Australia’s parliament has voted for sweeping gun law reforms and a crackdown on hate speech, a month after two attackers shot 15 people dead at a Jewish festival at Bondi Beach.
Both bills passed the House of Representatives and Senate at a special sitting late on Tuesday. The gun reform measures include a national gun buyback scheme and new checks on firearm licence applications.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the Bondi gunmen would not legally have had access to firearms if such a law had been in place prior to the attack, the country’s worst mass shooting in decades.
Governing Labor senators were backed on the anti-hate bill by Liberal lawmakers, whose coalition partners abstained.
After last month’s mass shooting, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came under huge pressure for not having done enough to prevent the attack in the first place, amid growing fears of antisemitism in the Jewish community.
Politicians were recalled two weeks early to debate the legislation. Introducing the reforms, Burke said individuals with “hate in their hearts and guns in their hands” had carried out the 14 December attack.
The father in the father-son duo allegedly behind the attack legally owned six firearms, while his son had been on the radar of intelligence agencies.
The gun reform bill, which cleared the House of Representatives by 96 votes to 45, includes stricter firearm import controls and provisions to improve information sharing between intelligence agencies on people trying to obtain gun licences.
The buyback scheme will target “surplus and newly restricted firearms”, Burke said, reducing the country’s four million registered guns.
Burke added that it “comes as a shock to most Australians” to know that the country has more firearms that it did before the 1996 Port Arthur attack, in which a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania.
That attack, the country’s worst mass shooting, had prompted the then government to introduce some of the world’s strictest gun controls. The new law will bring in some of the most significant changes to Australia’s guns laws since then.
The hate speech reforms had originally been included in an omnibus bill with the gun reforms but the government split the legislation last week after both the Liberal-National opposition coalition and the Greens said they would vote against.
While the Labor government has a comfortable majority in the lower house, it needs the support of other parties in the Senate.
Coalition MPs cited concerns about free speech and said the legislation was not clearly defined, among other things, while the Greens said they could not support it unless changes were made to protect all minorities and legitimate protest.
But on Tuesday, Liberals leader Sussan Ley, who last week said the bill was “unsalvageable”, said her party had reached agreement with the government on a watered-down version.
The Liberals had “stepped up to fix legislation” that the government had “mishandled”, she said in a statement, adding that the bill had been “narrowed, strengthened and properly focused on keeping Australians safe”.
The bill includes provisions that will ban groups deemed to spread hate and introduce tougher penalties for preachers who advocate violence. It will be subject to a review every two years by a parliamentary joint committee. The opposition will also be consulted on the listing and delisting of extremist organisations.
The bill was passed by the lower house and late in the evening it cleared the Senate – by 38 votes to 22 – after the National Party abstained while their Liberal coalition partners voted in favour. The Greens voted against, saying it would have a “chilling effect” on political debate and protest.
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