The deadline for all states and territories to be signed on to the federal Labor Government’s firearms ‘buyback’ has come and gone, with most Australian jurisdictions essentially saying they’re not touching it with a 10ft pole.
Despite being announced with much fanfare alongside NSW’s hateful laws and being spruiked as a key initiative by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the scheme has not proven to be the slam-dunk PR-winning exercise its proponents apparently hoped for – particularly as questions continue to mount over the astronomical cost and the fact that it is seen to be punishing the people who didn’t commit a terrorist attack.
Queensland and the Northern Territory have outright rejected the entire premise of a ‘buyback’ saying it punished innocent people for something they had nothing to do with — and did not address the actual issues of hate, extremism and criminality.
Victoria and South Australia have also refused to participate in a Federal buyback, while Western Australia and Tasmania have said they will consider their own schemes.
This essentially leaves NSW and the ACT as the only jurisdictions signed on for the federal ‘buyback’ – and as Sporting Shooter reported recently, there is nothing allocated in the 2026-2027 NSW State Budget for the program, leaving shooters and dealers alike in a ruinous limbo.
Shooters Union Australia has published economic reports for Victoria and (in conjunction with the Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia) NSW showing the astronomical financial cost of gun “buybacks” in those states, with Victoria’s cost estimated at $437m in the first year alone, and the total costs for NSW approaching $1bn – and with no public safety benefits in either case.
Federal Nationals leader Matt Canavan publicly condemned the Albanese Government’s failure regarding not just the ‘buyback’, but the way it had handled the entire situation.
“Labor’s proposed national buyback scheme and unworkable laws failed badly, because attacking lawful firearm owners was never the answer to the Bondi terror attack,” he said.
“This was confirmed by the interim report of the Royal Commission, which said that no state or federal agency reported that the laws as they stood at the time were insufficient to prevent an attack.
“Labor’s laws targeted the wrong people, punished regional communities and did nothing to deal with the real threats from criminals and extremists.
“States and territories have rightly walked away from this unworkable scheme because it went too far.
“The only thing Labor accomplished was demonising lawful firearm owners.”
Shooters Union Australia president Graham Park said it was abundantly clear the whole situation was motivated by cynical political opportunism rather than a genuine desire to improve public safety in Australia.
“If the Albanese or Minns governments were serious about making Australia a safer place for our communities, they would be focusing their efforts on criminals and terrorists — who don’t generally go to the trouble of obtaining gun licences, and routinely ignore nearly all the gun laws anyway — instead of trying to waste literally billions of dollars punishing innocent Australians and demonising them as ‘a problem’ in the process, simply because they are licensed, responsible firearms owners,” he said.
“How many doctors or nurses or paramedics or firefighters or front-line police or teachers or aged care workers would the money involved in a gun ‘buyback’ employ instead?
“What life-saving medical equipment or vital equipment and resources for schools could it be used for?
“There are so very many things Australia genuinely needs investment in, yet the federal and NSW governments would rather waste enormous sums of money to make a political point, and seem totally unable to acknowledge they have gotten it wrong with their current plans.”
Several other shooting organisations have also criticised the federal government’s attacks on responsible firearms owners and its attempts to implement a gun ‘buyback’, including SSAA National, SIFA, the Australian Clay Target Association and the National Rifle Association of Australia.
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