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- [00:01]
A
I'm Daniel James and you're listening to 7am. In December. Last year, in the wake of the Bondi terror attack, Anthony Albanese promised the biggest national gun buyback since Port Arthur. He wanted the states and territories to agree to new gun laws by March and legislate them by July. But that first deadline has passed and the national response is fracturing. Queensland and the Northern Territory are refusing the buyback. Tasmania is rejecting a cap on the national number of firearms a person can own. And a national register is not expected to be running until 2028. The royal commission into Anti Semitism has also weighed in, saying Australia should waste no time implementing the buyback. So today, 30 years after Port Arthur, we're returning to our January episode when Nicole Johnston speaks with Ebony Bennett from the Australia Institute on why Australia has more guns than ever and why reform is still so difficult. It's Sunday, may 3rd.
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B
Ebony, thanks for speaking with me. Can you lay out for me what the government's proposing?
- [01:17]
C
Well, after the Bondi massacre last year, national cabinet met and agreed to a number of gun law reforms. And now the government is implementing a bill that will hold up its end of the bargain on there. Things like limiting the number of firearms that any one individual can hold, as well as limiting the open ended kind of firearms licensing that we've seen in the past. Obviously the national buyback scheme and things like accelerating the work of standing up a national firearms registry.
- [01:52]
D
The government will establish a national gun buyback scheme to purchase surplus newly banned and illegal firearms. The largest buyback since the Howard government initiated one in 1996.
- [02:06]
C
So in 1996 we saw the banning of semi automatic and automatic weapons. And again we'll see many more restrictions introduced of the type of firearm that we used in the Bondi massacre here. And the Commonwealth's part of that in this legislation will be, for example, restricting the importation of reloading rifles and shotguns into Australia.
- [02:28]
D
Australia's gun laws were last substantially reformed in the wake of the port. The terrible events at Bondi show we need to get more guns off our streets.
- [02:38]
B
Now, in the aftermath of the Bondi attack, one of the most shocking revelations was the fact that the older gunman, Sajid Akram, that he had six legally registered guns, even though he was living in the city and his son had been investigated by asio. Why was that able to happen and how do these laws go about addressing that?
- [02:58]
C
Well, it's not exactly clear as yet how that happened, but obviously it's evidence that our current gun laws as they stand aren't working as intended. It appears like the New South Wales authorities may not have had access to that intelligence from ASIO or the fact that one of those perpetrators was known to ASIO in the way that he was. And this legislation will introduce provisions that mean that all of those licensing authorities at the state and territory level will be able to access that kind of intelligence from Commonwealth agencies like ASIO and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.
- [03:38]
B
For example, if we could talk about the last time that we had major gun reform after Port Arthur. What changes did John Howard make and how do we know about how they actually made the country safer?
- [03:51]
C
Yeah. The National Firearms Agreement was historic and landmark legislation and it's obviously still hugely popular with the public today.
- [04:00]
E
The Prime Minister John Howard tonight detailed
- [04:03]
B
sweeping plans to reform Australia's national gun laws, which could mean the introduction of
- [04:07]
E
a one off tax to buy back illegal weapons.
- [04:10]
C
John Howard, in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, gathered all the states and territories and the National Firearms Agreement did things like banning or restricting semi automatic and automatic firearms, restricting the importation of those kinds of firearms.
- [04:26]
D
We need to achieve a total prohibition on the ownership, possession, sale and importation of all automatic and semi automatic weapons.
- [04:36]
C
It included introducing mandatory licensing systems and background checks for all license holders. It introduced things like rules for the storage and use of firearms. Obviously it implemented the National Gun Buyback Scheme, which saw around 650,000 firearms surrendered to the authorities that at the time cost around $300 million to the Commonwealth. People could surrender their firearms, often to their local police station and then from there the Australian Federal Police were in charge of destroying those weapons. And obviously it included people who owned guns that subsequently became illegal to own or who in the wake of Port Arthur, just felt like, I don't really need these firearms anymore and I would like to do my part by handing them in. And we know that the National Firearms Agreement was incredibly successful because in the years leading up to the Port Arthur massacre, we saw around 13 mass shootings in the 18 years preceding Port Arthur. In the wake of the National Firearms Agreement being introduced, that number of mass shootings involving casualties of five or more people dropped to zero. It had a number of other great benefits for the Australian community and their safety. So it accelerated the decline of homicide, homicides by firearm in Australia and it also accelerated the decline in suicides by firearms in Australia. So it had a dramatic improvement in public safety. And it's really clear that the fewer guns are in the Australian community, the safer Australians are
- [06:24]
B
coming up the unfinished business after Port Arthur. Ebony, while John Howard's reforms had a big impact, there is some unfinished business from that time. Could you paint a picture of our current patchwork of gun laws around the country?
- [06:51]
C
Yeah, well, as popular as the National Firearms Agreement was at the time, it's really important to note that really no state or territory or the Commonwealth, indeed fully implemented all of the details of that agreement. Each state and territory still has a slightly different approach to gun laws and really we're only as safe as our worst state or territory. So, for example, there was never implemented the agreement to prevent children from having access to firearms across the board. In most states, there's no limit on the number of guns that any individual can hold. For a long time, Western Australia was the only state that had any kind of cap on the number of guns that you could legally own. And it was only December last year that New South Wales introduced its own caps. For example, 30 years after the fact, there is still no national firearms registry, something that all law enforcement would like access to. But for example, some states, like here in the act, all of their records of gun ownership for their gun register are analog. They're on paper, essentially. So that makes the process of establishing the National Firearms Register obviously much more difficult. We've also seen a steady chipping away in states and territories at Australia's gun law reforms over many years. People might not remember, but just prior to the Bondi massacre, for example, the MINS government in New South Wales was considering really relaxing New South Wales gun laws in a deal with the Shooters and Fishers Party. They were looking to enshrine a right to hunt, to open crown lands to hunting and shooting, and to legalise the ownership of silencers and suppressors. They've obviously dropped all of that kind of legislation and now committed to much more restrictive gun laws. But it just shows you that over time, state governments have become complacent about Australia's gun laws and that there are always elements of the gun lobby who have been trying to weaken them over decades.
- [09:01]
B
And on this issue of how many guns were allowed to have all the limits, could you tell us in some states how many guns we can actually own and what's the maximum?
- [09:13]
C
Yeah, so in Western Australia, they had a cap of 5 for most gun owners and that could increase up to 10 guns. In New South Wales, I think the cap of four, for example, applies across the board. But currently WA and New South Wales are the only states that have caps on the number of guns an individual can own. So all the other states and territories really have no limits. And we know from the data that we looked into from various police forces across Australia that there are a number of people who own huge numbers of guns. And it's not necessarily, you know, farmers who are using them to control pest animals on their properties. For example, we know a large number of guns are held in city and metropolitan areas. And in New South Wales, for example, there are close to 100 people who own over 100 guns each, many of them in the city. And obviously, when it comes to the Bondi perpetrators, they had six guns, lived in the city. And there's a lot of people in the Australian public saying, you know, why do you need that many guns?
- [10:24]
B
Ebony, you mentioned the National Register and there's been calls for this since Port Arthur. Why do we need one?
- [10:31]
C
Obviously, it's really important for law enforcement to know things like who has a gun at a property or if there are guns at a property. But it's also important for the Australian public. When the Australia Institute tried to find out how many guns there were legally owned in Australia, it was actually really difficult to find that information. It's not publicly available. Some states and territories really had difficulty locating that information. It wasn't easily accessible. The Northern Territory just didn't respond at all to our requests for that kind of information. So it's, I think, really important for the public to know not, you know, the personal home address of every gun owner. Obviously, that's only for law enforcement. But just knowing in general how many guns there are in the community and roughly where they are, are they in your suburb? I think, you know, should be publicly accessible information for Australians.
- [11:25]
B
So, Ebony, on that point, what is it that you found out about the numbers and how did they end up increasing after the buyback scheme in the 90s?
- [11:35]
C
Yeah, so obviously the number of guns in the community has dramatically increased. It's now hovering around 4 million legally owned guns in Australia. And we've also found that a huge number of guns, legally owned guns, are stolen every year. When we looked at the number of guns that had been stolen over time, it equated to roughly one every four hours. And law enforcement has said that the theft of legally owned firearms is the biggest single source of illegal guns in the community. And we know that police, I think, only recover around a third of those stolen weapons.
- [12:16]
B
So, Ebony, John Howard was able to pretty easily change Australia's gun laws and was celebrated for it ever since. But how's the debate changed to the point where getting both sides of politics to agree on stricter gun Control seems almost impossible.
- [12:33]
C
Yeah, I was just really saddened to see John Howard come out in the wake of the Bondi massacre and call gun law reform a distraction. Obviously, gun law reform can't stop hate. It can't stop anti Semitism, but it can stop the kind of hate that we saw in Bondi from turning into the horror that we saw in Bondi. And I think John Howard's intervention here, to label it gun law reform, just a distraction, really shows that the coalition is really willing to trash its political legacy on gun law reform in the interests of politicising this issue and making life more difficult for the labor government. Obviously, there are big parts of the nationals constituency, rural people, farmers, who do want access to guns. And increasingly, in recent years, we've seen the nationals really as the tail that's wagging the coalition dog. Thankfully, Australia does not kind of fetishise gun ownership in the way that we've seen in the United States, for example. But it's really clear the kind of rhetoric employed by the NRA and the gun lobby enters the Australian political debate all the time and more and more frequently. It's only a few years since we saw Pauline Hanson's One Nation, for example, caught on tape trying to solicit tens of millions of dollars of donations from the NRA in exchange for weakening Australia's gu. But the Australian public really overwhelmingly supports stricter gun laws, and it's widely considered, I think, the biggest and most positive legacy of the Howard government. So it's really sad to see them abandon that for what looks like pure electoral politics.
- [14:35]
B
Ebony, thanks for speaking with us on 7am thank you.
- [14:50]
A
I'm Daniel James. Thanks for listening. 7am will be back tomorrow with a new episode where I interview Antoinette Latouf on taking on the ABC and why audiences are losing faith in mainstream media.
- [15:03]
E
This is across institutions. It's not just the media. There's a real trust deficit. There's very low, historic low levels of trust in government, historic low levels of trust in business, but also in the media. I think it's because it's been so plain to see, particularly in the past two and a half years, the sorts of lines and rhetoric that we're being fed by legacy institutions and even our politicians, where we're like, hey, are you trying to gaslight us in real time?
- [15:28]
A
That'll be in your feed tomorrow. See you then,
- [15:33]
C
Sam.