10/09/2026
Australiaâs National Fi****ms Agreement has rested for 30 years on a single proposition: that fi***rm ownership is a privilege, not a right, and that the overriding consideration in our fi***rms laws must be public safety.
Speaker, our Police Commissioner told this Government in the plainest possible terms what that means in practice.
Commissioner Adams wrote to Minister Ellis saying: "public safety must take precedence over the privilege of fi***rms ownership."
She went further, warning fi***rms "present a real and increasing threat to both the public and our officers."
The Government and others argue that law-abiding, licensed fi***rm owners are not the problem, and that a cap unfairly punishes people who have done nothing wrong.
Speaker, that argument misses the point entirely, because it assumes a fi***rm stays in the hands of the person it was lawfully issued to.
It does not.
Fi****ms theft is now the principal way legally-owned guns become illegal guns in this country.
Research from the Australia Institute found more than 44,000 fi***rms were stolen across Australia in the past 21 years, including 9,000 since 2020 â on that data, a gun is stolen in this country roughly every four hours.
That tells us the more legal guns there are, the more can be stolen and become illegal guns.
The more fi***rms concentrated in a single location, the greater the potential reward for someone seeking to steal them.
It is not that law-abiding owners are the problem.
The more fi***rms sitting in any one place the larger and more attractive that collection becomes to thieves.
And of course the greater the chance those fi***rms end up in the wrong hands.
Introducing a cap is not a slur on lawful fi***rms owners.
It reduces the size of the pool available to be stolen, diverted, and misused, and thatâs directly in line with the advice of our police - the very people we are asking to face those guns.
I support this amendment, and I would urge the Government to please take the Police Commissioner's advice.
