Australian parliament backs sweeping gun buyback and tighter licence laws after Bondi shooting

Australia’s parliament on Tuesday voted for a national gun buyback programme and tougher checks for gun licences in the wake of the deadly Bondi beach shooting.

The scheme is likely to sail through the Senate with the support of the Greens party.

Fifteen people were killed and dozens wounded on 14 December after two gunmen opened fire at a Jewish festival on Bondi Beach in Sydney.

The buyback scheme was intended to target “surplus and newly restricted firearms”, home affairs minister Tony Burke said.

He claimed the Bondi attackers wouldn’t have been able to legally buy guns if such a law had been in place before the shooting.

“A critical question I’ve often been asked during this debate is, if this national reform package had already been in place, how many firearms would the Bondi gunmen have held? Would it be six? Would it be five? Would it be four? The answer is zero,” Mr Burke said.

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The new gun buyback scheme is the largest since a similar programme was instituted following the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, where a lone gunman killed 35 people.

The legislation passed by a vote of 96 to 45 in the House of Representatives, the lower house. It was opposed by the conservative opposition coalition of Liberal and National parties. “This bill reveals the contempt the government has for the million gun owners of Australia,” said shadow attorney general Andrew Wallace. “The prime minister has failed to recognise that guns are tools of trade for so many Australians.”

The Anthony Albanese government revealed on Sunday that there were a record 4.1 million firearms in Australia last year. Some 1.1 million were registered in New South Wales, the most populous state and the site of the Bondi attack.

The Bondi attackers held a firearm licence and owned six guns.

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The new scheme allows the government to purchase surplus, newly banned and illegal firearms, with costs shared equally with states. The government expects that hundreds of thousands of weapons will be collected and destroyed.

The cabinet has also agreed to a series of new controls, including limits on the number of firearms an individual can own, tighter restrictions on open-ended firearms licences, clearer limits on the types of guns that are legal, and a requirement that licence holders be Australian citizens.

Alongside gun control, the Australian parliament debated separate legislation that would lower the threshold for prosecuting hate speech offences.