would any of the new restrictions imposed on ordinary licence holders actually have prevented Bondi?
Those questions could not possibly have been answered in 10 days.
In April, the Royal Commission’s interim report said no agency had identified any gap in Australia’s existing legal or regulatory frameworks that prevented authorities from acting before or during the Bondi attack.
It also said no issue requiring urgent or immediate legislative action had been identified, although it separately recommended an updated National Firearms Agreement and national firearms buyback.
Yet the Minns Government had already legislated as though the answers were obvious.
That is the similarity Hugh identified.
Christchurch and Bondi were not identical attacks. New Zealand and NSW did not pass identical laws.
But the political method was almost identical: act against the licensed community while the public was shocked, present the restrictions as decisive leadership, then investigate what actually failed afterwards.
LAWS ARE EASIER TO PASS THAN REMOVE
New Zealand’s experience also contains a warning for NSW shooters who think bad legislation can simply be cleaned up later.
“If you only ever play defence, you will gradually lose by attrition,” Hugh said.
“It’s so much more difficult to un-write bad laws than it is to stop bad laws being passed in the first place.”
New Zealand’s national firearms register is a perfect example.
COLFO warned that it would be costly, unreliable and riddled with bad data. Its latest Trust and Confidence Survey found that 24.2% of respondents who had used the register discovered errors in their own records.
Yet Hugh believes the register will remain until it fails so comprehensively that the government can no longer defend it. Even then, politicians may simply pour more money into it.
The firearms prohibited after Christchurch present the same problem.
Some New Zealand shooters expected a change of government to deliver their semi-automatics back. That has not happened.
There may be incremental wins and limited exemptions, but once a government confiscates firearms and builds an entire regulatory system around the prohibition, returning to where you started becomes extraordinarily difficult.
That is precisely why NSW firearms owners cannot shrug their shoulders and assume the 2025 laws will eventually sort themselves out. They won’t.
It is also why firearms owners in every other state and territory need to push hard before any new laws are enacted. Otherwise it will be too late.
NEW ZEALAND IS CLAWING BACK LOST GROUND
The good news is that New Zealand shooters are no longer playing defence alone.
COLFO united shooting, hunting and firearms organisations that had previously fought their own separate battles. It built credible research through its annual Trust and Confidence Survey.
Hugh said its submission tool also helped generate more than 6500 submissions on the new Arms Bill.
Most significantly, its former spokesperson Nicole McKee entered Parliament with the ACT Party. She is now NZ’s Associate Minister of Justice responsible for firearms and Deputy Leader of ACT.
The new Arms Bill passed its second reading on 21 July. If enacted, it will replace the repeatedly amended Arms Act and establish Firearms Safety and Education New Zealand as a regulator operating independently of New Zealand Police.
It is not a complete reversal of everything imposed after Christchurch. Hugh is blunt about that. However, removing sworn police officers from ordinary licensing and regulatory decisions would be a significant step.
As he put it, police are trained to deal with criminals and potential threats. That mentality is necessary when pursuing violent offenders. It is the wrong mentality for administering the lawful activities of licensed shooters.
New Zealand is now attempting to rebuild that relationship.
NSW, meanwhile, has handed police even greater power over the same community they regulate, investigate and enforce against.
That is the final lesson.
Jacinda Ardern was praised for acting before all the facts were known. Chris Minns followed the same political formula after Bondi and received the same headlines about strong and decisive leadership.
New Zealand is now spending years trying to repair the consequences, and they have far more liberal firearms and weapons laws than us.
If NSW refuses to learn from our own experience, and the rest of Australia doesn’t either, we don’t have any more ground to give.
We will likely lose the lot.
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