Professor David Flint has put his finger on one of the more cynical features of Australian politics after the Bondi Beach massacre. Faced with an antisemitic terrorist atrocity, the Albanese government rapidly discovered that one of the people requiring political attention was the Australian licensed gun owner. It was an extraordinary displacement of emphasis.
The Bondi attack on December 14, 2025 was an antisemitic terrorist attack in which 15 innocent people were murdered. The Commonwealth itself subsequently described it as ISIS-inspired. Yet within five days of the massacre, the Albanese government had announced what it called the largest national gun buyback since John Howard's response to Port Arthur. The government proposed restrictions on the number and types of firearms that individuals could possess, tighter licensing rules and a national scheme for purchasing surplus and newly prohibited firearms.
Flint's complaint is essentially that the government reached for a familiar ideological lever. There had been a terrorist atrocity, but suddenly the political conversation included farmers, sporting shooters and other licensed firearm owners who had nothing whatever to do with it. The distinction matters because Port Arthur was a mass shooting committed by a lone gunman whose possession and use of firearms went directly to the policy response that followed, whereas Bondi involved ideological terrorism directed against Jews.
Guns were the instruments of the attack, but an instrument and a motivation are not the same thing. If terrorists drive a truck into a crowd, the existence of the truck does not explain the terrorism. If they use knives, the knife does not supply the ideology. When terrorists use firearms, therefore, one can legitimately examine firearm regulation without pretending that regulation exhausts the explanation of what happened.
That qualification is important because Bondi did expose a genuine firearms-system failure. Sajid Akram possessed a firearms licence and six guns, and that fact plainly deserves investigation. The crucial question, however, is not simply how many guns existed in his house, but how a man who had come to the attention of security authorities ended up being permitted to possess them. That question has become considerably more uncomfortable for the authorities.
Akram reportedly applied for his NSW firearms licence in June 2020, not long after he and his son had been interviewed by ASIO in connection with concerns about Islamic extremism. The licence was eventually issued in July 2023. Authorities had attributed the extraordinary three-year processing period partly to a backlog, but documents subsequently reported by The Australian indicate that the relevant backlog had been cleared well before the licence was approved. NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley has now conceded that the backlog was only part of the explanation for the delay.
That should turn the policy discussion in a rather different direction. The question is not merely, "How many guns should Australians be allowed to own?" It is, "Why was this particular person permitted to own them?" That is a question about intelligence, information sharing, licensing administration and risk assessment. Indeed, National Cabinet has now agreed to improve criminal-intelligence sharing between Commonwealth and state agencies precisely because such gaps matter.
Imagine the absurdity of responding to a failure of aviation security by imposing new restrictions upon every licensed pilot without first establishing why the particular individual who presented a known security concern got through the system. Yet with firearms the political reflex is different. Because guns already occupy a special place in progressive politics, a terrorist attack involving firearms becomes an opportunity to revisit firearm ownership generally.
The Albanese government's own announcement leaves little doubt about how quickly that connection was made. On December 19 it declared that the Bondi attack demonstrated the need to "finish the job" begun after Port Arthur. The government pointed to the fact that there are now more than four million firearms in Australia and specifically objected to the fact that one terrorist's household contained six guns. But four million firearms did not commit the Bondi massacre, and neither did Australia's licensed shooters, farmers, sporting shooters or collectors. A terrorist did.
The distinction between possessing a firearm and presenting a danger is fundamental to rational policy. Ten rifles locked in the safe of a farmer who has held a licence responsibly for thirty years may pose less danger to the public than one firearm in the possession of an extremist. Counting objects is easy; identifying dangerous people is harder. Government naturally gravitates toward the first when it has failed at the second.
New South Wales nevertheless imposed some of the toughest firearms restrictions in the country. Licence terms were reduced from five years to two, caps were placed upon the number of firearms individuals could possess, with limited exemptions, some firearm categories were reclassified, background checks were strengthened, and the federal and NSW governments have now agreed upon a buyback beginning on November 2. The Commonwealth and NSW will share the costs equally.
The government calls this community safety, while critics see collective punishment. The latter description has considerable force where restrictions fall upon people whose conduct bears no causal connection to the event invoked to justify them. A licensed farmer does not become more dangerous because an Islamist terrorist committed murder at Bondi, and a sporting shooter does not become more dangerous because intelligence and firearms-licensing systems failed to communicate effectively. If a particular class of firearm presents an independently demonstrated public danger, governments should make that case on its merits rather than smuggling it into legislation beneath the emotional weight of a massacre.
There is also something revealing about the language of numbers. Prime Minister Albanese declared that there was "no reason someone living in the suburbs of Sydney needed this many guns". But since when did "need" become the ordinary test of lawful possession? Australians possess innumerable things they do not strictly need. Governments normally require a reason to prohibit lawful property rather than requiring citizens to prove to government why they need it.
Firearms are appropriately subject to much stricter regulation than most ordinary possessions because they are inherently dangerous, but even here the relevant questions should be risk, fitness and lawful purpose, not whether a politician regards the number six as aesthetically excessive. A person can possess twenty firearms and use none criminally; another can possess one and murder someone with it. The number may sometimes be relevant to risk, but it cannot substitute for assessment of the person possessing them.
This is why the resistance from several states matters. The proposed national buyback has not swept effortlessly across Australia. Queensland and the Northern Territory continue to reject participation, while other jurisdictions have resisted elements of the Commonwealth approach. National Cabinet has nevertheless agreed on narrower reforms including stronger intelligence sharing and restrictions relating to 3D-printed firearms.
That distinction provides a useful test of what sensible reform might look like. Better intelligence sharing directly addresses an apparent vulnerability exposed by Bondi. Ensuring that relevant security information reaches the authorities deciding whether somebody should receive or retain a firearms licence is an obvious reform. Effective national records may likewise make it harder for unsuitable people to exploit jurisdictional gaps, while controls on genuinely novel technologies capable of circumventing existing firearms regulation can at least be debated on their own merits. Taking firearms from compliant owners because a terrorist used firearms is a different proposition.
Senator Bridget McKenzie and the Nationals have now introduced legislation seeking to repeal the federal measures and abolish the national buyback. Their argument is straightforward: almost one million licensed firearm owners should not be blamed for a terrorist atrocity they did not commit. Whatever one thinks of every detail of the Nationals' position, that principle deserves to be taken seriously.
There is a larger political pattern here that Flint is right to identify. Governments rarely allow a crisis to remain confined to the precise failure that produced it. A crisis supplies urgency, emotional momentum and temporarily lowered public resistance to measures that would be much harder to enact during ordinary times. The question citizens should therefore ask after every emergency is brutally simple: would the government have wanted this policy anyway? If the answer is yes, then scrutiny should increase rather than disappear.
That does not mean the government secretly welcomed the atrocity or that every firearm reform is illegitimate; such claims would go far beyond the evidence. It means that governments possess pre-existing ideological preferences, and crises provide opportunities to advance them. Australian Labor has long occupied the more restrictive side of firearms politics. Bondi supplied an exceptionally powerful political moment in which further restrictions could be presented as an immediate response to national trauma.
The timing speaks for itself. The massacre occurred on December 14, National Cabinet agreed the following day that gun laws should be strengthened, and four days after the attack the Commonwealth announced the biggest national buyback since 1996. Perhaps every proposed measure was independently necessary, but if so, the government should demonstrate it.
Show how restricting the firearms of existing compliant owners would have prevented Bondi. Show why the appropriate limit is four, six or ten, and demonstrate the marginal public-safety benefit produced by forcing a particular licensed owner to surrender firearm number eleven while allowing him to retain firearm number ten. Explain why shortening licence periods will identify dangerous extremists if the intelligence necessary to identify them does not reach the licensing authority. Above all, explain exactly what happened to Sajid Akram's licence application between 2020 and 2023.
That last question becomes more important with every new revelation. If administrative and intelligence failures allowed a person who warranted additional scrutiny to acquire firearms legally, then punishing people who passed through the system properly is not merely unfair. It risks distracting attention from the failure that actually matters. The lesson of Bondi should surely be that dangerous people must be kept away from guns, not that lawful gun owners should be treated as dangerous people. There is an enormous difference.
Professor Flint is therefore right to put the safety catch on the government's political response. Australia already regulates firearms heavily, and nobody seriously proposes abandoning appropriate licensing, storage requirements, background checks or restrictions upon particularly dangerous weapons. The question is whether every atrocity involving a firearm should become another ratchet by which lawful ownership is progressively reduced.
Bondi deserves something better than that. Fifteen people were murdered in an antisemitic terrorist attack, and the proper response is to identify the ideology that motivated the killers, determine every institutional failure that allowed the attack to occur, repair the intelligence and licensing systems that failed, and prosecute or disrupt extremists before they can act. If independent evidence shows that particular firearm laws also require reform, reform them. But do not use the murderer as the excuse and the innocent owner as the target. That is not confronting the cause of Bondi; it is changing the subject.