The NSW emperor has no clothes

MPs still have time to wind back hastily imposed gun laws 

It simply beggars belief that NSW Premier Chris Minns absolutely cannot – or will not – accept his gun laws are deeply flawed. I’m not going to rehash the background or the awful aspects of those laws – every shooter in Australia knows them by this point – but it is incredibly telling that no other state has signed on to Minns’ laws after Bondi.

WA (which, I understand, basically called up Minns’ government and told them what laws they should introduce) have had their hated, legislated-in-bad-faith laws on the books for a couple of years now. Queensland and the Northern Territory have unequivocally rejected caps or recategorisations of firearms, saying they are not interested and the matter is not up for discussion. Victoria’s “rapid review” of the laws also rejected caps and recategorisations, South Australia has said its gun laws are fine, and even Tasmania, which has decided it might recategorise some guns after all (but not to the same extent as NSW and WA), has drawn the line at capping how many guns a licensed shooter can own.

That leaves the ACT, which is still debating what to do given it has realised that introducing NSW’s laws will mean more people with gun licences, as the families and friends of people with “too many” guns go and get a licence to become the legal owners of the “extra” guns.

This all ties into the shockingly irresponsible firearms “buyback” (and I use the quotes deliberately; the government cannot buy back something it never owned) which is, if implemented at Commonwealth level, going to cost multiple billions of dollars and alienate hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Australians, while doing nothing to address the actual causes of cultural disharmony and anti-social behaviour in Australia.

We commissioned an economic report which showed the cost for Victoria to participate in a gun “buyback” was going to be $437m in its first year alone and sent a copy to every MP in Victoria. To their credit, they read the report, discussed it with their own economic experts, and essentially agreed a buyback was an economically terrible idea, and one they weren't going to participate in.

We, alongside our industry partners SIFA, commissioned a similar report for NSW, which showed the NSW buyback would cost just under half a billion dollars purely in compensation for seized guns alone (the cost when admin etc was taken into account was nearly $1bn), and result in the loss of more than 440 full-time equivalent jobs; all while having no improvement in public safety.

Unlike Victoria, whose MPs considered the report and wisely decided spending hundreds of millions of dollars to punish people who hadn’t done anything wrong was a terrible idea, NSW appears to have simply ignored it – and everyone else pointing out how awful the laws are, how they are not backed by evidence, and how they’re going to cost insane amounts of money which are badly needed for healthcare, housing and infrastructure.

Shooters, Fishers and Farmers MP Mark Banasiak hit the primer squarely when he asked why, if Minns’ laws were so urgent they needed to be rammed through in the middle of the night at Christmas with no proper consultation, 95 percent of those laws had not yet been enacted six months later?

There’s clearly only one answer to that, but it would involve every MP who voted for those laws to admit something the rest of us have been able to see from the start: the emperor has no clothes and acknowledging that fact will subject them to an enormous amount of political scrutiny as well.

What they don’t seem to have realised is that they’re under scrutiny from the electorate now anyway, and even people who have no interest in firearms have seen how the whole thing played out and realised, “I could be next”.

It’s probably too late for the Minns ALP Cabinet MPs, especially in rural seats, but there’s still time ahead of the 2027 NSW state election for any other MP who voted for the laws to stand up and say, “I got it wrong, I am sorry, and I will vote to fix this and make things right.”

Will they? That depends on how many of their constituents – that’s you, NSW readers – make it clear to those MPs that attacking gun owners costs votes.

Graham Park is the President of Shooters Union Australia.