After Bondi Beach, Australia’s Gun Laws Confront New Realities and the Lessons of Port Arthur

Sydney’s Bondi Beach, usually a symbol of sun and surf, became a site of terror this week when two gunmen attacked a Hanukkah festival, killing 16 people and injuring dozens more. Soon after, the New South Wales Police confirmed that the weapons used were legally obtained firearms, properly licensed and owned under existing laws.

The attack, which appeared to explicitly target people in the Jewish community, has forced Australia to confront a prickly question left unresolved by the government’s response decades ago to a mass shooting in the Tasmanian city of Port Arthur: Can strict gun laws alone prevent such mass violence?

Modern laws born of tragedy

Australia’s current gun laws were created in the wake of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, when a lone gunman killed 35 people. After this tragedy, federal and state leaders formalized the National Firearms Agreement, which banned most semi-automatic weapons. By contrast, handguns (pistols) were not outright banned. Licensed owners may possess handguns, registered to the owner only for approved reasons (chiefly target shooting) and subject to strict regulation. It introduced uniform licensing standards nationwide and implemented longer waiting periods. It also financed a national buyback program to take guns off the street that destroyed more than 650,000 firearms.

Over time, however, implementation of the law began to vary across jurisdictions. States and territories retained authority over licensing and possession of firearms, and this led to inconsistencies in enforcement. A 2025 report by the Australia Institute, an independent public policy think tank based in Canberra, highlights how license revocation rates in New South Wales have been nearly double those in Queensland. At the same time, the National Firearms Register, first agreed to by the National Cabinet in 2023, was rolled out in stages from mid-2024 and will not be fully operational until mid-2028. The register is intended to allow police national access to up-to-date firearm ownership and license status. At the time of the Bondi Beach attack, it was not yet fully implemented.

By 2025, Australia had more than four million registered firearms, a figure that critics say reflects rising firearm numbers despite strict laws. The same report published last year by the Australia Institute found that there were 25 percent more guns in Australia in 2025 than there were at the time of the Port Arthur tragedy. The same report found that 1 in 3 firearms in New South Wales were located not in rural or regional areas, but in major cities. Cecilia Milton, 74, who has worked in New South Wales in a non-profit organization that rehabilitates criminals, agreed while having a chat with The Sentinel. “Back in the day, we never saw firearms as much as I saw them in the last two decades. Homicide convicts often told us how easy it was for them to get hold of a firearm. Then came 3D printing.”

Immediate policy response

Within hours of the Bondi massacre, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese convened an emergency meeting of the National Cabinet. The leaders agreed to commit to “strong, decisive and focused action on gun law reform,” including renegotiating the National Firearms Agreement to ensure it would remain robust in a changed security environment.

The government flagged several key reforms now being developed by police ministers and attorneys-general:

• Lowering caps on the number of firearms per individual, responding directly to the fact that police said the older alleged shooter held six legally registered guns.
• Revisiting license renewals. Australian firearms licences are not indefinite and must be renewed periodically. In practice, the police send reminders as the expiry date nears, and failure to renew causes the licence to lapse.
• Implementing citizenship requirements for firearm licenses, meaning non-citizens could face stricter conditions.
• Promising a crackdown on 3D-printed firearms, high-capacity magazines, and certain types of ammunition and equipment.

States have also proposed specific legislative changes. In New South Wales, Premier Chris Minns called parliament back in session to tighten classifications of certain shotguns, restrict magazine capacities and empower police to revoke licenses without tribunal appeal.

In response to the hate

Voices from the Jewish community, whose members were directly targeted by the attack, have been central to the public conversation. At victims’ funerals and national vigils, leaders have condemned both the violence and what they describe as a slow governmental response to rising antisemitism in the country.

Things will always be different now for the Jewish community, said the co-chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Alex Ryvchin on National Television. “This stops life, this destroys worlds. Things will always be different for us,” he said. “Things can’t go back to normal. It’s fundamentally changed this country.”

In the aftermath of Sunday’s Bondi Beach attack, Andrew Klein, a celebrated Australian professional speaker and master of ceremonies wrote a post on Facebook, which has since been shared many times over. “We are many things today — but we are not shocked or surprised. Sadly, we all felt this was kind of inevitable,” Klein wrote. “Sunday was tragically the logical end point to what we have experienced in this country over the past 2 and bit years. We all felt this was on the cards; the writing was on the wall.”

“I published a widely circulated article on LinkedIn precisely one year ago today called ‘Make Australia Safe Again’ just after the torching of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne,” Klein added, “arguing that if our Government continued to remain inert, paralysed and impotent in tackling anti-semitism, then we all knew what would come next.”

The same sentiments have been shared by members of the Australian Muslim community. One Bondi Beach shooting witness recounted to a Sentinel reporter the terror of the shooting. Mehreen and her husband Junaid (whose names have been changed to conceal their identities) were just leaving Bondi Beach when they saw the tragedy unfold, and they described how they fled the scene but sheltered nearby at a motel to help in case anyone from the Jewish Community needed it. “The rise of extremism in Australia has amplified antisemitism, increased Islamophobia, and led to more instances of hate speech and hate crimes against members of both communities,” said Mehreen, an early education worker from Sydney.

They asked not to be identified for fear of being targeted themselves, something they never expected when they migrated to this country in 2014.

The Alannah & Madeline Foundation, an advocacy group for strong gun laws created by the families of victims of the Port Arthur Massacre, echoed the call for new limits on the number of firearms individuals can own, better tracking systems and more robust license renewal processes. “The community, rightly, expects our gun laws to place tight restrictions on gun ownership and use – and for there to be fewer, not more, guns in our community, especially in light of Sunday’s tragedy,” Sarah Davies, the organization’s CEO, said in a statement to the press.

Uncomfortable resistance to gun laws

Rishav Kale, a political studies teacher from Federal College, Victoria, breaks it down. “Australia’s constitutional framework complicates reform,” Kale said. Firearms regulation sits with the states, and federal influence is exercised mainly through consensus. Police can act on statutory thresholds, but intelligence agencies cannot revoke licenses, creating enforcement gaps. Even if information is shared between state and federal agencies, “there is no legal trigger compelling decisive action,” Kale said.

At Monday’s hastily convened National Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and state and territory leaders unanimously agreed on the need for intense, focused action to strengthen gun laws, including renegotiating the National Firearms Agreement to keep regulations robust in response to evolving security concerns.

Yet the question remains: Will they succeed? There already has been publicly observable variation in state responses and some signals of caution or resistance from specific states. Any fractures that exist along state lines will undermine the effectiveness of new laws. Because firearm regulation lies with the states under the Australian Constitution, unanimous state support is required for a robust National Firearms Agreement.

Unlike Port Arthur, the Bondi massacre unfolded in a more complex political landscape, where terrorism, antisemitism, and border security dominate voter concerns. Intelligence briefs from agencies like the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation have highlighted the rising tide of extremism and ideological shifts that encompass not just antisemitic violence but also broader extremist trends targeting multiple minority groups. 

However, this also raises the question of whether even the strictest gun laws can fully prevent ideologically driven violence The lesson of Port Arthur is, perhaps: No — highlighting the need for comprehensive measures (intelligence, counter-radicalization, and community resilience efforts) alongside any legislative reforms. 

UPDATE: After this story appeared, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced funding for a new gun buyback campaign to be managed by the country’s states and territories to target surplus, newly banned, and illegal firearms. It could become the country’s largest gun buyback campaign since Port Arthur.