Sean Bell (NSW, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

To every law-abiding firearm owner and to every Australian watching what is happening right now: One Nation's position on this legislation, on this policy issue, is very straightforward. One Nation supports law-abiding gun owners. One Nation believes we should be punishing extremists and not punishing law-abiding gun owners. The Albanese Labor government has dumped on us this major gun reform package, the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Firearms and Customs Laws) Bill 2026, and they are expecting everyone to simply accept this while ignoring the normal processes of scrutiny.

The truth is the people who will be affected by this first will not be terrorists or criminals; it will be you. It will be farmers. It will be regional Australians. It will be pest controllers. It will be sporting shooters. It'll be collectors. It will be licence holders—law-abiding citizens who have never committed a crime in their lives and who would never commit a crime. They will be the ones who will be punished. These are the people that do the training. They keep their firearms secure, they comply with inspections and they live by the law. To those people: know that you are not the problem and we have your back.

One Nation knows that criminals do not line up for gun buybacks. Criminals do not register illegal weapons. Criminals do not care about new paperwork, new rules or new announcements. They operate in the shadows, through trafficking, importation and organised crime, and they will keep doing it while the government is focused on quick headlines instead of criminals. I'll say it again. One Nation's position is straightforward. We support law-abiding gun owners. One Nation believes we need to punish extremists, not shooters. We need to punish the root cause of the things that happened in Bondi—radical Islamic extremism—not law-abiding Australians who have never committed a crime in their life.

If the Albanese Labor government is genuinely concerned about public safety, it needs to be honest about this. It needs to be honest about what is driving the violence that we saw in Bondi and this extremism. We should be confronting it directly. We should not be dodging it with vague language and political slogans. Unfortunately, what we've seen is Labor's instinct has been to punish people who are already doing the right thing—law-abiding Australians who have never committed and never would commit a crime in their life.

The other issue here is One Nation is not prepared to sign you up for a blank cheque. We actually don't know how much this is going to cost. We know that a lot of the states are rejecting this proposal. We know that Queensland, the Northern Territory and Tasmania are not on board with this.

Here is what One Nation wants instead: we want policies that actually target criminals and protect the public. That is how you improve safety, not by scapegoating farmers and licence holders, not by punishing law-abiding Australians and not by pretending criminals and terrorists will comply with a gun buyback. Again, to the law-abiding firearm community: One Nation hears you, and we will stand with you. And to the wider public: do not be fooled by this farce. Do not be fooled, because real safety comes from confronting the cause of the threats and enforcing laws against criminals, not cracking down on the people who are already abiding by the law. One Nation opposes this buyback, and we will keep fighting for common sense and fairness. We will keep standing with farmers, regional Australians, pest controllers, sporting shooters and collectors. We are not about to support a policy where we don't know how many billions it's going to cost—and it's in the billions. How many regional hospitals could we be funding?