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Australia’s lower house of parliament has voted in favour of a national gun buyback programme, firearms and hate speech reforms, a month after the deadly shooting at Bondi Beach.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the gunmen would not have legally had access to firearms if had such legislation was in place prior to the attack.
The individuals who killed 15 people on 14 December had “hate in their hearts and guns in their hands,” Burke told parliament.
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. Both bills will now move to the Senate and are expected to be passed later on Tuesday.
The gun reform bill, which was passed by the House of Representatives by a vote of 96 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 such mass shooting, had prompted the then government to introduce some of the world’s strictest gun controls.
The lower house of parliament also passed reforms to hate speech on Tuesday aimed at tackling antisemitism.
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 them.
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 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.
