Tuesday, 11 August 2026

 Renee HEATH (Eastern Victoria) (21:28): I rise to speak on the Firearms Amendment Bill 2026, and I am going to start by saying I am extremely thankful that we live in Australia. In my lifetime we have lived through an incredible arc of history, one that has been incredibly safe, peaceful and prosperous. I love the state of Victoria and the nation of Australia. It is a place that has long been known for the peace we enjoy, for the social cohesion and also for the fact that Australia has been a safe haven for many people that have escaped all types of terror. We are a nation with an Indigenous heritage where the spirit is connected to the land, a connection that runs deep and long; a British foundation where the rule of law is applied evenly to everybody, regardless of their background; and a nation with a multicultural character. It is this character that is the reason that we have been held up as a model and praised as the most successful multicultural nation on earth. It is this reality, though, that is under threat at the moment, and that is why we are here debating this legislation today.

The events that led us to this point prove more than ever that guns need to be kept out of the hands of criminals and terrorists, and we will support reform that does that. In America we see from time to time some mass shootings, and they spark debate about gun reform. It is always a divisive argument where the left and the right both come out swinging, and every time that happens I am extremely thankful that that is not our story. The reason that guns are not readily available here, however, is one that is born of tragedy – a tragedy that has been etched in our collective memory. I will read what happened from the National Museum of Australia’s website. It says:

On 28 April 1996, 35 people were killed and many more injured in a mass shooting at the historic Port Arthur tourist precinct in south-east Tasmania.

Armed with three high-powered firearms, the perpetrator murdered the owners of a nearby guesthouse before driving to Port Arthur where he shot multiple visitors and staff in and around the site. The young Hobart man later murdered a hostage at the guesthouse, before he was captured by police as he fled the building.

The massacre provoked national debate about private ownership of guns, especially automatic weapons.

Within weeks of the tragedy, Australian Prime Minister John Howard implemented critical changes to gun safety legislation with bipartisan state, territory and Commonwealth support. The endorsement offered by Coalition partner and Nationals leader Tim Fischer, and Labor’s Kim Beazley, leader of the Opposition, was crucial to achieving the reforms.

In November 1996 the perpetrator was sentenced to imprisonment with no eligibility for parole on 73 charges, including 35 life sentences for murder.

In the wake of this event the decisive action that was taken and the incredible leadership shown by Prime Minister John Howard in my opinion have made Australia one of the safest places on earth, one where parents can send their kids to school knowing that there are not going to be shootings taking place. I understand and acknowledge that many people at the time had and even now have various opinions, but personally I feel quite certain that the action that we took together as a nation was in fact the correct one. I believe as well that it struck the right balance. Recreational shooters have been able to continue their sport and farmers have been able to continue going about their work, and until 14 December 2025 there were no mass shootings.

However, 14 December 2025 was I believe one of the most shameful days in our national story. If we look at this through the lens of gun laws alone, we completely miss the point. It prompted a rapid review led by Ken Lay into firearms, aimed at supporting the national approach and bringing Victoria’s firearm laws up to date with the risks of today. It highlighted much more than that, though, and we cannot talk about one issue without reflecting on the other. The events of that day took place because antisemitism was allowed to fester until it resulted in a terrorist attack that saw 15 innocent lives killed and 41 people injured at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach. Every single one of those lives mattered. One story, however, that kept coming back to my mind was the story of Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman, who was murdered that day in Bondi. I am going to read a little bit of his story because this is the backdrop to what we are debating here today. This is an article from the Guardian from about seven months ago. It says:

On the 75th anniversary of the Holocaust, Alex Kleytman took to social media to remember his mother, who was a prisoner of the Pechora camp in Ukraine when she was just 16 years old.

“The purpose of this camp was not to kill, but to make people die of hunger and hard labor,” he wrote in January 2020. “She managed to survive. Her memories can be heard in Yad Vashem [the Holocaust memorial in Israel].”

Kleytman, too, survived the Holocaust, going on to have two children and 11 grandchildren, settling in Sydney and always tightly preserving his Jewish heritage.

“Each year,” he wrote, “there is fewer of those who were released from the camps [who remain alive].

“Against the backdrop of love and memory, more and more photos and messages about desecrated cemeteries, painted swastikas on the walls of synagogues and attacks on synagogues appear.

He said this:

We must be strong and be able to stand for ourselves … not to forget about those Jews who fought back the enemy in the distant years of the WWII.

This man is an incredible man. He was born in 1938 in the Ukrainian city of Odessa. Two years after the war broke out he then fled and went on the most amazing journey to Siberia with other evacuees, finally reaching a Russian city. They later moved after the war, as their home in Odessa had been bombed.

Two decades later, his family applied for emigration to Israel but were rejected, and the family fell into the ranks of “refuseniks”, an unofficial term for Soviet Jews who were unable to leave the bloc, and were badly mistreated.

Their second attempt at emigration, however, was successful, and the family landed in Sydney in 1992. Soon after, he began working for a large construction company, where he remained for 20 years. This man, after surviving the Holocaust, after surviving all the horrors that it meant to be Jewish during World War II, was still not free. He lived as a second-class citizen in the Soviet Union for two decades under a Soviet bloc, unable to leave. He was not allowed to leave for Israel, not because of their rules but because of the Soviet rules.

Still, there was that dream of freedom. He applied to emigrate again and he finally succeeded, and he moved to Australia. For almost three decades he lived here as a free man. He had a beautiful family, and he could finally celebrate his traditions. But this is the part that we must remember: after living through so much, surely he would have felt like he could finally relax; however, after surviving the Holocaust, after surviving Hitler and after surviving Stalin, he was murdered here on our shores by the same hate and the same antisemitism that he had tried most of his life to escape. Australia has been one of the most successful multicultural nations on earth, but this story here proves just how fragile that is. It is important to set the scene of this, because this is the backdrop of this legislation.

As we take on this topic I want to state clearly my true belief: any attempt to somehow bundle lawful, law-abiding gun users – people that use guns for recreational shooting, for hunting, for farming, for any sort of pest management – in with the reason that this legislation is coming before the house today would be to ignore the real issue that has nothing to do with lawful gun users but has everything to do with violent extremism. There is a pattern that is shown by those who perpetrate terror-related violence: that these extremists will use absolutely anything as a fatal weapon. I think that it is important to raise this to put into perspective exactly what we are talking about today.

On September 11 in 2001, when al-Qaeda attacked America, it was a plane that was their fatal weapon of choice. The attack killed just shy of 3000 people, thousands were injured and the world changed forever. On 20 January in 2017 there was a terrorist attack just outside here on Bourke Street which led to the death of six people and 37 being hospitalised. In that attack it was a car used as a fatal weapon. In 2018, in the event that is now known as the Melbourne stabbing attack, a young man that was inspired by the Islamic State killed one person and injured two, using a knife as his weapon of choice. The same type of weapon – a knife – was also used in the Wakeley church stabbings in 2024, also motivated by religious extremism. In 2024 the Adass synagogue was targeted with an arson attack. We have since found out that, horrifically, that was a state-sponsored attack that happened here on our shores in Melbourne. There is a pattern of terror-related violence from the past that shows us that extremists will use anything they can get their hands on as fatal weapons: cars, planes, suicide vests, bombs, buses, knives or guns – you name it.

While I believe that it is vitally important to debate the Firearms Amendment Bill, I will also point out that the Bondi attacks happened in a nation with some of the strongest gun controls in the world, and I would caution us against using guns as a scapegoat and ignoring what actually happened in its full context. Guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are safe. Guns in the hands of terrorists and criminals are not. It is that simple. The driver of this event was hateful antisemitism, and that cannot be erased. I do not mind if people in here are completely pro gun or anti gun. We must have this debate. I am happy to stand here and debate it today. I am happy to stand here and champion the rights of recreational shooters, farmers and law-abiding gun owners. We cannot afford to muddy the waters by bundling in responsible, law-abiding citizens with what happened on that day, because they are two worlds apart.

What happened on 14 December last year was just a tragedy of monumental proportions, and what made it even more painful was that for years the Jewish community saw it coming. They feared it, they warned of it and they were ignored – and all while they were being victim shamed. They lived to see their worst nightmares play out. In this debate I am not going to repeat that mistake and ignore those voices again, because what happened was the result of what happens when antisemitism is allowed to go on uninhibited.

This is where it all started. It started when terrorists had a coordinated attack inside Israel proper on 7 October, leading to the biggest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. Around 1200 people died, and 251 were taken hostage. We watched it happen in real time on live stream. These brutal attacks were online. They were so brutal, they were so graphic and they were so violent, yet it was the truth of what was happening. It included women with bloodied pants getting dragged into cars as they were taken hostage, and it included – and this is something that plays over in my mind – the head of a Thai tourist being hacked off with a garden hoe. That is how brutal it was, and that just plays over in my head. But what happened in the days following, and it was only days, was that censorship kicked in and these videos were taken down. I was not expecting to see what happened next, but what happened was that the truth of what we saw was replaced with a narrative, and it was beyond anything I had witnessed before.

Within a day we saw protesters in Sydney chanting ‘Gas the Jews’ and ‘Eff the Jews’. It was not ‘Gas the Israelis’ – that would have been bad enough – but ‘Gas the Jews’. It was the targeting of Australians here. We were being told on the one hand that this was about a foreign war, but on the other hand we were seeing Australians – people that were born and raised here – being targeted. Those are two narratives that there is no way you can possibly reconcile with each other. We heard women who had been raped being blamed in Australia. I saw the biggest explosion of Jew hatred that I have ever seen in my lifetime, and it just went relatively unchallenged. For years antisemitism was given a megaphone. In fact every Sunday the streets of Melbourne became a runway for this type of hate as antisemitism began to spread and became the latest craze. Jewish schools were vandalised, Jewish businesses were attacked, Jewish artists were doxed and synagogues were vandalised in protest – not Israelis, Jewish Australians. Every step of the way we witnessed these Jewish people being gaslit. Victim blaming became the norm.

All over the nation this was happening. Australian Jews, not Israelis, came under threat because antisemitism, the oldest hatred in the world, came out of remission. Political leaders became bystanders who were too afraid to stand up, and I believe this lack of political leadership turned the most successful multicultural nation on earth into a hotbed of hatred. Every cry for help from Jewish people was ignored until that day, on 14 December, when thousands of people gathered, families went to Bondi beach, one of our most iconic beaches, and to our collective shame terrorists turned up with the one goal, to kill Jews, and they succeeded 15 times. They were being hosted on one of Australia’s most iconic beaches. There were thousands of others there – surfers, swimmers, sunbakers, people having a party. You cannot get more Aussie than that, with people from all different walks of life in one place together. But not long after it started, these two terrorists, with the intention of killing Jews, started firing shots.

The names of the people that were murdered that day include Matilda Bee Britvan, aged just 10 years old. I will read you what her dad said. He said:

We came here from the Ukraine … I named her Matilda because she was our firstborn in Australia. And I thought that Matilda was the most Australian name that could ever exist.

So just remember… remember her name.

They were Rabbi Eli Schlanger, Rabbi Yaakov Levitan, Dan Elkayam, Peter Meagher, Marika Pogany, Tibor Weitzen, Reuven Morrison, Boris Tetleroyd, Boris and Sofia Gurman, Adam Smyth, Tania Tretiak and the Holocaust survivor that I spoke about, Alex, who was murdered while shielding his wife from gunfire. That is one of the issues that needs to be addressed, and every single one of us must play our part in that and not just leave it to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. Every one of us has to take responsibility for that and stand up. These events caused the nation to stop and review. A nation-led response, causing every state to carry a responsibility, is what has brought us here.

Former police commissioner Ken Lay has done a power of work that forms this legislation, and this legislation here adopts 15 of the 16 recommendations. I am going to read out from the Ken Lay report some of the things and the reasons that were given. Now, this is unbelievable to me. This is under recommendation 8:

Victoria’s current firearms laws do not fully address all pathways through which firearms enter the illicit market, including theft, unlawful manufacture, and diversion or trafficking activities.

Isn’t that amazing? In Victoria guns have been largely illegally trafficked and have gotten into the wrong hands of people, of criminals and of terrorists. I just want to point out that that there is the issue, and I hope that nobody in here tries to muddy the waters and say that it is about law-abiding firearm holders. It states:

Victoria Police rely on fragmented internal systems and have limited real-time access to interstate intelligence, meaning decision-makers may not have a complete picture when assessing fitness to hold a licence.

Amazing stuff. Further, it states:

Current Victoria Police systems need updating to support a near-real-time national register and integration with state-based digital platforms.

I would love to read more of that, but I do not want to run out of time to go through our amendments.

This bill contains a number of elements. It imposes a citizenship requirement and a firearms background check; it amends the Firearms Amendment Act 2018; it makes amendments to the firearm prohibition order offences, including penalties for failing to notify the chief commissioner of change of address; it gives new powers to the chief commissioner to reclassify firearm categories for 12 months; it implements a national AusCheck system; it defines a new threshold for trafficable firearms; and it includes a new insert for the chief commissioner’s cancellation rights of a dealers licence. In the report you can read about the justifications for all of these. I am very happy that the one that was rejected was the one that puts a cap on firearms. That was one that they did put forward. It says within the report why essentially that is and that there are different types of firearms that might be used for different sorts of pest control and different situations in farms. It goes through all of these things. So I think that we have come to a good point.

I am just going to speak now to the Liberals and Nationals amendments to this bill. I am not sure if now is an appropriate time to have them circulated, but essentially what they do is this. The first one is around the readiness of the AusCheck system. This amendment is about delaying the commencement of part 7 until the Commonwealth arrangements, information-sharing agreements, IT systems, administrative processes and guidance materials are fully operational. It requires publication of costs, privacy protections and implementation arrangements before the commencement. What we want from this is to ensure that the firearm background checks scheme does not commence before the necessary systems are in place. We believe that putting that forward would be jumping the gun.

The next lot of amendments is around procedural fairness for firearms licence holders. The amendments remove the requirement for automatic cancellation of firearm licences following an adverse background check and replace it with a suspension process, including notice to the licence-holder and an opportunity to have a review and to provide the evidence. This would maintain public safety through suspension powers while ensuring the licence-holders are afforded procedural fairness before their licence is permanently cancelled. Procedural fairness for firearm dealers is really a similar reasoning. It removes the automatic cancellation of dealers’ licences and replaces it with a suspension process that includes notice and a time for them to respond, and review rights. This would provide them with the same procedural safeguards as individual licence-holders while preserving police powers to act when necessary in response to public safety.

The next amendment is around service standards and transparency. This amendment would require the Chief Commissioner of Police to establish service standards for firearm background checks, including targets and communication standards for applicants. It would require annual public reporting against those standards. What this would do is promote accountability, transparency and the timely processing of firearms background checks.

The next amendment is around an independent review of the scheme. It requires an independent review of the firearms background check regime after implementation. It will examine the effectiveness, public safety outcomes, cost, privacy impacts, resource implications and effects on licence-holders. What this aims to do is ensure that Parliament receives an evidence-based assessment of whether the reforms are working as intended and whether further legislative changes would be required in the future.

Overall the Liberals and Nationals package of amendments aims to retain the government’s firearm background-checking regime but introduce implementation safeguards, transparency measures, procedural fairness protections, service standards and independent oversight. In submitting these amendments, I commend the bill to the house.

 Jeff BOURMAN (Eastern Victoria) (21:54): It gives me no pleasure to be doing this. My lack of pleasure comes in two parts: (1) as a member of the Jewish community, albeit a peripheral member, and (2) as an almost lifelong shooter. I need to correct a few things from Dr Heath. 1996 was the first time we were betrayed by the Liberal and National coalition. I remember this clearly because ironically 28 April 1996 was when it happened and 29 April 1996 was when I started at the police academy. Law-abiding firearms owners were forced to hand in our guns, not all of them, that some of us had had for a lifetime – in my case probably 20-something years – when we had done nothing. In the end there could have been a justification for that if there was a demonstrable change in the rates of firearm deaths. I must also point out that firearms deaths on the Australian Institute of Criminology site include suicides. But if you look, since the mid to late 1980s there has been a consistent drop in firearms deaths in Australia. In 1997 there was a blip, because they were so low in general that an event of that magnitude could not not have an effect, but then they kept on going, hence why you have all this rubbish about firearms deaths having decreased since 1996; therefore the 1996 laws must have been good. If you look before 1996, the story changes. I just get a little – not cranky. I just feel it needs to be clear, because there seems to be this thing that 1996 magically fixed everything until December 2025, but in September 2014 there was another mass shooting. It was a result of a domestic incident in New South Wales where some coward killed his family and himself, but that was five people. We also had, as Dr Heath and I will agree on, the Bourke Street massacre or killings – whatever you want to call it – where a car was used. I do not believe I saw anyone calling for a change of registration requirements for cars, but I digress a little bit.

My issue with this legislation is that we do not really need it, in that in Australia and in Victoria we have a robust system, we have robust licensing and we have registration, which you can believe in or not. We have safe storage, which I do believe in. I believe in licensing, just for the record in case there is any clarity needed on that. None of these changes contained in this bill would fix what happened on 14 December 2025, because there was a failure of government. There was a failure of the federal government, there was a failure of the New South Wales government – somewhere in between, because no-one is giving us a clear picture. We can have all the royal commissions we like, but whilst everyone is busy butt-covering, we are not going to get the truth. But the facts remain. I do not use names of offenders. The younger offender came to the attention of ASIO twice, I do believe. He came to the attention of the Jewish community safety group once, and at no point in time apparently did anyone think, ‘There might be a firearms licence involved in this guy’s life. Let’s check.’

Back in the day there was a thing called CrimTrac, which was where us firearms owners had our data on the same system as criminals. Never the twain shall meet, but I do not want criminals having guns, so you can put up with this thing. But what happened to CrimTrac? What happened here could have been avoided if New South Wales police had known and had put a firearms prohibition order on the young bloke, and then his dad would not have been able to have his guns. Evil exists in the heart, not in the gun safe. Maybe they would have found another way, but we will never know.

It brings me to a few of the problems. One of the offenders was born here; citizenship requirements will not fix that. They only used three firearms; caps will not fix that. The firearms prohibition order I covered. Both the federal and New South Wales governments really wet the bed on this one. Eight days after the event the New South Wales Parliament had changed the laws, and they are still trying to figure out how to do it. How many months are we down the track? That is not how you should be doing legislation. I will be opposing this. There is the continuation of the firearms prohibition orders thing, which I do not really mind, but there is also a lot of stuff that we should not be subject to. I have amendments, and I would like them circulated.

Business interrupted pursuant to standing orders.

Lizzie BLANDTHORN: Pursuant to standing order 4.08, I declare that the sitting be extended by up to 1 hour.

Jeff BOURMAN: Actually some of my amendments are out of scope, and we will go through the appropriate thing for that. I will quickly just go through them. Someone wanting to try recreational handgun shooting can only do it at a club under supervision, and you must fill out what is called a notice of receiving instruction. It is called a NORI. The legislation where these were created way back when was, in my opinion, faulty in that these NORIs never expire. What you have is a situation such as I have had myself. For a while I had a recreational handgun licence. All was good. You needed to do some attendances before that and have a few of those NORIs chucked in to get your licence – all good. In the early part of my tenure here I struggled to make attendances; in fact it was basically getting towards COVID, and I decided I was not going to renew my licence. Moving forward, here I am again. Mind you, it was February when I put in my application, and I still have not heard much; that is a go at the funding of licensing and regulation, not a go at licensing and regulation. I run the risk of ending up with too many notices of receiving instruction. After the 13th one you become a prohibited person. My amendments effectively say that those NORIs should expire after five years. After five years, I think it is a fair bet. This has no implication on public safety. It is just fairness, because if you have a few instances where you cannot participate, you do the right thing and you either sell your guns or you give them to a dealer and your licence expires. But then when times change and you go back to get it, it is conceivable that you will not be able to do any training as required by the club. So that will fix that.

The part 4A amendments relating to approved handgun shooting clubs are actually a streamlining of administration. At the moment all handgun target clubs must report all attendances. We trust people enough to have these things at home. We trust these people enough to go to a range and use them. So what we are saying is the clubs – and they need to be audited of course – can report the people that do not comply instead of everyone. That is going to take a big chunk of business away from the licensing and regulation division, who can then go and do something else. Again, there is no public safety implication on this. It is in the club’s interest to make sure that they are on top of this, because if they are not, the club gets shut down. There have been clubs over the years that have done the wrong thing, and the police have dealt with them.

Now we get down to the other parts. This is number five on my sheet. I am not a fan of having only citizens being able to have lawful firearms. The reason I say this is I know for a fact there are police officers in Victoria Police that are not citizens of Australia for personal reasons. I am not going to go into them, but they need to be that way. We trust them to have firearms and to carry them around. We train them to shoot people, which is what the police have firearms for, in self defence. We trust them with this. In the end, when you think about it, we can trust someone enough to put them in the police, in the special operations group with actual machine guns, all the flashbangs, all the tactical stuff and all the whiz-bang stuff, but we are not going to give them a licence to go shooting rabbits on the weekend. That also goes to the Australian Defence Force. It is conceivable we can have someone in the SAS that does all sorts of stuff for this country but we will not give them a licence to go shooting rabbits or targets on the weekend. So my amendments to the citizenship stuff are basically to, first of all, either get rid of it or to align it with the police and military, because it is patently unfair and patently racist to say that we will take you as a police officer or in the ADF, but we are not going to give you a .22 or a .223 or whatever it might be – uh-uh.

Also, moving on – there are a few of these – the last two are just consequential stuff. But with AusCheck, AusCheck is going to cost up to about 500 bucks, give or take a bit. My intention is not to stop AusCheck. My intention is that the government absorb the cost for these checks. This should have been done decades ago. CrimTrac should have been joined properly decades ago. A stuff-up of the federal government’s and possibly the New South Wales government’s making should not become our costs. I am all for the checks. I do not want the wrong people having recreational firearms – I have always made that very, very clear. But if all of a sudden you chuck 500 bucks onto the end of a shooters licence fee, you are going to start to hurt most of the people that are of lower socio-economic status. They are making less; they have still got to pay the same. So I feel that this amendment is just bringing the spirit of egalitarianism back to this. Yes, if you are going to do it, do it. I have not got a problem with that. But if you are going to do it, I think the government should bear the costs of it. So on the whole of this, the Liberals’ and Nationals’ amendments look okay to me. It will be no surprise to anyone that I am not supporting the Greens’ stuff. I will allow – when I say ‘allow’, I mean I will not oppose it – their instruction motion, but I will get a fair amount of joy from opposing their actual amendments.

I do not recommend this bill to the house. It could have been done better. We law-abiding firearms owners, whether you are a hunter or a target shooter or whatever, should not have been subject to any changes. But I will also say on the whole of things, we did a damn sight better than New South Wales.

 Michael GALEA (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (22:07): I am also pleased to rise to speak on the Firearms Amendment Bill 2026, a bill which makes a raft of changes to our state’s firearms laws. As has been extensively discussed in the previous contributions, a major catalyst for these reforms were the horrific events in Bondi in Sydney late last year. I have already spoken repeatedly about that event in this place, and I will not seek to dwell too much on it other than to reflect, perhaps, on the words of the Prime Minister, who said at the time, in the aftermath, that the terrorists at Bondi Beach had hatred in their minds but guns in their hands. It was a very true and apt comment. And indeed, whilst there is a significant power of work that is being done in this jurisdiction and in other jurisdictions to combat that most insidious of hate – of racism and antisemitism – I will confine my remarks today to this bill, which deals with not so much the intent but the means: the gun in the hand, as it were.

Following that atrocity, this government commissioned former police commissioner Ken Lay to undertake a rapid review into our state’s firearm laws. It made a number of recommendations, the vast majority of which have been accepted by government. The government released the review and its response to the review in May of this year, so this bill is the coming to life of a number of the recommendations from that review as well as some other measures which were agreed to by all state and federal jurisdictions as part of the national cabinet process.

At the outset as well I do want to acknowledge that we know that the vast majority of firearm users in this state are decent, honest people who want to do the right thing. This bill is intended in no way to infringe upon their continued use of them, be it for work or be it for sport or recreation or other completely legitimate means. I acknowledge it is a popular sport, with one of the largest shooting ranges in Victoria in my electorate – in our electorate, Mr Limbrick, in the south-east. I acknowledge that this is not a bill that is targeted at those people. This is targeted at those who use guns unlawfully, and it makes sure that Victoria Police have the powers and the information that they need to respond effectively to those risks.

It does do a number of things, and one of the most consequential reforms in this bill before us today is the introduction of the Commonwealth firearms background check requirement. This will operate through the Commonwealth AusCheck scheme, and once these provisions are in effect a background check through AusCheck will be required for all new firearms licence applicants. Existing licence-holders will also be required to undergo the check when their licence is next reviewed. This of course will allow that intelligence from organisations like ASIO and similar – that national intelligence information – to be considered as part of the firearms licensing process. It allows a check to be initiated outside the normal relicensing cycle as well if new information becomes available which suggests that a person may present a security or organised crime risk.

It is really important that Victoria Police should have access to this most critical information in a timely fashion, considering the dangers that can occur when those checks and balances are not applied, as we saw so tragically in New South Wales last year. These changes will commence in the future once the necessary Commonwealth arrangements are in place and Victoria Police has progressed work on its upgraded firearms licensing system – an upgrade for which this government has invested many millions of dollars. There is also a new citizenship requirement for firearms licensing, as has been discussed by Mr Bourman, and under these changes firearms licences will generally be available to Australian citizens and also New Zealand citizens who are permanent residents of Australia. The purpose of the citizenship requirement is to improve the reliability of information that is available when a firearms licence application is being considered.

I want to take this opportunity to address some of the concerns raised by Mr Bourman, acknowledging that this has been the subject and focus of much debate in the shooting community, who I understand are broadly supportive of many of the other reforms in this bill. But it is important that I take a moment to address this. Firstly, having just spoken about the importance of that Commonwealth-level national security data and intelligence in assessing firearms applications, it is important that we are able to hold such a stringent test equally for all applicants. As it stands, relying on external advice from other countries, which there may not even be strong security relationships with, degrades the level of trust that we can have that every person who does go for a firearms licence the government should be satisfied does meet a very high and very stringent threshold, and when you are dealing with security from other countries you simply do not have the access to the same amount of information. It is imperative that Victoria Police have the most accurate and thorough information possible.

I segue into my next point, which is that there are of course work and other exemption permits. This is an important exemption and will indeed apply to those who may not hold Australian citizenship but may, for example, be police officers. There will be exemptions in place which will allow them to continue to work as they otherwise would. This is an important exemption because there are people, particularly in our regional communities – it is not just police, it is also primary industries – who do need access to firearms as part of their work, and this is a bill that recognises that. It also enables other groups of people to be allowed through regulations where appropriate.

There are changes to the firearm prohibition orders as well, and this is an important reform that this Labor government brought in, in 2018, in the previous parliamentary term. They were introduced to give Victoria Police stronger powers to prevent serious and organised criminals and other people considered unsuitable from accessing firearms. A person who is subject to an FPO is prohibited from acquiring, possessing, carrying or using firearms and firearm-related items. This scheme also gives police important powers to make sure that those orders can be enforced. Since the scheme was introduced Victoria Police has issued 2767 FPOs and there have been slightly under 2000 charges laid relating to breaches of FPOs. I think these figures show what an important measure this scheme is, and it is for that reason that this bill seeks to continue that program. Under the existing legislation the FPO scheme is due to sunset in May 2028. This bill will remove those sunset provisions, meaning that the FPO scheme will remain permanently in Victorian law. Given the frequency of its use by Victoria Police and the demonstrated effectiveness of it, it is appropriate that we do keep this in place, and this bill will do that. It also increases the maximum penalties applying to five offences relating to FPOs, so if someone has been prohibited from possessing a firearm and then chooses to ignore that prohibition, that is a serious matter that is dealt with through the charges increased under this bill.

There are also changes to offences related to firearms trafficking, with the introduction of graduated offences and penalties for the unlawful possession, acquisition and disposal of trafficable or large traceable quantities of firearms. The penalties will increase depending on the number of firearms involved. This means that more serious offending involving larger quantities of firearms can attract a stronger penalty. Under these reforms the most serious offending can attract imprisonment of up to 15 years.

Indeed, as we are seeing rapidly evolving technologies, and with firearms and other weapons of war from conflicts overseas, it is also appropriate that we update and amend the legislation to ensure that we are capturing emerging technologies insofar as they relate to firearms. This bill will expand the Chief Commissioner of Police’s power to temporarily recategorise firearms, allowing them to respond when a particular new type of firearm or even a new type of modification to an existing firearm becomes a new or emerging risk. This temporary reclassification will be able to apply for a period of up to 12 months and expands the regulation-making powers so that longer term changes can then be implemented as necessary and detailed and considered work can be done without delaying the immediate response that will be provided through these changes. This is a particularly important change as indeed we are seeing evolving technology, whether it be through drones, through 3D printing or through artificial intelligence, and it is entirely appropriate that we are fully equipping our police in a legislative manner to be quick and efficient when it comes to detecting and responding to emerging threats from firearms.

We do have strong laws in Victoria, as we do across the rest of the country, and I will note that, contrary to a previous speaker, it is a remarkable achievement of the political system in this country that we were able to come together and make significant firearm reforms in the late 1990s. Indeed I acknowledge a tremendous contribution by – this is probably the only time I will say this in this chamber – John Howard. He showed remarkable strength and courage to do that, given opposition from some on his own side. However, it was a remarkable reform which has been held up internationally as a source of inspiration for many others as well and as an example of successful firearms regulation. It is important, though, of course that all jurisdictions in Australia continue that work and that we do not rest on any laurels. We do see new and emerging patterns of offending in offender typologies, in technologies and in other forms as well. That is why keeping our legislation updated is so critical. Whilst many of the reforms in the bill today do stem directly from both the horrific Bondi attack and the Ken Lay review, it is also important to note that this is not simply about one incident. This is part of an evolving package of works considering, acknowledging and responding to evolving needs and the threats that our community faces and that Victoria Police faces in keeping us safe. With that I commend the bill to the house.

 Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (22:19): I am pleased to rise to speak on the Firearms Amendment Bill 2026 and, following on from my colleague Dr Heath, just reiterate that the Liberals and Nationals will not be opposing this bill. However, we will seek to amend and improve the bill before the house. The firearms bill implements a number of the recommendations that have arisen from the Ken Lay report and review, following on from the heinous terrorist attack on innocent Australian lives on Bondi Beach on 14 December last year.

The bill introduces citizenship requirements for firearm licences, it expands the powers regarding firearm classification and prohibition orders, and it seeks to implement the Commonwealth AusCheck firearm background checking framework into Victorian law. As I said, we have many comments to make on this. I do want to flag that I have a number of questions in the committee stage that I would like to interrogate on behalf of many of the stakeholders and individuals, from farmers to local residents, the Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia, the Australian Deer Association, Field & Game, and many people that have written to me, as well as me seeking their assessment, their views and their understanding on the implications of this bill.

Just reflecting, certainly etched into all of our psyches, I am sure, was that heinous crime committed on innocent Jewish Australian families in Bondi. As the footage emerged and we saw those just horrendous, horrific details coming through our screens, we saw acts of heroism from passers-by, from emergency responders, from people putting their bodies in front of small children. These are all heroes of many different nationalities, but certainly our Jewish families deserve our utmost respect and condolences as they try and heal their lives post this terrible crime.

Of course, like every Victorian, we want answers. We want answers to ensure that this does not happen again. Like every Victorian, we want stronger actions against the terrorists, and they were terrorists that did this to our community. Like every Australian, we want to ensure that those people that perpetrate these actions first of all come to justice but are also inhibited through stronger oversight, stronger targeting, stronger enforcement and stronger deterrence of trafficking and criminality. What we do not want – and we have said this from the outset – is to see punishment of those who do not deserve this punishment.

The Prime Minister I think was very weak in his response. He went for a kneejerk reaction of ‘First of all, let’s institute a buyback system, and by the way, the states can pay for it across the board. And also, let’s look at gun caps.’ That is something that we, the Nationals in particular but the Liberals and Nationals, have stood firmly on. We saw two guns in the hands of recalcitrant, vile, demonic people, and two guns was two guns too many. Ten to 20 guns for law-abiding citizens has no impact on community safety or threat or risk to community safety. We have listened and we have travelled and we have asked and we have engaged. We have sat down with farmers, sporting shooters and hunters, and we know the importance of getting this right. I do not believe that this bill is right, but I think we have to try and strike a balance. Having that feedback is really important. My colleague Senator Bridget McKenzie tabled a petition in the federal Parliament – over 70,000 signatures – saying no to overreach, no to caps. Indeed in this Parliament I did a short and sharp contribution on behalf of a Brunswick-living, duck-hunting and harvesting, Sri Lankan–born Australian – a fantastic gentleman who approached me. He harvests for his table. We presented a petition, which was really important, about balance and called for any implementation to be evidence based.

Now, this is the other term. When evidence came, we approached Ken Lay and I spoke with Ken Lay, as did Tim Bull, and brought various people in – farmers, pest controllers and hunters – to speak and for Ken Lay to hear this, and he promised evidence based. I have the utmost respect for Mr Lay; however, when we saw that report come through, one of his recommendations was with regard to caps on guns. It was not about protecting the community. In essence there was no evidence to say a gun cap would produce greater protection for community safety. In effect it almost said that there have been many different reviews on this, the jury is out and the repercussions or the outcome would be that we may actually save people from committing suicide – those people possessing guns. That was the only thing that really came through. Clearly, gun caps are not required. Thankfully, in either a moment of sanity or a moment of pressure from the Electrical Trades Union and other unions, then Premier Jacinta Allan decided not to put caps and to reject that particular recommendation. That is something that we stand with law-abiding firearm owners on and accept and appreciate.

In relation to what the bill does, very briefly, it continues the firearm prohibition order scheme, the FPO scheme, and expands categories for that framework. In talking with people, there was not a great deal of consternation, but I do have some questions in relation to that. A key change is in part 3 around categorisation of firearms. The bill allows regulations to reclassify them and the Chief Commissioner of Police to declare categories temporary or permanent. Some others made some comments around this, and I will have some questions in the committee stage.

In terms of firearms trafficking, there is a new definition of ‘traffickable’, from two to nine firearms – a ‘large traffickable quantity’ is over 10 firearms – and a new offence of possession of a large amount of a trafficable quantity, 15 years imprisonment, and there are other amendments. In relation to the firearm prohibition order offences, as I said, there is an increase to 15. So there is an increase in penalties, and in discussing that with various stakeholders they were not certainly not opposed to that.

There is the citizenship requirement in relation to being an Australian citizen, a New Zealand citizen with permanent residency or in a prescribed class, and we will go through that. I would like to make sure that there is some clarification about those classes to ensure that there is clarity. I have heard from various people, but I will not have time for that now, so I will do it in the committee stage.

In relation to background checks, that is where our amendments come in in force. I will go to those and go through them in detail. I thank our lead speaker Dr Heath for circulating them. Brad Battin, as our shadow minister in charge of this, highlighted this in his contribution, as did Danny O’Brien, the Leader of the Nationals. One of the key things on this relates to the operational readiness of AusCheck. AusCheck has been around for a long time – over 20 years – and indeed it was often used in its early years in relation to maritime safety and aviation safety. But actually around 2024–25 in the federal space – and this is a federal piece of legislation – it was updated to do firearm background checks. The issue we have is that we certainly support that background-checking regime, including against terrorism, against violent extremism and against organised crime. That should be the utmost aim of all of this, but what is happening is that the government has basically said the minister can bring it in at any time, into this Parliament, into law. However, the system is not up and operational in the federal space. So it is introducing and accepting legislation and regulation and the whole gamut when it actually does not exist in proper implementable form in the federal space. Our point of view is Parliament should not create a system that is operationally incomplete on day one. Good public policy requires it to be ready. We want to ensure that with AusCheck if it is worth doing, it is worth doing properly – after it is in proper existence in the federal space.

In terms of other amendments, there is cost transparency. Before a new major Commonwealth–state screening framework commences firearms licence holders should know what this costs. The bill introduces significant administrative impact, and we want to understand, on behalf of many of our stakeholders, what it costs. What are the operational costs? What is the impact on licence fees? I think Lucas Cooke, the former CEO of Field & Game, has done some research. It could add up to 500 additional dollars on top of a licence renewal, and that could be very preclusive for people either getting a new licence or getting a licence. We need to understand what it actually costs in the first place and have that transparency.

In terms of publishing service standards, the Liberals and the Nationals want to ensure that Victoria Police will publish processing targets, escalation pathways and procedures for dealing with delays and errors in these licensing decisions. I note very clearly: this is not about sensitive material, this is not about ASIO material, this is about Victoria Police publishing if it is expediting the process as efficiently as it can. We want to see the publishing of service standards.

We also want to make sure that the privacy and information management systems that will come into play are clarified for people. There will be additional information. It will come through. Simply, what our amendment does is ask the government to explain how information will be shared, how it will be stored, how it will be audited and what complaint mechanisms are available. Also, privacy and cyberspace are not peripheral issues. We need to make sure that we get across them. We want to ensure that that occurs. We want stronger information for sure, but we also want to ensure that there is accountability around that information.

It is also about procedural fairness. This is a really important one that I will go into in detail in the committee stage. The amendment protects public safety while ensuring administrative mistakes can be corrected. I will go into that; I do not have the time for that now. Finally, it is about an independent review of this system to ensure that there is a public safety outcome, that there are processing times, that the costs are not overburdensome, that there is privacy protection and that procedural fairness is in place.

We always will stand by our law-abiding firearm owners, whether they be farmers, pest controllers, clay target shooters or duck hunters. We also want to see duck hunting continue. I see the Minister for Environment is here. I put that on the record once again, and I will have more to say in the committee stage.

 Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (22:34): I rise this evening on behalf of the Greens to speak to the Firearms Amendment Bill 2026. The Greens will support this bill. There are necessary reforms here and they should pass, but the government has really not finished the job with this bill. This bill implements useful parts of Ken Lay’s Rapid Review of Victoria’s Firearms Laws while leaving out its most important recommendation – a limit on the number of firearms that one individual can own – and much of the review’s work remains to be done on another day.

The starting point for the Greens on this topic is straightforward, and it is a widely accepted one after the Port Arthur massacre: firearm ownership in Victoria and indeed Australia is not an unrestricted right, it is a privilege, and that privilege is regulated because firearms are lethal weapons – dangerous products that are flogged by the gun industry – and because public safety must come first. People’s right to be safe comes first. Possession and use of firearms are conditional privileges, and they are conditional on the need to ensure public safety and peace.

This bill does several things that the Greens welcome. It updates existing firearm categorisation procedures to account for higher risk firearms and accommodate emerging technologies and future firearms manufacturing developments. It installs a new citizenship requirement limiting licences to Australian citizens, New Zealand citizens with permanent residency and certain others. It institutes a Commonwealth firearms background check to leverage criminal intelligence in firearms licensing and prohibition decisions. It makes the firearm prohibition order scheme permanent rather than allowing it to sunset in 2028, it increases penalties for breaches of those orders and for people who knowingly supply firearms to a person subject to an order and it introduces graduated trafficking offences with a higher penalty where 10 or more firearms are involved.

I need to draw attention in the chamber and for the public to how much of Ken Lay’s review this bill leaves undone. The rapid review was of course commissioned in December following the horrific antisemitic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach, which killed 15 people and injured a further 41. That review received more than 19,000 survey responses and more than 500 submissions, and former chief commissioner Ken Lay made 16 recommendations to the government. The government has said publicly that it accepts 15 of those recommendations and rejects only one. But the parliamentary library’s analysis and our review of this legislation is clear: only four of the recommendations from Ken Lay’s review – 2, 4, 8 and 10 – are receiving immediate legislative reform through this bill and through, therefore, this government. Those four recommendations deal with classification, citizenship, illicit firearms and trafficking and criminal intelligence in licensing decisions, and they are absolutely worth doing. But accepting recommendations and implementing them, especially when we are in the sunset of this term of government, are not the same thing.

Not the only omission but an absolutely glaring and preposterous omission by this government, I have got to say, is their rejection of recommendation 1, which is a cap on firearms. Ken Lay recommended a cap of four firearms for individual category A and B licence holders. The government has rejected that recommendation outright through political cowardice, I would say, and influence from the shooting lobby.

Mr Lay observed that the average licence-holder in Victoria does hold around four firearms, and for that reason this recommendation would have made no difference to a large number of owners in Victoria. The review also noted that some recreational hunters in Victoria have up to 68 firearms and some sporting shooters have as many as 288 – dozens or hundreds of firearms being amassed in private arsenals in this state. Mr Lay did not suggest that there could never be legitimate circumstances that require exemptions, and a sensible cap can accommodate genuine occupational, sporting and other exceptional needs. But the proposition that there should be just no upper limit on how many guns someone can own in this state does not go with community expectations, and I think it is incredibly difficult for this government to defend.

Other states are moving ahead of us now on this. New South Wales has introduced a general firearm cap with higher limits for specified purposes. Western Australia has also introduced limits, and the ACT is considering these. Victoria is now deliberately choosing to be a laggard state and undermine national consistency and approach on this topic. As my colleague Ellen Sandell made clear in the other place, the real question is not whether or not firearm owners are law-abiding; the important question that we should be answering here is: what laws minimise risk across our whole community?

The government’s response has been to say that it wants to focus on the wrong person getting hold of even one gun, which is frankly the shooting industry’s line and reveals the influence of them over this government’s choices. That is a false choice, though. We should stop dangerous people from getting access to even one firearm, and we should also ask whether any individual needs dozens or hundreds of firearms. Those two objectives are not either-or; they are entirely compatible. The rapid review clearly identified the ‘strong and well-established correlation between lower levels of firearm availability in the community and reductions in firearm-related harm’. To be clear, the evidence shows that much of that harm, contrary to what people might assume, occurs in private and domestic circumstances rather than, as you might think, public spaces. The rapid review noted that the level of harm being experienced in the community from gun prevalence is high. Over the last 10 years there were 104 deaths from firearm assaults and many more injuries. There were also 342 firearm suicides in that time period. The presence of firearms in a home dramatically changes the risk factors, particularly if they are overlaid with mental health, family violence or acute distress circumstances. Firearm harm was more concentrated in regional Victoria than it was in metropolitan areas, and firearm harm disproportionately affects older people and men. That is interesting, I note, when you consider that this is also reflective of the demographic make-up of gun licence holders, and it is consistent, I think, unfortunately with those suicide statistics that we saw.

This rapid review concluded that:

… effective firearms regulation is as much about preventing self-harm and family violence as it is about preventing the kind of public mass casualty events that drive political and media attention.

The number of legally held firearms also matters because legal firearms can be stolen or diverted even when properly stored, and we know that there is a challenge in maintaining levels of inspection and so on around storage arrangements. Gun Control Australia has pointed out that more than 9000 firearms were stolen nationally over six years, with only around a quarter of those recovered. More guns in circulation means more guns that must be kept securely stored and kept from diversion into the illicit market.

The Alannah & Madeline Foundation has also welcomed elements of these reforms but described the rejection of a cap as a missed opportunity. Gun Control Australia similarly supported aspects of the reform package, but they have described the government’s refusal to consider and implement a cap as a serious failure of public safety leadership. These organisations, whose sole focus is reducing firearm harm, come from lived experience of firearm harm, and their concerns and views deserve to be taken seriously. I note that the rapid review also considered that, in terms of current consultation and input into shaping firearms regulation, there is a slant towards industry perspectives and shooter groups. Victoria Police is also in favour of a cap because it will assist with effective management of legal obligations to inspect and, as I have noted, will reduce overall firearm harm in the community. That is probably the most glaring omission in the government’s response to the rapid review that has informed this legislation today.

The Greens have also been very clear about our concern at the government’s enthusiasm for promoting shooting to children. Victoria currently allows junior licences from the age of 12, and just last month we learned that the government’s proposed outdoor recreation body could now go further to legally promote participation in shooting by children. This beggars belief, frankly. It goes against community expectations, and I think it is also very inconsistent for a government that wants to ban machetes and have amnesty bins for machetes, ostensibly to keep these weapons out of the hands of young children, to then, on the other hand, be going and trying to promote shooting to kids. It also is completely nonsensical when you consider the government’s approach to social media bans at the federal level. These are kids that apparently are not capable of having a social media account, yet this government is happy to continue putting weapons in the hands of those children. It is a real blind spot for this government, I must say. The Greens have amendments to address these two glaring omissions from the bill, and I ask that the amendments in my name be circulated now.

Broadly, our amendments do two things. The first set of amendments introduces a cap of up to three firearms per individual category A and B licence holder, and this includes – I will just go into some detail now – the provisions that were in recommendation 1 in Ken Lay’s report, which we have tried to incorporate into these amendments before the Council tonight. The amendments provide for a strengthened requirement to demonstrate a genuine need for each firearm, supported by formal and verifiable evidence, and where an applicant seeks to hold firearms beyond the base cap of three, there is a requirement to demonstrate a compelling need for each additional firearm, which is supported by strong, specific and evidence-based justification – not just a tick box. Thirdly, where an applicant seeks approval beyond any exemption threshold, there is a requirement to demonstrate an exceptional need, reflecting rare and extraordinary circumstances that justify approval beyond the cap. Specific exemptions should be available where a compelling need can be demonstrated to hold firearms above the base cap of three, specifically for primary producers and sports shooters, and where an exemption applies, consideration will be given up to an additional seven firearms per licence-holder, allowing for a total of up to 10 firearms. This would likely affect approximately 23 per cent of licence-holders.

The following conditions would also apply to any exemptions: applications for firearms above three and up to 10 must demonstrate a compelling need for each additional firearm, and applications to hold firearms beyond a total of 10 must demonstrate an exceptional need, reflecting rare and extraordinary circumstances. Exemptions apply to professional hunters where firearms are required on the basis of employment, as distinct from recreational hunting, and subject to appropriate oversight and compliance requirements, and exemptions should apply to licensed firearms dealers, licensed firearm collectors and corporate licence holders, subject to existing regulatory control, with all exemptions subject to appropriate oversight conditions and compliance requirements at the discretion of the chief commissioner and no exemptions considered for recreational hunters beyond the up-to-three cap. That is the function of our first set of amendments, which is introducing a cap. I will note that Mr Lay’s recommendation was for a cap of four based on, it seemed, the average licence-holder’s number of guns. The Greens have taken the position that we think three will be adequate for most people’s purposes and also that we would like to see an overall reduction in the number and prevalence of weapons in our community. That has informed our selection of three for the cap that we are putting forward.

Our second amendment bans junior licences. There is no need for the state of Victoria to actively cultivate firearm use amongst children. Lawful adult sporting shooting can continue without the government encouraging 12-year-olds into firearm use or maintaining a licensing pathway for children.

That is the function of the Greens’ amendments, and I look forward to discussing those in committee. As Mr Bourman noted, our amendments are also outside scope and require a motion in order to consider them, and I would ask parties to support that procedural scope motion so that we can debate all of the amendments being brought forward by members of the crossbench and opposition tonight in good faith. Before I close today, there are other parts of the Lay review that require action. Recommendation 7 called for stronger oversight across the entire licence life cycle and raised a possible mandatory health reporting pathway which would support the fit and proper person test. This is one of the things that I struggle to understand – why the government has not proceeded with this. It seems such an obvious way to reduce harm, particularly I will note amongst some of those suicide stats that we saw, where people continue to have access to lethal weapons. That is one of the interventions where a mandatory health reporting pathway could really bring down fatalities and injuries from guns in our community.

Any model for a mandatory health reporting pathway would need to be designed carefully with health professionals, disability advocates and the community, but the underlying principle here is so important. Suitability to hold a firearm licence cannot just be assessed once, a set and forget, and assumed indefinitely, as risk changes over time and people’s circumstances change over time. This is also important to stop interpersonal gun violence, particularly I would note in cases, as Mr Lay pointed out, of family or domestic violence: where a gun is in the house it raises the stakes and the potential for injury greatly. The Greens have previously called for time-limited licences with repeated character and family violence checks, in line with what Mr Lay has called for.

The government should now really clearly set out how it will implement the remaining Lay recommendations, including the licence life cycle recommendation, and what further safeguards it proposes and when it will advance those. What is its pathway for implementing those recommendations that it states it has accepted? Recommendations 12 and 13 on information sharing are said in the government’s response to be underway, but there has not been any information or update as to the progress or implementation for that work, which needs to be completed alongside the implementation of the national firearms register. The government has allocated $38.4 million to upgrade its firearms licensing systems for that purpose, and we hope to see timely delivery.

Another thing that just beggars belief for me is that Victoria has turned a cold shoulder on participating in the national gun buyback. What a moment there was for unity at a national level to tackle gun violence, as we did in the wake of Port Arthur. Victoria should participate constructively in the buyback. The government has said that it will not participate in the Commonwealth’s scheme as it currently stands, essentially because of disagreement about the cost-sharing arrangement. That cannot be the end of the discussion. WA’s recent buyback removed more than 83,000 firearms from their community, and it reduced the number of registered firearms in the state by around 24 per cent. Victorians would like to see less prevalence of weapons in our community, and I think the government should back that in and reconsider its position on the buyback. The lesson that we learned so painfully after Port Arthur was that national consistency really matters. A patchwork of weaker jurisdictions undermines the strength of the national framework. The Greens have called for the buyback to remove excess and high-risk firearms as well as stronger restrictions on rapid-fire and high-powered weapons. The flexibility that is created by this bill to recategorize emerging firearms is useful, but it just does not complete that broader task which still needs doing.

Another positive feature of this bill is the decision to make firearm prohibition orders permanent. The Greens support strong measures to stop people who pose a genuine risk from accessing firearms, but permanent police powers I will note do require permanent scrutiny. The government’s treaty compatibility statement has acknowledged that First Peoples are disproportionately the subject of firearm prohibition orders. Between 2021 and 2025, 7 per cent of FPOs were issued to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, although First Peoples made up less than 2 per cent of Victoria’s population. The statement also acknowledges the significant search and detention powers that are attached to these orders and the potential for their disproportionate application to result in unequal impacts on the human rights of First Peoples. All of that may be justifiable in service of the broader aim of reducing harm in the community. But what I do observe is that the newly established First Peoples’ Assembly, Gellung Warl, was not given an opportunity to advise on this bill prior to its introduction, and oversight, transparent reporting and scrutiny of these powers are essential.

This debate should not just be reduced to a contest between people who want to own guns and everyone else. Even those who partake in shooting have an interest in a system that is safe, coherent and trusted. Ken Lay was asked by this government to complete a substantial review, and he did just that. The government asked him to consider limits on gun numbers, classification, licensing, licence monitoring, illicit firearms, emerging technologies, intelligence and information sharing. And it received the answer – a well-researched, evidence-based answer. This government should not now cherrypick the recommendations that it finds politically easiest due to influence from the shooting lobby and fear about losing marginal Labor seats.

Indeed it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the government has been prepared to go only as far as the shooting lobby will allow. In May, when the government announced that it had rejected the cap, the Greens called out this capitulation to the gun lobby. And more recently I have said that Labor keeps finding ways to advance the interests of the gun lobby when what Victorians actually want is stronger regulation and stronger gun safety. We support the measures in this bill that will give us stronger intelligence checks, trafficking laws, classifications and licensing rules. But the government cannot credibly say after tonight that it has delivered on the Lay review; one, because it has rejected the first and clearest recommendation; and secondly, because it is leaving many of the remaining recommendations outside the scope of this bill. There should be a sensible cap on the number of firearms a person can own. There should be stronger life cycle monitoring of licence-holders, and Victoria should be part of an effective national buyback. We should finish the work on national information sharing in the firearms register, and we should not be encouraging children as young as 12 to take up shooting.

It is a devastating missed opportunity, this bill. It falls far short of what is needed, far short of what the government promised, and it leaves Victoria ultimately as a laggard state, holding back an effective national approach to reducing harms from weapons and the gun industry. Firearm regulation works when governments are willing to act before a tragedy, not only after one. We should not wait for another terrible act of firearm violence before making reforms that the evidence has already told us, and the government’s own review has told us, are sensible, practical and necessary. The question we start with should always be the same: what laws will best reduce firearm harm and keep the community safe? That is the standard the Greens apply to this bill, and our amendments are in service of taking us closer to that. We will support the passage of this bill today, but we urge the government to continue to pick up the reforms it has rejected and to continue the implementation of those important Lay recommendations it says it has accepted.

Business interrupted pursuant to standing orders.

Jaclyn SYMES: Pursuant to standing order 4.08, I declare the sitting be extended by up to 1 further hour.

 Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (22:59): I rise to speak on the Firearms Amendment Bill 2026, which will amend the Firearms Act 1996 to impose a citizenship requirement for gun licences, require a national background check for licences, provide further powers to categorise firearms, increase penalties for firearms trafficking, make the firearms prohibition order scheme permanent and increase the penalties for breaking firearms prohibition orders. The bill has come as a response to a terrible tragedy: the appalling terrorist attack at a Hanukkah celebration on the Bondi Beach foreshore that took the lives of 15 people and injured 41 others. That awful tragedy prompted the Commonwealth and state governments to review their laws around firearms licensing and ownership to consider if there were legislative changes that could improve community safety.

In Victoria the widely respected Ken Lay was asked to conduct a rapid review of Victoria’s firearms laws, and his final report made 16 recommendations to government around firearm laws and regulation. The bill immediately implements four of those recommendations from the Lay report: recommendation 2 relating to updating existing firearms classifications, recommendation 4 relating to introducing a citizenship requirement for firearms licence holders, recommendation 8 relating to strengthening the laws on firearm trafficking and recommendation 10 relating to how intelligence is used in licensing reviews and appeals.

The Victorian government did not support the recommendation to cap the number of firearms an individual can possess, and the Liberal Party actually believes that this was the right decision. We know that the large majority of gun owners do the right thing, and the Liberals are strong supporters of lawful and responsible gun ownership among sporting shooters, primary producers and recreational hunters. A cap would have been an overcorrection that penalised those with legitimate reasons to use firearms without significantly improving community safety or preventing another Bondi. There are some in this chamber who are completely anti-gun, and the truth is that they do not understand the reality of life in rural Victoria. I received numerous emails from my constituents in the lead-up to this bill coming to Parliament, and many were concerned about the possibility of caps being imposed. For primary producers in particular, firearms are necessary tools for animal management and pest control, and they require a range of firearms with different calibres and rates of fire. Many recreational hunters are also sporting shooters and typically own several firearms, all with different uses. A cap of four or five firearms, as implemented in Western Australia, would have interfered significantly with responsible gun use without any clear improvement to community safety. A cap on gun ownership would not have prevented the Bondi terrorist attack. A total of three guns were used in that attack, and that would have been below the caps of four or five firearms that have been implemented in New South Wales and Western Australia respectively.

The changes that are proposed in this bill are largely sensible, and we will not be opposing the bill. When the firearm prohibition order scheme was introduced into Parliament, it was an emergency measure subject to a sunset clause after 10 years. Clauses 4 and 5 of this bill will repeal section 4AA of the Firearms Act 1996 and make the firearm prohibition order scheme permanent. Clauses 15 to 19 increase the penalties for various offences related to breaching firearm prohibition orders, and we support such tougher penalties on criminals and those who do not respect the rules around lawful and responsible possession of firearms. This bill is about criminals and organised crime, and these changes are about doing whatever we can to stop guns getting into the hands of extremists.

I do have some concerns with parts of this bill, and several of the constituents who contacted me shared the same concerns. First, clause 34 requires licence applicants to satisfy a firearms background check. We understand the reasons for introducing a national background-checking scheme. However, we are concerned about the long wait until the scheme is ready and the potentially high cost of carrying out the checks and duplicating state processes. There is currently no commencement date for this to come into effect, because it depends on the Commonwealth finalising the AusCheck scheme, which is not operational yet and may take several years before it is up and running. We have heard that getting an AusCheck done could cost $500, and when you add that to the cost of a licence application or renewal and other administration costs, you could be looking at $1000 to get a firearms licence. For farmers already doing it tough or recreational hunters who want to shoot a few weekends a year, the cost starts to become prohibitive.

After the bushfires in January this year, many farmers had to perform the heartbreaking task of shooting injured livestock. They needed high-calibre rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. They also needed a lot of time and a tough constitution. I know farmers hate putting down their own livestock; they would prefer someone else to do it. But imagine if they had let their licence lapse and sold their guns because of a big jump in cost – the animals would have been left suffering for even longer while they waited for a licensed shooter to arrive.

If the AusCheck scheme makes it too expensive for recreational hunters and farmers to obtain and keep gun licences, then responsible firearm use will drop and we will not have enough experienced shooters when we need them. Additional layers of complexity or cost do little to improve community safety while hindering lawful activity. Right now deer numbers are out of control in Victoria and feral pigs are causing millions of dollars of damage. One farmer in my electorate recently sent a bill to the state government for $40,000 after losing 160 sheep and lambs to wild dogs. The reality is that we need primary producers and recreational hunters to continue shooting regularly to help control feral animals. When the AusCheck scheme finally does come into operation, it must not become a giant hurdle to legitimate firearm ownership.

I also have some concerns over the expanded powers to classify and reclassify firearms. Of course we know that with 3D printing it is possible to have rapid development of new and unconventional guns, and the Chief Commissioner of Police will need to be able to quickly classify novel firearms. These powers are necessary, but they must be used responsibly. There are examples from the recent past where restrictive classifications were imposed as a kneejerk response to firearms that were different or unfamiliar.

I was contacted by numerous constituents concerned about this legislation. They stressed that law-abiding firearm owners in Victoria already operate within a highly regulated environment with ongoing fees, licence conditions and storage requirements. They strongly feel that they should not be penalised with additional restrictions because of the unrelated shortcomings in vetting and intelligence sharing that contributed to the Bondi terror attack. The Liberals do have concerns with this bill, but we believe that on balance the bill will make improvements to the licensing and regulation of firearms. It will strengthen penalties for those who breach firearms prohibition orders, and so we will not oppose this bill.

 Rikkie-Lee TYRRELL (Northern Victoria) (23:07): One Nation Victoria will not be supporting this bill in its current form. While I can see the merit in its motives, there are far too many cracks and incomplete clauses, and it still requires vital consultation from key stakeholders and industry bodies. One Nation has always been supportive of responsible gun ownership and use. We understand that many licensed gun owners are not always Australian citizens. These licensees have demonstrated, in some cases for decades, that they are responsible, safe and law abiding. These people contribute to local community economies in the Northern Victoria Region, which rely heavily on game shooting tourism and sport shooting associations. These non-citizen licensees are part of a community. This is the Victorian shooting community, a community that is like a family. They camp together on hunting trips, their kids grow up together on weekends and school holidays and they celebrate with Easter and Christmas parties, just like many other organisations. They pass on a world of knowledge and respect and demonstrate the safest practices when using and storing registered firearms. This bill discriminates against people who have simply not gained Australian citizenship, regardless of their past unblemished gun ownership licences.

Here is where it gets messy: AusCheck checks on licensees can be unreliable and errors can be made which result in the wrong people being licensed and the right people having their licences taken away. There have been cases of people on watchlists having their family members issued with or being allowed to keep their firearm licences. Victoria first needs to establish a – no pun intended – bulletproof system of screening, background checks and information sharing amongst agencies to ensure that firearm licences and ownership do not fall into the wrong hands. The AusCheck process is also very expensive, somewhere in the region of $500 per check. Who will pay this, the taxpayers? A licence-holder application is on top of the $300-plus licence fee they must pay. While I agree that extra checks are necessary, the burden of the cost should not be placed on people who have followed every law and regulation to the tee.

Another messy, half-baked portion of this bill is the carve-outs for the exemptions of the citizenship requirements. There is still unmet consultation and input from key stakeholders and industry bodies that will provide necessary and skilled advice on how this bill will impact those it is intended for. This, in a nutshell, is creating a bill blindfolded and will very likely have damaging and costly repercussions as soon as it becomes law, whenever that may be.

The wording of this bill seems clumsy, ill thought out and somewhat lazy. While I can appreciate that an inquiry and a responsible amount of consultation was done before this bill was brought to the house, the government has still presented us with incomplete clauses and sections that need to be consulted on and then put into regulations by the minister at the time. Why waste the house’s time like this? Why not give the members of this chamber and the Victorian people the respect of bringing a finalised, completed bill with all the finer details worked out? It seems like another overreaction from a Labor government. Every law-abiding firearms owner must not be punished or forced to bear the costs of those who do wrong. They must not be treated like criminals. The government needs to go back, do the work and bring a completed bill to the house for us to debate.

 Gaelle BROAD (Northern Victoria) (23:11): I am pleased to be able to speak on the Firearms Amendment Bill 2026. This chamber certainly does reflect a range of different perspectives, and we have heard some of those different perspectives during this debate. In April this year I spoke after a petition about firearm regulation was tabled in Parliament by my colleague Ms Bath. Over 12,500 people signed the petition, and it raised serious concerns about rushed reforms. It sought fairness rather than rushed decisions that are not based on evidence.

The attack at Bondi was horrific – absolutely horrific – and the federal government in response flagged legislative reforms. As we saw, other states like New South Wales reacted and introduced very stringent reforms, and the Nationals at both the state and federal level highlighted that Australia already has some of the toughest gun laws in the world and highlighted the need to ensure that law-abiding firearm owners are not penalised unnecessarily.

Victoria undertook a firearms review led by former police commissioner Ken Lay. I know my colleague Tim Bull in the Legislative Assembly spoke very highly of his approach, and I think Ms Bath did as well. Tim Bull held a round table with Ken Lay that included Olympic and international shooters, vermin controllers and a gun shop owner, and they all explained very respectfully why a cap on guns will not work. I have also spoken with many residents across northern Victoria who share this view, and one I recall referred to firearms being like golf for them. Shooting was like golf for them: you need different clubs for different purposes, and they were pointing out that it is the same with shooting. They also mentioned guns owned by their ancestors and the heritage value of that and how important it is to them. They talked about all the restrictions and requirements that are on them as responsible firearm shooters.

I spoke with Russell Hill, a member of the North East Muzzleloaders, a club not far from Wangaratta, and he wrote to me. To quote his letter, he said:

My passion is pistol target shooting. To compete in all of my disciplines, I require a minimum of four pistols. In black powder target shooting, I compete in eight different longarm categories, each requiring different firearms. I also hunt feral animals and deer, which require different firearms suitable for different purposes.

…

A limit of four firearms would prevent me from participating in the various shooting disciplines in which I currently compete and have participated safely for many years.

In addition, I use a variety of historical firearms when educating the public through historical re-enactments, including events depicting the Ned Kelly era, the Colonial Redcoats, and the Eureka Stockade. These events provide an opportunity for Australians to learn about our colonial history in a safe and controlled environment.

I think it is important to remember the various different types of firearms that people use.

We held a firearm forum in Bendigo, and hundreds of people did attend. Senator Bridget McKenzie came and Danny O’Brien, the Leader of the Nationals, came. Hundreds of people were there because they care about the impact of this legislation, and they enjoy shooting and use it for so many different purposes. I am very grateful to represent Northern Victoria, the rural life that exists and the understanding that firearms are used by farmers and used by recreational shooters and hunters. It is an important part of life and part of our regional communities, and it contributes to tourism. We know that there is a lot of conservation work that occurs through those clubs. There are businesses selling goods for people to enjoy our great outdoors. People do enjoy participating in it as a sport, and we are fortunate in Australia to have people that are competing on the world stage and who do us proud because of their skills and abilities in shooting. Others use firearms for controlling feral animals. There are different sizes, and that is very important. I have been to a number of clay target clubs. They are very social clubs, and I know people enjoy going there each week. Competition is so important, and that supports the local community as well through accommodation for those that are attending those competitions.

Others enjoy duck hunting. Duck hunting is a multigenerational family sport where there are grandparents, fathers, sons and daughters. They go away and they make a tradition of doing duck shooting together. I note that the Greens also referred to their desire to restrict junior licences, and I think that is such a concern because, as we know in our regions and in our clubs, junior licences are very important for training young people. Just like a learner driver with a car, it is about equipping them. I have heard from a number of them about how much they enjoy doing that activity with their parents.

In considering this legislation I received correspondence. One noted that the tragic event at Bondi was a failure of intelligence sharing and communication between ASIO and the New South Wales police. Another highlighted that organised criminals, illicit firearm traffickers and individuals intent on violence are unlikely to be deterred by additional administrative requirements imposed upon licensed firearm owners and businesses, and they highlighted really the need for Parliament to require clear evidence that each amendment will deliver a measurable improvement in community safety before imposing additional obligations on compliant Victorians. I strongly agree. Another wrote to me – they are a retiree – and said they have got no criminal convictions or terrorist affiliations and that once again they feel they are being punished for the actions of criminals. Their concern with the bill is the proposal to use AusCheck, which they said is notoriously expensive and will become a barrier to entry for firearm sports.

I do want to thank Brad Battin, who is the shadow minister, for his work on this bill, and I know Dr Heath spoke earlier to our amendments, which include delaying part 7 – AusCheck – until the Commonwealth systems are fully operational and being clear on the costs before commencement. While the objective of a nationally coordinated system is broadly supported, concerns remain regarding the timing of its legislative inclusion. AusCheck is still under development and key details regarding its operation have not yet been settled. Advice provided indicates the system may take several years to be fully developed and operational. As I mentioned, the cost of AusCheck has not been disclosed, and we certainly do not want to see exorbitant or ramped-up costs because there is a government at the time that may want a bit of extra money. One thing that I had not heard before but have certainly heard from people in my electorate is concern about the licensing and regulation division being profoundly under-resourced. I have heard from people that are concerned about delays with their licensing, and I think when we consider the impact of any reforms and the importance of monitoring licences, it is concerning to read that the unit is under-resourced and rarely staffed. That is the feedback that I have had.

We support sensible and proportionate changes, such as ensuring firearm licences are limited to Australian citizens, but we do not want to make changes that make life harder for law-abiding firearm owners without making any difference to terrorists and criminals. Law-abiding firearm owners should not be punished for the actions of terrorists, and as the Nationals have said time and again, we do not have a gun problem, we have a terrorist problem. We are not opposing this legislation, and we appreciate the chamber’s consideration of the amendments put forward that seek to improve it. We also want to see a review down the track to monitor the impact of any changes.

 Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (23:20): I rise to speak briefly in relation to the Firearms Amendment Bill 2026. Like many others, in doing so I would like to acknowledge again the circumstances in which this bill has come about. I obviously spoke about the antisemitic terrorist attack at Bondi Beach quite extensively when we held a condolence motion debate in here. This issue is personal for me and my household, as it is for Mr Bourman, as he noted. Despite our differing views on this bill, we see the impacts and the harms of antisemitism up close and in real time in our households, in our daily conversations and in the way that it is showing up in society and came to the worst possible outcome last year. As the mother of a beautiful Jewish daughter who is now eight months old and who was born only days after that terrorist attack, I feel really strongly the need to share my feelings and concerns about this issue if it goes unaddressed for any longer, as a family member and a parent of people in the Jewish community. I hope that in the spirit of this debate today, even though there will be differing views, we can come together on the importance of addressing that incident. Many people will not think this is the right way to address it. I do not believe that removing weapons is the only way to fight hate and to fight harm and to fight discrimination, but like this one and the way in which it happened, these reforms are incredibly important, and I will be supporting them.

This came about from a rapid review conducted by former Chief Commissioner of Police Ken Lay. It ran over eight weeks between January and February 2026 and received almost 2000 survey responses, many of which were from members of my community who feel very deeply and passionately about this issue. I know there were comments earlier about people in regional Victoria. The people that I work with in regional Victoria care very much about gun safety and gun reform, certainly sensible reform that enhances community safety and reduces the likelihood of incidents like we saw happen last year. The rapid review received more than 500 written submissions and conducted 40 face-to-face consultation sessions, hearing from regional and metropolitan Victorians.

We watched that review very closely. I am no stranger to this debate. When it crosses over my patch it is in relation to the harms inflicted upon animals. We spoke about limits and caps on firearms during the parliamentary inquiry into duck shooting when we had Victoria Police appear. I was disappointed that not all of the recommendations Mr Lay made in his final report were accepted, because I believe some of them are really meaningful and really important. I know that there will be commentary that people only use one gun at a time, but one of the things that can increase gun harm and gun violence is stolen firearms. Tracking them when there are a number of them can be more difficult for the firearm owner, and that is certainly what many people have expressed to me with their concerns in relation to this bill and how far it goes.

The bill introduces a citizenship requirement for firearms licensing, which will be satisfied by an individual who is an Australian citizen or New Zealand citizen who is a permanent resident. It introduces a Commonwealth firearms background check requirement, and for firearms licensing that will leverage ASIO national intelligence information checks through AusCheck. Once these provisions commence, an AusCheck criminal history check will be required for all new license applicants and existing licensees when they seek to renew their licence. It also creates greater flexibility for the chief commissioner to temporarily recategorise a firearm or type of firearm and expands regulation-making powers to better enable police to respond to emerging firearms technologies of concern.

I spoke about my views on the cap on gun ownership, which of course has already been adopted by Western Australia and New South Wales and is under consideration in the ACT. Some Victorian hunters possess as many as 135 firearms and some sports shooters have as many as 288. I was just having a conversation with my colleagues about whether or not I have ever shot a gun before or used a firearm, and I certainly have not, but I do find it hard to understand how someone could possibly need almost 300 guns in order to participate in their recreational pursuits. I think more guns create greater risk and that this cap on ownership – which was recommended by Commissioner Lay in the rapid review and which was supported by Victoria Police, gun control advocates and multicultural organisations – should have been accepted. It would reduce the number of firearms in circulation and limit opportunities for theft or misuse in a single incident. It would also ease the pressure on the regulatory system and allow for closer scrutiny of licence-holders seeking to acquire high numbers of weapons. In rejecting a cap on ownership, the former Premier said:

Where we need to place our focus is on the criminals who get their hands on one single gun.

The truth is the more guns an individual is allowed to own, the more a criminal can steal. The evidence on the connection between legal firearm numbers and illicit supply is actually stark. The Australia Institute has found that over 9000 firearms have been stolen since the start of 2020 and at least 44,600 have been stolen over the past 20 years – that is one firearm stolen every 4 hours. Police recover only around a quarter of those guns that are taken. The more legal guns there are in Australia, the more illegal guns there will be as a result of it. Gun Control Australia described the decision to reject a cap as ‘a green light for more illegal firearms on our streets’.

I also want to speak briefly to ‘genuine reason’ and the National Firearms Agreement signed by all states and territories after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, which requires anyone who possesses a firearm to have a so-called genuine reason, such as farming or hunting. However, the standard of evidence for hunting and sport shooting as genuine reasons is low in Victoria. For sports shooting, all someone needs is to be a paid-up member of a shooting club to qualify. Club membership is also enough for hunting, as is owning a rural property or just having a permission slip from someone else who does. This is something that regularly comes up in the duck-shooting debate when we talk about the number of licensed duck shooters in Victoria and whether or not those licence-holders are actually active duck shooters or whether that is just in order to have a genuine reason to own a firearm. Applicants can in effect buy a genuine reason by joining a sporting shooters association, which also boosts gun lobbying power. Certainly we have seen plenty of gun lobbying power in this term of Parliament. Most Victorians with a firearm licence who use the genuine reason of hunting or sport shooting do not regularly participate in those activities according to data from the Victorian Game Management Authority and the Australian Institute of Sport. Combining the most recent figures on game hunting activity with general sports participation data produces an estimate of almost 40,000 Victorians who participated in sports shooting or hunting in 2025. Almost 150,000 people have a firearms licence justified by either activity statewide. So according to this data over 100,000 people did not use their firearms for the genuine reason on their licence in that last year. The government are effectively allowing their decision-making on what is an enormously significant issue of community safety to be guided by an incredibly tiny population of Victorians. Certainly that, again, was evident in the duck-shooting decision, where now less than half a per cent of people are duck shooters in Victoria and half of those are actually active according to the statistics.

The Coroners Court has data that shows 459 people were killed by firearms in Victoria in the decade to 2025. This included 342 firearm suicide deaths and 104 assault-related firearm deaths. Both firearm-related suicides and assaults are far more common in regional areas, and a recent coronial inquest into a firearm-related suicide recommended that Victorians applying for and renewing firearms licences must first prove mental wellbeing. Currently, those applying for or renewing a gun licence must tick a box indicating whether they have been treated in the last five years for any mental health, alcohol or drug related issues. In making this recommendation the coroner noted that this has the hallmarks of a rubber-stamping process rather than a genuine vetting process around the use and control of dangerous equipment. I would strongly encourage the government to at least consider this.

I note that the Greens have a number of amendments which I will be supporting, including introducing a cap on the number of guns owned by one person, which, as I stated, I believe should have been in the government’s original bill – there is very, very clear evidence to guide that decision – and to prohibit people under the age of 18 from having gun licences. Of course we canvassed this issue very recently in the Outdoor Recreation Victoria debate, when it was confirmed by the government that that agency, much like the Victorian Fisheries Authority, will have promotional powers if they wish to encourage junior firearm licences. I have seen many people under the age of 18 out operating firearms during the recreational duck shooting season, and we had an incident very recently, in March this year, of a Game Management Authority officer telling gun owners how to flout rules to allow children to head out on wetlands and breach those safety regulations and that safety advice, so I think this is a really good proposal. I believe that with many decisions in life we cannot make them until we are 18. Certainly owning a firearm is a very, very serious decision and one that should not be put in the hands of people who are essentially still children or promoted to them through education or schooling programs.

I will be supporting this bill, although I think it has really been a missed opportunity. It does not go far enough. It is devastating that we had such clear evidence and clear advice before us, and once again, we had an expert – actually it is the second time the expert Ken Lay has delivered a meaningful report on something that should be implemented in our state that the former Premier rejected. Both of them were big failures and big mistakes, and I just hope that we do not see an incident that requires us to reconsider these, like the circumstances that brought this about. I feel really deeply about this change, not just because of my own policy areas but for my family and ending hate and violence against marginal communities. I commend the bill to the house, but I urge the government to consider going further and reconsidering many of the very sound recommendations that were also made in the report.

 Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (23:33): I rise to speak against the Firearms Amendment Bill 2026. Victoria’s licensed shooters and hunters are among the most disciplined and law-abiding people in this state. They complete safety courses, pass repeated background checks and store their firearms securely, as well as maintaining clean records. Yet the government and opposition continue to demand that they jump through ever more hoops simply to prove that they have remained good citizens – far more than the hoops that must be jumped through when applying to look after our children in day care centres. This regulation of licensed firearm owners is just too much. It restricts access for people who have already demonstrated that they can be trusted. These 240,000 Victorians deserve to be rewarded for their safety record and personal responsibility, not treated as though they are the criminals deserving to be crushed more and more. Recreational shooting and hunting are skilled activities. They are competitive sports, and law-abiding people who wish to participate should be able to do so without such unreasonable barriers.

Victoria was a very different place when I was growing up, but families no longer feel secure in their own homes or on our streets. People of every age feel vulnerable in public places. There are home invasions, carjackings, firebombings and other violent crimes which are an all-too-common reality for Victorians these days, and they all just get told not to interfere, to call 000. And if they do interfere and, sadly, their lives are lost or they are very badly injured, rather than getting an award, they are used as a warning for people not to get involved, not to do anything and to rely on the police, whose numbers have been cut and whose ranks are already too thin.

I used to be completely anti-gun. I have really turned around on this issue, and one of the things that actually made me reaffirm my changed position was, sadly, watching the Bondi massacre live on X. Watching those poor people pinned down, defenceless, and watching the other people watch them, unable to do anything to help them, was one of the most distressing things I have ever seen. I just cannot believe that we are left without any way to defend ourselves or defend others. We need to be able to trust adults to assess their own risk and to be willing to be assessed by the government, especially when the lives of their families and the security of their property are at stake. The law does already recognise the right to self-defence, including the use of lethal force in extreme circumstances, yet in practice ordinary Victorians are denied the means to exercise that right. We cannot even carry pepper spray in this state. Responsible adults cannot obtain a firearm for the purpose of defending themselves or their homes. The result is that law-abiding people are left as sitting ducks while the criminals operate with illegal weapons completely without restraint, as they do because they are criminals and they do not care what the law is anyway.

Victorians are the kinds of ducks that I can agree with Ms Purcell and the Animal Justice Party do deserve defending. Victorians who are prepared to meet some reasonable, sensible standards of safety, training and accountability should not be prohibited from defending their homes and their families. And a society that tells people that they can defend themselves but systematically removes every effective tool to do so is not protecting citizens, it is abandoning them and then shaming them for feeling unsafe. Our focus has to remain on the criminals who traffic illegal firearms and commit violent offences and on the violent ideologies behind them. Strong laws against illegal activity are essential, but treating responsible, licensed shooters as the problem is not the way to go and is completely unfair.

 David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (23:37): I will start by saying this: the Libertarian Party will never support using the actions of Islamic terrorists as justification for taking away the rights of Victorians. What is happening with this Firearms Amendment Bill 2026 is rights are being taken away. Every time there is a firearms bill there are always more rights being taken away. It is never anything else. What we are seeing with this bill are some things that are wishful thinking and highly irrational.

I would like to deal with two recommendations from the Lay report, one of which the government apparently agrees with me on and the other which I disagree with the Lay report on. The first one is the cap on the number of firearms. The government, happily, has disagreed with the Lay report and refused to implement that recommendation. The restriction that was proposed in the rapid review does nothing to improve the safety of Victorians. In fact, what it does is merely place restrictions on people who otherwise would be law-abiding people. A single gun in the hands of a bad person is far more dangerous than a thousand guns in the hands of a peaceful person. The number of guns does not bear any resemblance to the amount of danger that someone proposes. The ideas behind the evil that has been committed in Australia are the problem, not the tools that those evil people use to commit them. In fact, rather than take away the rights of Victorians when we are confronted with evil ideologies and terrorism, what we must do to protect Australia and defend ourselves against them is double down on the principles of Western civilisation, which means the defence of freedom and the defence of individual liberty.

Members interjecting.

The PRESIDENT: Order! There are a lot of conversations everywhere. If the house could just come to order.

David LIMBRICK: Thank you, President; it was rather distracting. One of the things that this bill seeks to do is take away the ability of non-citizens, so people with permanent residency – except for New Zealanders, for some reason – to be able to obtain a firearms licence. The justification in the recommendations from the rapid review was that for non-citizens it would be more difficult for police to obtain a lengthy history and therefore it was a valid restriction on those people’s rights. I would say this in response to that recommendation: there are many people who have lived in Australia for decades and pose no risk to anyone who currently own a firearms licence. Conversely, we may have people who have been here as little as four years and have become a citizen who may pose a danger. Therefore one’s citizenship status bears no relevance to the amount of danger or the amount of history that the police can collect. Indeed if the recommendation had said something like ‘Someone needs to live in Australia for a certain period of time before obtaining a firearms licence so that we can understand from their criminal history whether or not they should have one’, that would have been a reasonable suggestion, I think, because it takes some time and, as has been pointed out, some foreign governments do not keep very good records or we do not have very good relationships with them.

I have two amendments on this bill which I would like to circulate now, please. The first of these amendments simply removes the citizenship test in line with my rejection of the idea that this is a valid proxy for risk. The second amendment is rather more interesting. There is an interesting story behind this. The second amendment is about a particular class of non-citizens, and that is British subjects who came to Australia before 1984. In 1984 the federal laws changed so that these people required citizenship before they could vote. But I think that the government when they drafted this bill – as with many bills throughout this place where they either tax or take away the rights of someone who they think cannot vote – thought that non-citizens could not vote. In fact that is not true. There is a class of people who can vote, and it is these British subjects who came to Australia before 1984. According to the Australian Electoral Commission, nationwide there are about 100,000 of these people and in Victoria there are about 25,000.

I know this because one of those people is my stepfather, who also happens to have a firearms licence. He came here as a child with his father. There were many of these so-called ten-pound Poms that came to Australia, but the reason that my stepfather’s father came to Australia is rather interesting. Before World War II broke out he was an officer in the British army. When World War II broke out, he was deployed to France. As people would know, France was overrun by the Nazis – by the German invaders – and the British expeditionary force was in France defending against the Nazis. They had the battle of Dunkirk, which was effectively a huge evacuation exercise to stop the entire British expeditionary force, just about, being captured or killed by the Nazis. In order to facilitate this evacuation they needed a rearguard: soldiers that would stay behind on an extremely dangerous mission. Their mission was to slow the Nazi advance so that the British expeditionary force could evacuate. My stepfather’s father – Bert his name was – was one of these rearguard soldiers. He was not killed by the Nazis like many of these rearguard soldiers were, but he was captured by the Nazis. He spent most of World War II in a Nazi POW camp. Under the Geneva Convention officers are meant to get paid by their captors, and he was an officer. The Nazis, being sneaky, figured out a way to pretend that they were complying with the Geneva Convention when they really were not complying with it by paying them this currency which was basically Monopoly money.

When these officers went back to the UK, they were horrified to find out that actually the British government deemed them to have been receiving their pay whilst they were POWs, and many of them were left with very little money indeed. They did not get their back pay, basically, or what they were entitled to. Decades later this was sorted out after many inquiries and campaigns and this sort of thing. But Bert was so disgusted with the British government that when he saw an offer by the Australian government – the Australian government advertised to British ex-servicemen and said to them, ‘If you come to Australia, we will give you and your family the same rights as Australian ex-servicemen, the Australians that fought the Germans and the Japanese. You will have the same rights when you come to Australia.’ For the most part we kept that promise. They came here, we allowed them to vote, we gave them access to veterans services and this sort of thing and their children also were allowed to vote. One of those children that immigrated to Australia was my stepfather.

The promise that we made to them, this bill is breaking. This bill is breaking a promise that was made to those British ex-servicemen that they and their families would have the same rights as Australians. We are saying, with this bill, ‘Well, actually, you might be able to live in Australia, you might be able to vote in Australia and you might even be able to obtain an Australian passport, but you’re not actually Australian.’ That is what we are saying to these people, even though many of them have never known any other country. They grew up here. They came here as infants. They do not know any other country. They are Australian. The idea that we just say they cannot have a firearms licence anymore is wrong; it is absolutely wrong. That is why I am putting forward an amendment, and that is why I am hoping that I will get the support of the chamber to pass this amendment, because I think that Australia needs to honour its promise that it made all those years ago.

I would like to respond to a couple of things said throughout the debate, one by Ms Copsey in particular about children and firearms. I take offence to that, because in my family I have got three sons, and on their 12th birthdays I took them down to Springvale rifle range – it is in my electorate – and taught them how to safely use a rifle, and they all loved it. They thought it was great, and all of my boys know how to safely use a bolt action firearm now. If you go down to Springvale rifle range, what you will notice is it is very popular, for a start. It is almost always full on the weekend. It is crazy how busy it is, with so many young people, all types of people – fathers with their children, fathers with their sons and daughters, all different backgrounds. It is hugely popular. I do not know if they are citizens or not – I have got no idea – but the idea that they are dangerous because of a bit of paper that they do not have and someone else who has a bit of paper is less dangerous I do not accept and I think is wrong.

There is one thing that the bill does that, although I have some concerns about it, I am supportive of, which is the intelligence sharing between the state government and the federal agencies. I am supportive of this because it is clear that one of the things that really did lead to disaster in Bondi was an intelligence failure – the failure to share intelligence between our federal and state agencies. Therefore I support that, although I do share the concerns that have been raised by many about the potential delays that this would cause and also the cost. AusCheck is apparently quite expensive. I am hoping that maybe the government can somehow make it more efficient now that it is getting more scale, apparently. Maybe it can be a bit more efficient and maybe a bit cheaper, although asking for a government IT system to become cheap and efficient is a big ask, I know. With that in mind, the Libertarian Party will not be supporting this bill, and I would urge all members of this chamber to support the amendments that I have proposed.

Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) incorporated the following:

Victoria has a long and proud history of strong and sensible firearm laws, and this Labor Government is committed to continue this legacy to ensure community safety is maintained.

In the wake of the Bondi Attack late last year, now is not the time to take a step back on gun laws.

There is understandable angst and concern among Victoria’s Jewish community, many of which reside within my electorate of Southern Metropolitan, and for whom have endured an uncertain period in recent times.

They deserve and expect to be kept safe from hate-fuelled events like we saw on that dark day last December on Bondi Beach, and through this bill and other measures, the Labor government is taking action to ensure their safety, and the safety of the wider community.

Following the attack at Bondi, this government undertook a rapid review of Victoria’s firearms laws, ensuring any gaps or potential vulnerabilities in the system are identified and corrected.

And what that review reveals is that now is not the time to step back on gun laws.

It is the time to make real change and ensure all Victorians can put their trust in a strong system.

This bill ensures their safety through 6 amendments, acting on 4 recommendations from the Rapid Review into Victoria’s Firearms Laws.

Firearm licenses will now be restricted through new citizenship requirements, only allowing Australian citizens, New Zealand citizens with Australian permanent residency or a non-citizen who requires a firearm for work.

This strengthens the licensing process by ensuring background information such as criminal record checks are as reliable and accurate as possible when supplied from other jurisdictions.

Additionally, the background checks themselves will be strengthened through the establishment of the AusCheck scheme.

This bill will also put in place harsher penalties up to 15 years in prison for those caught trafficking firearms.

By toughening the penalties for trafficking firearms, we can stop gun violence at its source, by keeping firearms away from the people most likely to do harm.

Everyone deserves to go about their daily lives in peace, without the threat of verbal, physical, or lethal attacks.

We never want to see a repeat of Bondi. In Victoria, Australia, or anywhere else.

As a Labor government, we stand by minority groups who face these threats.

From passing anti-vilification laws to criminalize hate speech – laws the Liberal party voted against – to strengthening police powers, establishing help forums and taking action to prevent extremism from the start, the Labor Party stands with our Jewish community in their right to go about their daily lives.

Because when Labor says we’ll do something to protect communities, we mean it.

When we said we’d legislate against hate speech, Labor did it.

When we said we’d strengthen security at schools and places of worship, Labor did it.

When we said we’d strengthen gun laws, we’re doing it right here, right now.

David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan) incorporated the following:

I rise to make a contribution to the Firearms Amendment Bill 2026.

The bill implements certain recommendations of former Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Ken Lay’s Rapid Review of Victoria’s Firearms Law and aligns with recent commonwealth reforms. Specifically the bill will:

• continue the existing firearm prohibition order scheme beyond 8 May 2028

• introduce a citizenship requirement for firearm licences

• increase penalties for firearms trafficking offences

• increase penalties for offences under the firearm prohibition order scheme

• impose a firearms background check requirement for certain licenses

Critically the bill fails to implement the Lay reports first and arguably most important recommendation, which is to introduce a cap on the number of firearms an individual can own to four, with certain exceptions.

The former Premier failed to support this recommendation, despite the fact that Victoria Police supported the cap based on the fact that most gun owners only had a small number of firearms and that it would – logically – remove firearms from circulation.

At the same time, I’m not especially surprised. The former premier in particular did more to weaken gun laws in this state than any other. Time and time again, she ignored evidence in favour of promoting the interests of the gun lobby in this state.

At a time when community safety is said to be the number one priority of this government – and recalling the whole furore over machetes and the government line about the importance of ‘getting dangerous weapons off our streets’ – I find it hard to square how allowing individuals to own as many of these lethal weapons as they want is making our community safer.

It sounds disingenuous to say the least.

I’m not sure why anyone needs to own more than four firearms – unless they’re planning on forming a militia of some sort. Surely four lethal weapons are enough.

The Lay review found some recreational hunters own up to 68 firearms and some sports shooters have as many as 288.

Ironically while we are continually blocked by this government on sensible drug reform – with their lazy arguments about community safety and protecting children – they seem entirely comfortable with increasing the number of guns in circulation and the extraordinary argument that law abiding citizens should be able to own as many guns as they like.

Whether gun owners are law abiding citizens or not, having more guns in circulation is not a good thing. Nationally, some 9000 licensed firearms have been stolen over the last six years – an extremely conservative estimate I would say given that not all firearm thefts are reported – and police have recovered very few of them. So there’s probably around 6000 guns floating around out there.

At the end of the day more guns in circulation means just that – there are more guns in circulation – and more likelihood that these will fall into the wrong hands.

We recognise the valid use of firearms by farmers and that shooting and hunting are legitimate sports. There are legitimate reasons for owning firearms. But we need to get the balance right.

I would also hazard I am not the only person alarmed to learn that an aim of the new Outdoor Recreation super agency is to boost participation levels, and will promote shooting as a recreational activity to children as young as 12.

To quote Alannah & Madeline Foundation chief Sarah Davies:

“There is no public benefit to this practice, aside from potentially fostering a new generation of firearm enthusiasts.

Ms Davies also pointed out the absurdity of the proposal in light of the social media ban for children.

“… a 13-year-old cannot use Facebook, yet they can legally use guns,” she said.

Incredibly the very modest protections in this bill have the Nationals “up in arms”. Gun owners are under attack! They are busy consulting with their communities through multiple firearms forums around the state.

Peter Walsh argued, and I quote:

Why should we all be penalised for a crazy, absolute miniature minority who have done some bloody horrible things with guns and shot people? It is like everything. It is the honest people that suffer, and we do not believe we should be suffering any more than we already have been.

Well, he would say that!

And the former premier agreed:

The vast majority of firearm owners, the overwhelming majority, are law-abiding.

‘What we have to really target our focus on and our effort on are those evil actors, the criminals who get their hands on one single gun.’

It’s chillingly similar to that old NRA fallback ‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ – the one that is consistently trotted out after another tragic mass shooting in the US – an event so common these days that it barely rates a mention in the news. For those who are interested, in 2026 alone there have been 281 mass shootings in the US.

For all the bleating from the usual suspects about law abiding owners being penalised for the actions of a small minority, that minority is still able to inflict an awful lot of carnage. And I remind members that one of the assailants in the recent Bondi shootings did in fact hold a gun licence.

We are fortunate that we have seen relatively few mass shootings in Australia in recent years, largely due to the strict gun laws introduced after the Port Arthur massacre by that peace-loving hippie, John Howard – restrictions which are incredibly popular among the Australian public.

Shooters and hunters love to talk about recreational shooting, pest control, the absolute necessity of owning a gun – but they don’t much like dwelling on the role of guns in domestic violence or suicides.

A recent longitudinal study by Stanford University in the US analysed data on handgun acquisitions and deaths in a cohort of over 26 million Californians who had not previously owned handguns. The researchers compared death rates among those who did and didn’t acquire handguns, with a particular focus on suicides by firearm compared to other methods. They found that access to firearms posed a ‘substantial and enduring risk’, and that gun owners had suicide rates nearly four times higher than people living in the same neighbourhood who did not own handguns.

In Australia these trends are consistent with those in the US. While we have a relatively moderate overall suicide rate, we have an extremely high male firearm suicide rate.

The Royal Commission into Family Violence heard many examples in community consultations and in submissions of how firearms were used as threats or to cause actual harm. Victoria Police confirmed that the ‘the high prevalence of firearms in such communities increases the risk of serious family violence.’

Other concerning statistics provided to the royal commission showed that:

• Gunshot wounds are the third most common cause of death in domestic homicide incidents in Australia.

• Violent intimate partners are more likely to engage in severe domestic violence if they have access to a firearm, and that

• A woman is 20 times more likely to be killed if their abuser has used or threatened to use a weapon.

As a member of the Legalise Cannabis Party, I have spent nearly four years in this place arguing for the legalisation of a plant-based substance that has resulted in exactly zero deaths.

Of course, gun violence perpetrated by crime gangs running our cannabis market is another thing, but that lends more support to my argument that the government should be regulating cannabis rather than leaving it to criminals.

But there has been not one single fatality that has resulted from consumption of cannabis.

We can’t say the same of firearms and yet apparently we can’t even put a cap of four guns per individual on extremely dangerous – lethal – weapons.

This legislation is of a piece with the government’s backing out of federal gun buybacks and opening up more national parks to hunting. They’ve maintained the status of deer as a protected species to appease recreational hunters. This is despite all the evidence of the damage deer are wreaking on our native fauna and flora – prioritising the recreational activities of a small group of people over the protection of our irreplaceable wilderness and farming communities.

This government has made any number of captain’s calls to reduce gun restrictions in Victoria in order to placate the shooters and fishers or to shore up marginal regional seats.

LCV will support this bill because it does make some reforms, but they are pretty ordinary and won’t do much to increase community safety.

 Jaclyn SYMES (Northern Victoria – Minister for Energy and Resources, Minister for Environment, Minister for Climate Action, Minister for the State Electricity Commission) (23:49:589:): I move:

That debate be adjourned until the next day of meeting.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned until next day of meeting.