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This week NSW Parliament has been recalled to consider changes to gun laws in response to the Bondi terrorism attack.
For communities like the Hawkesbury, where many residents live on farms, run rural businesses, or participate in shooting sports, gun ownership is not an abstract political issue. It is part of daily life, work, and long-standing tradition. That is why a violent even in Sydney can still have immediate local relevance, especially when it reshapes the laws that govern everyday rural realities.
The terrorist attack at Bondi Beach one week ago has done exactly that. Fifteen people were killed, many more were physically injured, and thousands of local Bondi residents and visitors were terrorised when gunfire erupted during a Hanukkah celebration on one of Australia’s most iconic beaches. In the aftermath, governments across Australia have moved swiftly to tighten gun laws after it emerged that the firearms used in the attack were licensed, registered, and legally owned under existing New South Wales legislation.
For Hawkesbury residents, the question is not simply what happened at Bondi, but what it reveals about the gun laws we live under, what is now being proposed, and where the limits of those reforms still lie.
The Bondi attack was carried out by a father and son acting together. Police shot one attacker dead at the scene, while the other was critically wounded and has since been charged with murder and terrorism offences. Authorities have formally declared the incident a terrorist attack motivated by antisemitism. Investigators confirmed that the attackers fired multiple long-arm firearms into a gathered crowd and later recovered at least three weapons used in the shooting, with a fourth firearm located nearby.
The weapons identified by police were not illegal or black-market firearms. They included a Beretta BRX1 straight-pull centre-fire rifle and two 12-gauge Stoeger M3000 M3K shotguns, firearms that sit within existing civilian categories under Australian gun law. These weapons were legally owned and registered to the older attacker, who held a valid firearms licence and had met all the formal requirements imposed by the state at the time those licences were issued.
That fact has become the fulcrum of the national debate now underway.
Australia’s gun laws are widely regarded as some of the strongest in the world. The framework introduced after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, through the National Firearms Agreement, fundamentally reshaped civilian access to firearms. Since then, mass shootings have been rare, gun homicide rates have fallen dramatically, and public confidence in the regulatory system has remained relatively high.
Under current New South Wales law, a person must apply for a firearms licence through police, be at least 18 years old, pass criminal history and background checks, and be assessed as a “fit and proper person.” Applicants must demonstrate a genuine reason for owning a firearm, such as farming, pest control, or sport shooting. Self-defence is not considered a valid reason. Firearms are categorised according to type and risk, and more powerful weapons face tighter restrictions. Every firearm must be registered, and each purchase requires a Permit to Acquire.
Importantly, citizenship is not currently a requirement. Permanent residents and some visa holders can legally apply for licences. Once issued, a firearms licence in NSW typically lasts for five years before renewal is required.
For decades, this system has been understood, particularly in regional areas, as a workable balance between safety and legitimate use. The Bondi attack, however, has exposed weaknesses not in the existence of gun laws, but in how those laws assess risk over time.
The first gap is the absence of any formal cap on the number of firearms a person may own. Under current rules, a compliant licence holder can legally accumulate many firearms, sometimes dozens, as long as each individual purchase is justified and storage requirements are met. Each application is assessed in isolation, without necessarily considering patterns of accumulation or changes in behaviour over time.
The second gap is the static nature of background checks. Police vet applicants at the point of licence issue and again at renewal, but there is no system of continuous assessment. If a person radicalises, becomes ideologically extreme, or experiences behavioural escalation after receiving a licence, those changes may not be detected unless they result in a criminal charge or a specific report to authorities. The system is designed to assess suitability at fixed points, not to monitor evolving risk.
The third gap lies in the fragmented nature of firearm registration. While all firearms must be registered, records remain largely state-based. A fully operational, real-time national firearms register has been discussed for years but has not yet been completed. As a result, intelligence sharing across jurisdictions can be slower or less comprehensive than intended, particularly when people move or acquire firearms in multiple states.
These gaps do not suggest negligence by police or regulators. They reflect a system designed in the 1990s to respond to known risks of the time, primarily criminal history and access to prohibited weapons, rather than the more complex challenges of radicalisation, online extremism, and lone-actor or small-cell terrorism.
It is against this backdrop that New South Wales Parliament has been recalled this week to debate and pass a package of proposed reforms.
The proposed changes focus on tightening eligibility and oversight rather than dismantling lawful ownership. One key proposal is to restrict firearm licence eligibility to Australian citizens, with possible limited exceptions for permanent residents. Licence durations would be shortened, potentially from five years to two or three, to allow more frequent reassessment of suitability. Police decisions to refuse or revoke licences would be harder to overturn through tribunals, giving greater weight to risk-based judgments.
Another major shift under discussion is the introduction of ownership caps. While current law allows large collections, the proposed reforms would limit most recreational shooters to four firearms, with higher caps, potentially up to ten, for primary producers and elite sport shooters. The intention is not to remove firearms from farmers who need them, but to prevent unchecked accumulation without heightened scrutiny.
There are also proposals to further tighten restrictions on certain firearm types and high-capacity magazines, alongside an expanded gun buyback scheme, the largest since 1996, to compensate owners for newly prohibited or high-risk firearms. A faster rollout of a national, real-time firearms register is central to the reform agenda, promising better visibility for police across state borders.
Waiting periods for firearm purchases are also likely to be extended or reinstated in cases where they have been waived, particularly for repeat acquisitions. Enforcement would shift toward proactive compliance audits, with harsher penalties for breaching storage rules or exceeding ownership caps.
What is notable, however, is what these reforms do not yet address.
They do not introduce continuous monitoring of licence holders for radicalisation or ideological extremism. They do not create automatic triggers for licence review based on intelligence alone. They do not fully integrate mental health escalation pathways into firearms oversight. In short, they tighten the system structurally, but leave the deeper challenge of dynamic risk largely unresolved.
This is not an easy problem to solve. Any move toward ongoing behavioural monitoring raises serious concerns about privacy, civil liberties, due process, and the potential for overreach. For rural communities, where firearms are tools of trade as much as sporting equipment, there is understandable anxiety about being unfairly targeted by metropolitan-driven policy responses.
Yet the Bondi attack has made one reality unavoidable: a person can be legally licensed, compliant with the law, and still become a grave risk over time.
The plain-English takeaway is confronting but necessary. The attackers at Bondi used lawful civilian firearms that fell squarely within existing legal categories. The failure was not a single loophole or oversight, but a system that treats licences as static approvals, allows accumulation without holistic review, and lacks national, real-time oversight.
For the Hawkesbury, the challenge now is ensuring that reforms improve public safety without undermining legitimate rural and sporting firearm use. That means acknowledging both truths at once: that Australia’s gun laws have saved lives for decades, and that they must evolve to meet new forms of risk that did not exist when they were first designed.
The debate now unfolding is not about whether Australia should have strong gun laws. It is about whether those laws can respond to dangerous change before it turns into irreversible tragedy — and whether that can be done while respecting the rights and realities of communities like ours.
That balance, more than any single provision, will determine whether the reforms now being rushed through parliament ultimately succeed.
The Gazette will follow this story.
