Firearms Legislation Amendment (Repealing Unfair Gun Laws) Bill 2026

Mr LITTLEPROUD (Maranoa) (10:03): I move: That this bill be now read a second time. It gives me great pleasure in moving the Firearms Legislation Amendment (Repealing Unfair Gun Laws) Bill 2026, because it rights a wrong. It rights a wrong after the tragedy of Bondi.

No-one is questioning the tragic circumstances of what happened in Bondi. But what we saw after it was just political expedience that took away the rights of over a million Australians who have lawful gun licences in this country, who have done nothing wrong. If you have that much hate, as those animals did in Bondi, you will find a way.

Whether it is a gun, whether it's a bomb or whether it's a car, you will perpetrate that hate. But we already have the strongest gun laws in the world. That came from Port Arthur.

We should be proud of how we led the world in putting those gun laws together. You can't just go and get a gun and a gun licence in this country because you want one. You have to pass a fit-and-proper-person test.

You then have to go through training and wait 14 days, to have a cooling-off period. You can't just walk in and say, 'I want the highest calibre weapon that I can find.' You actually have to demonstrate a necessity for it. That, along with the fact that there are continual—every year—police checks on your premises to make sure those guns are stored in the way they should be, is an important part that has protected Australians.

In fact, even what New South Wales tried to do in reducing the number of guns that Australians in New South Wales can own down to four, would not have averted Bondi in any way, shape or form, because, if you look at the police report, there were four guns used at Bondi. In fact, one of those was left in the car. So this from the New South Wales government and the Albanese government was all about a political diversion—a diversion from the fact that we do not have a gun problem in this country; we have an Islamic extremist problem in this country that has been allowed to fester by our government.

Its warning signs were there for years. We saw the streets of Sydney and Melbourne burn. The violence perpetrated on those streets that led to Bondi were the warning signs, the cues that this government failed to acknowledge and failed to actually address.

One of those perpetrators actually had a gun licence and was living with the other perpetrator and was on a watch list. The fact that that gun and that licence were not taken off them when they were on that list shows that the laws work but the process around it didn't. So why do we persecute?

Why are we going to persecute a million gun owners who do the right thing? This isn't just about farmers. It is important for guns to be owned by farmers; it's a tool of trade.

But it's also for the sporting shooters. It's also for those recreational shooters who do much of the pest mitigation work for our farmers who are too buggered at the end of the day to go and shoot pigs and dogs. They actually rely on these people to come out from urban areas and do that work for them.

And now they are having their rights and their ability to save the Australian taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars a year by being able to mitigate these pests removed. This was nothing about good policy; this was all about politics. We are going to see the price of this.

In fact, there is now only one state and one territory that have signed up to this buyback at a federal level. It was mooted to cost a billion dollars, and now only New South Wales and the ACT will sign up to it. It's ridiculous.

When you see the unintended consequences—I saw the Home Affairs minister in here with confected outrage a couple of weeks ago talking about the repealing of the part of this bill around the use of a carriage service. What that means is that now, if you own a 22 and you want to go and fix the bolt on it, and you download on a carriage service, you are then able to be charged with up to a five-year penalty for downloading how to fix your own weapon.

He came in here and said, 'We're getting rid of this, and 3D guns and printed guns will now be able to come into the market.' That is nonsense. The minister knew full well that every state and territory in this country has made it an offence to print a gun. It is an offence to do it in every state or territory.

Instead, they push through, not understanding the consequence of people who, because they used a carriage service to fix a firearm, because they used the internet, are then criminals. What has our country come to, when there was no need for this? There was no issue about this.

It's also about the import of even things like sporting vests for our sporting shooters, our clay-pigeon shooters, who actually need these vests to put their cartridges in so they can compete. Putting 50 cartridges into a vest to sit out there on a licensed gun range to be able to shoot is now going to be taken away from you. You cannot import that vest into this country.

That's just pure insanity. This is the reality that we are facing from a government that was desperate to cover over the fact that they failed Australians in keeping them safe from extreme Islam, rather than actually having the courage to look Australians in the eye and say, 'We will fix extremism in this country, not take away your rights.' This is a bill that destroys the rights of Australians for nothing other than political expedience.

And this isn't just about farmers. This is about every Australian—every Australian that does the right thing. We've become a country that, once something goes wrong, we want to just keep regulating to try to find perfection.

You are never going to find perfection. All we do is add complexity and take away rights in this country. What we've got to change back to is to police and persecute, rather than take away the rights of so many Australians.

This bill is important. I would say to those on the other side, there are plenty on that side that would support this bill and understand that this was a stretch too far from this government that was desperate to try to win some political points after a disaster that they helped perpetrate. I commend the bill to the House.

The SPEAKER: Is the motion seconded?