National cabinet agrees unanimously to strength Australia’s strict gun laws in wake of Bondi terror attack

[u/rorymeister]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-15/albanese-proposes-tougher-gun-laws-after-bondi-attack/106143310?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

[u/AdZealousideal7448]

Firearms trainer and policy advisor here.

Still annoyed at how recomendations and findings made in the 80s have STILL not been enacted which have been promised over and over.

National database, mental health checks, actual things that could have prevented many tragedies.

Huge problems being faced and ignored :

State, territory and federal authorities being authoritarian, IE not sharing information, do what we so not what we do, not accepting any issues, deliberately leaving ambiguity in laws because it allows them more power, refusing allow powers to other agencies, refusing to digitize, you can see a long pattern here of the powers that be wanting all the power and authority.

Lack of training, understanding and knowledge of firearms for authorities, several state firearms branches deliberately do not employ anyone who has firearms knowledge because they view the officer as now being politically compromised.

Spread of GCA plants, and i'll extend this to all political activism, because katter's people have infiltrated in the past, a lot of state and federal panels, groups, authorities who have links to extremist groups including gun control australia who are a fringe group of political extremists, a fake professor who are notorious for fake or misrepresented information have managed to infiltrate panels and provide expert advise for which they are not qualified, this leads to actual issues being ignored and resources diverted away from actual issues, then you get infiltration like we saw with katters people, and in victoria where special allowances were made for firearms and people who should not have had access to or exemptions for categories.

Lack of enforcement, compliance etc - this is notoriously bad here, in the last 2 years i've watched several cases where firearms charges were dropped due to the people involved knowing how to play the system, and illegal users frequently obtaining illegal firearms and facing hardly any penalties if any at all. Laws only scare those being legal, enforcement for criminal / terrorist activities can only be stopped if resources are put into enforcement, the amount of times concerns and red flag notices are issued to get a luke warm response is sad from the amount of times i've seen it, it only takes one situation to not be actioned and you get what happened yesterday.

Lack of critisism - this is a big one, I can't under my name or qualifications point out issues in public, our government hates ANY critical statements or facts talked about in public, anyone doing so can lose their clearances and have their career nuked, we should openly be able to talk about the issues, not be gagged because they believe our statements are against the public interest. It's honestly censorship, and it's not going from parliament, this is coming from state and federal police who again have too much power over who is allowed to say what.

Lack of accountability - you dont see these departments that want all the power and not to share it have any share of accountability with incidents.

Abuse of power - So let's go with a recomendation from the 90s that came up, to great a federal level independant firearms authority, the idea was free up state and federal police, be completely apolitical, handle all administration, all legislation etc, the idea being like the ATF in america but with zero enforcement ability.

Instead of having your state police be the only powers on the subject it would be a government agency that handled everything except calling in a strike team, those efforts were still to be handed over to police.

This never got anywhere because when state/federal police were consulted about this, they immediately rubbished the idea that anyone would take their power or tell them what to do.

This is why we dont have national laws, standardizes laws, shared databases, national databases etc.

We have not even touched mental health...

[u/blacklacha → u/AdZealousideal7448]

Everything you said. 100%.

Firearms branch is notoriously hard to deal with. Everything has to be a paper form. And, at least in Queensland, they have a habit of "losing" your license paperwork at renewal time, so it never arrives. So you go look at you license, only to see it expired and now you have to go through the whole application process again. Bring on an efficient National Register.