Professor David Flint has put his finger on an uncomfortable question about the political response to the Bondi Beach terrorist massacre. Why has so much attention been directed towards guns when the defining feature of the atrocity was not simply the weapon used, but the antisemitic extremist ideology of those allegedly responsible?
The Albanese federal government and Minns government in New South Wales have responded with what Flint describes as Australia's largest gun buyback in decades. The political attraction is obvious. Guns are physical objects. Governments can count them, regulate them, confiscate them and eventually stand before television cameras announcing how many have been removed from circulation. Ideology is much harder. Confronting Islamist extremism, antisemitism and failures of integration raises questions about immigration, policing, intelligence, religious radicalisation and multiculturalism that governments would much rather avoid.
This is the heart of Flint's argument. The Bondi atrocity did not occur because Australia previously lacked gun laws. Australia already has some of the Western world's most restrictive firearms legislation. Nor does passing another firearms measure explain why terrorists develop sufficient hatred of Jews to murder them.
A gun can make a terrorist more lethal, certainly, and reasonable firearms regulation has a legitimate place in public safety. But removing one instrument does not remove the motivation to kill. Terrorists have used vehicles, knives, bombs, aircraft and improvised weapons, and illegal guns as Sweden shows. A policy response concentrated overwhelmingly upon the instrument therefore risks confusing means with cause.
That distinction becomes particularly important if law-abiding firearms owners bear much of the cost. Someone who has spent decades complying with licensing requirements, secure-storage laws and police checks did not create antisemitism. Taking another firearm from such a person may produce a useful statistic for a ministerial press conference, but it does nothing by itself to persuade a radical Islamist that Jews are entitled to live peacefully in Australia.
Flint's accusation goes further. He argues that governments tolerated an increasingly poisonous political atmosphere after the October 7 Hamas attack, including antisemitic demonstrations and intimidation, while failing adequately to use powers already available to authorities. Whether every element of that indictment ultimately survives scrutiny is precisely the sort of question that deserves serious investigation. But the general policy question cannot simply be wished away: were authorities lacking powers, or were they unwilling or unable to use the powers they already possessed?
If the second answer is even partly correct, another round of legislation is an extraordinarily convenient response. It transforms a failure of administration into an alleged failure of law.
This is one of government's oldest political tricks. When something terrible happens, announce a new law. The announcement creates the appearance of action while directing attention away from whether existing institutions failed. Nobody needs to explain why warning signs were missed if the discussion can instead become an argument over the legislation supposedly needed to prevent the next tragedy.
The same problem applies to terrorism more generally. Counter-terrorism begins long before somebody acquires a weapon. It involves intelligence collection, monitoring extremist organisations, disrupting financing, prosecuting genuine incitement and threats, securing vulnerable communities, controlling borders and taking seriously ideological movements that openly celebrate political violence.
It also requires governments to distinguish ordinary Muslims, who should not be collectively blamed for terrorism, from Islamist ideology. Refusing to make that distinction does Muslims no favour. It instead produces the absurd choice between pretending ideology has nothing to do with terrorism and treating an entire religious population as suspect. A serious government should be capable of identifying extremist doctrines and organisations without declaring millions of peaceful people responsible for them.
The same principle applies to antisemitism. If Jewish Australians require guards around schools, synagogues and public celebrations because credible threats exist, the central public-policy problem is the existence of people willing to threaten them. The security arrangements are responses to the danger. They are not its cause.
That is why the gun debate can become such a useful distraction. Guns permit politicians to discuss something tangible while avoiding the question of why Jews in Australia increasingly require extraordinary security in the first place.
There is another political advantage. Gun owners constitute a relatively easy target. They are identifiable, licensed and overwhelmingly compliant with government regulation. Authorities know where many of their firearms are because owners themselves registered them. Dealing with them is administratively straightforward compared with penetrating extremist networks, confronting radical preachers or acknowledging that immigration and integration policies may have imported or incubated ideological conflicts Australia once experienced largely from afar.
The compliant citizen consequently becomes the easiest person to regulate precisely because he is compliant.
This does not prove that every element of a gun buyback is worthless. If authorities identify categories of weapons presenting an unreasonable public risk, there is a legitimate debate to be had about them. But that debate should stand on its own merits. Bondi should not become a rhetorical blank cheque for firearms restrictions that would have made little difference to the ideological environment from which the attack emerged.
Nor should Australians accept the proposition that every tragedy demonstrates that government lacked sufficient power. Sometimes government possesses ample power and fails to exercise it intelligently. Sometimes intelligence fails. Sometimes police decisions prove mistaken. Sometimes political sensitivities discourage authorities from confronting a developing problem. And sometimes governments respond afterwards by demanding still more authority.
That possibility makes the proposed response especially important to scrutinise. If the principal lesson drawn from an antisemitic terrorist massacre is that licensed Australian gun owners must surrender more firearms, something has gone badly wrong with the diagnosis.
Flint's argument ultimately forces the debate back to the question politicians would prefer not to answer. What caused Bondi?
If the answer involves radicalisation, Islamist extremism, antisemitism, failures of policing, inadequate protection of threatened Jewish Australians or failures in immigration and integration policy, those matters should be investigated directly. If existing laws were inadequate, identify precisely where they failed and change them. If officials failed to use adequate laws already available, identify that failure and establish accountability.
But do not substitute the collection of firearms from people who obeyed the law for confronting people who despise the society and fellow citizens around them. A government can buy back a gun. It cannot buy back its way out of confronting terrorism, and the failure of multiculturalism. Socialist governments, that have plagued Australia have always sought to ban guns first, deal with the real problems, not at all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/labors-distraction/
Inform One Nation and independents about a possible constitutional challenge to the gun confiscation law; see here:
https://blog.alor.org/a-constitutional-challenge-to-the-new-gun-laws-by-ian-wilson-ll-b