The New South Wales gun buyback begins on 2 November, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed, marking Australia’s most substantial firearms reduction effort since Port Arthur nearly three decades ago. The scheme is a direct response to the attack at Bondi Beach on 14 December, in which 15 people were killed.
How the New South Wales gun buyback will work
The programme runs in two phases. Phase one, starting 2 November, offers owners up to AUS$1,000 per firearm, with rates varying by type. According to i24NEWS, revolvers attract the full AUS$1,000, semi-automatic handguns AUS$850, and air rifles AUS$450. A second phase is set to begin in early 2027, targeting higher-value firearms worth more than AUS$3,000, with compensation capped at AUS$10,000 per weapon.
Albanese and New South Wales Premier Chris Minns announced the measure together, with both the federal and state governments providing backing. The buyback sits within a January package that also included tighter gun licence checks and a crackdown on hate speech. New South Wales additionally imposed a cap of four legally owned firearms per individual under state law.
Australia recorded 4.1 million registered firearms last year, more than 1.1 million of them in New South Wales. The firearms used in the December attack were legally obtained, a fact that accelerated political momentum behind the response. ‘Australians are quite rightly proud of our gun laws,’ Albanese said in televised remarks, ‘but the fact is there are more guns in Australia today than there were at the time of dealing with the Port Arthur gun buyback.’
The attack that changed the political calculus
The Bondi Beach attack on 14 December was carried out by a father and son. According to LCANews, Sajid Akram, 50, was shot and killed by police during the assault. His son, Naveed Akram, 24, survived and has not yet entered pleas. The BBC reports that Naveed Akram faces 59 offences in total, including 15 counts of murder and one count of committing a terrorist act. Police believe the pair were inspired by Islamic State.
The scale of the attack, and the speed with which legally held weapons were turned on a crowd, gave the reform its political weight. It is one thing to propose tighter controls in the abstract; it is another when the weapons in question passed every existing check before being used to kill 15 people.
What Port Arthur achieved, and what comes next
The 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania killed 35 people. The buyback that followed removed roughly 650,000 firearms from circulation and is credited with a sustained reduction in mass shootings in Australia in the years that followed. The current buyback has a different starting point: a country where registered firearm numbers have climbed back above the levels that existed before Port Arthur.
Whether the New South Wales gun buyback approaches that scale depends entirely on participation rates, which will not be clear for months. The two-phase design, stretching into 2027, is partly an acknowledgement of that complexity: higher-value weapons require a different conversation, and different compensation, than a standard handgun or air rifle.
The scheme does not exist in isolation. Tighter licence checks and the individual ownership cap of four firearms are already in place under state law. The buyback adds a financial incentive to reduce the overall stock. Prime Minister Albanese’s office has pointed to 2 November as the formal start of that process.
