Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Gun reform is certainly not the whole solution to keeping us safer, but it is a crucial first step taking away one of the most dangerous tools used to cause harm. It is a step that I would have assumed uncontroversial in the wake of the tragic events in Bondi. That is why this bill, the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Firearms and Customs Laws) Bill 2026, has the support of the Australian Greens.

Right now Australia's firearms laws contain serious loopholes that allow gun owners to endlessly recycle the same justification to accumulate dozens, and in some cases hundreds, of guns. No sensible regime should allow what are basically private arsenals of this scale to exist in our suburbs. It is entirely indefensible. A farmer needs access to a gun, sure—one gun, a few guns—for legitimate purposes. But 100 guns—why? To the opposition senators opposing these reforms, I ask a simple question: why does a farmer need 100 guns?

This isn't just about whether ownership is technically lawful; it is about scale, concentration and risk. It is also about the very real possibility of firearms being stolen or misused. Every year more than 2,000 guns are stolen. That is one gun every four hours. Most illegal guns come from thefts of legally owned firearms. To put it simply, the more legal guns there are, the more illegal guns end up in the wrong hands.

We cannot talk honestly about gun reform without recognising the warning signs that have too often gone unheard. For decades women and domestic violence survivors have warned us about the danger of firearms in violent homes. They've told us again and again that access to guns escalates threats into fatalities, yet our own gun laws have remained too weak and too fragmented.

We also cannot ignore the influence of the gun lobby in this country. Per capita it spends amounts comparable to, and by some measures even higher than, the NRA in the United States. Just like in the US, that influence has worked to stall reform and normalise dangerous levels of gun ownership in Australia. How many debates do we have to have in this place where major party and One Nation politicians argue positions against the interests of their own communities because of dodgy political donations? Fossil fuels, gambling, guns—take the donations away and then honestly tell me that you would oppose these reforms.

We are watching, in real time, the consequences of weak gun laws elsewhere: rising political violence, extremism becoming normalised and mass shootings being treated as inevitable. When Australians see mass shootings in America, we look at the lack of action from politicians in the pockets of the gun lobby and thank our lucky stars that we don't have politicians like that here. Well, we do. A mass shooting happens and we have politicians opposing gun laws while accepting donations from the gun lobby. Is this the Australian Senate or is this America? They are not values that Australians accept. That is not the future Australians want.

It is time our policy and our leadership catch up. The Greens have always consistently recognised that legitimate needs must be respected in gun law reform and that any reform must reflect that reality. But the Greens do not accept and do not believe the Australian public accepts that any one private citizen has a genuine reason to own dozens or hundreds of guns. The buyback contained in this bill will begin to right this course.

When I think about what happened in Bondi, I feel a deep mix of grief and anger. I feel grief for the lives lost, grief for the families and communities who will never be the same and anger—real anger—that once again we are here, after another act of devastating violence, asking ourselves what we could've done differently. I also feel an overwhelming responsibility, and the Greens feel an overwhelming responsibility, not to reach for platitudes or hide behind symbolism but to act decisively and seriously in a way that genuinely reduces the risk of this happening again.

If we mean what we say when we say, 'This isn't us,' then we must be prepared to take difficult, concrete steps, and taking dangerous weapons off our streets and out of our communities isn't radical; it's rational. It is the most basic act of harm prevention and it is an essential first step in stopping violence like what we witnessed in Bondi.

In Victoria, my home state, there are around 960,000 registered firearms that are owned by more than 236,000 people. These numbers are higher than before the Port Arthur massacre. As the daughter of a fourth-generation farmer, I understand deeply that there are legitimate reasons for firearm ownership in this country. Farmers participate in legitimate regulated activities, and no-one is disputing this. But I feel alarmed when I look at this data because what we are seeing goes far beyond legitimate use.

We know from Port Arthur what decisive gun reform can achieve. After that tragedy, Australia acted and it saved lives. Recently, our neighbours in Aotearoa showed that governments could act swiftly and with moral courage after an Islamophobic mass shooting was carried out by a white Australian. Those reforms sent a clear message: the tools of mass violence do not belong in our society. What a shame it is, then, that this reform is not treated as a shared national responsibility today. What a shame that the National Party would rather engage in culture wars than commit, across party lines, to getting unnecessary guns out of our communities and off our streets. This issue should not be partisan.

Today, I also recognise—after work from the Greens, my colleagues—the agreement to establish a national firearms safety council as another step towards meaningful gun safety, and I want to thank my colleagues Senator Shoebridge and Senator Larissa Waters for their leadership in that area. These reforms must be our first step, but, of course, we can't pretend that they're the only ones. When I look at my home state of Victoria, particularly in the weeks of horror after Bondi, I feel something else. I feel pride—pride in its diversity and pride in its resilience. In the days and weeks after Bondi, I saw communities come together across faiths and across cultures. Solidarity matters. It reminds us that removing the tools of violence must go hand in hand with confronting hatred, extremism and social fracture before they take hold.

Let me be very clear. Suppressing democratic freedoms and protecting some groups over others or vilifying migrants will not make us safer. It will do quite the opposite. Knee-jerk reactions from Labor that follow the coalition down this twisted path of culture wars and divisions do not make us safer. They will not make us safer. So, yes, we must take back firearms as tools of destruction and violence and chaos, but we must make sure that what we do today isn't just symbolic but serious, grounded in evidence, in courage and in a refusal to accept the slow drift towards violence as normal.