Queensland will be left with “the weakest guns laws in Australia”, according to gun control advocates, after the premier rejected putting new restrictions on the number or type of firearms that people can own.
On Monday, David Crisafulli and the police minister, Dan Purdie, announced what they called the second part of a three-part policy response to the Bondi shootings.
Under the proposed changes to be introduced to parliament on Tuesday, only Australian citizens will be able to obtain a gun licence, with Purdie saying there would be some exceptions for “sporting shooters and for work, businesses [and] primary producers”.
He said the restriction would not be retroactive, meaning the reforms will not immediately revoke any current gun licences.
“We’re not looking [at] going back and doing an audit to try and find out how many on the register, what their citizen status is,” he said.
“Moving forward, when this is passed and proclaimed, if you apply for a licence, that’s when this will take effect”.
Queensland has rejected a planned national gun buyback sponsored by the prime minister, Anthony Albanese.
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Nor will it follow New South Wales in setting a maximum number of guns per licence holder. Laws passed in NSW on Christmas Eve capped the number of firearms recreational shooters can own at four, and farmers at 10, among other changes, including a ban on some rapid-fire weapons.
A senior advocacy adviser of the Alannah and Madeline Foundation, Stephen Bendle, said the gun control group, founded after the Port Arthur massacre, was “disappointed that the Queensland premier has put the demands of the firearm industry over the public safety of the Queensland community”.
“Queensland will have the weakest gun laws in Australia, despite the premier’s rhetoric,” he said.
“None of the initiatives announced today does anything to prevent a Bondi or Wieambilla tragedy.
“Firearm safety advocates have had 45 minutes’ discussion with the government since Bondi. We have been ignored in our calls for national consistency in gun reforms. The firearm industry have clearly carried the day in Queensland.”
If passed, the laws would create a mandatory minimum sentence for drive-by shootings, increase penalties for stealing firearms and ammunition and for trafficking guns, and create various new offences designed to prevent ownership of 3D-printed weapons.
They would also close a loophole the government says prevents the police investigating people who are planning a terror attack.
The laws would allow police to take into account a person’s criminal record when issuing a licence, even if a conviction was not recorded.
Crisafulli has repeatedly said that his priority in drafting the legislation was dealing with antisemitism, but that he also intended to make it easier to take firearms off “terrorists and criminals”.
The government will also introduce hate speech legislation which would give the attorney general the power to ban specific slogans, which the government has said would include the pro-Palestine protest chant “from the river to the sea”. A new offence will prevent the public distribution, publication, public display or public recitation of a proscribed phrase to cause menace, harassment or offence, with a maximum two-year jail sentence.
Civil liberties groups and the Greens described the move as “Orwellian” and an attack on free speech.
“The government is making itself the thought police. If they decide your words are offensive, you can go to jail for them,” Greens MP Michael Berkman said. “Is that the kind of democracy we want to live in?”
The vice-president of the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, Terry O’Gorman, said “banning or criminalising a catch-cry, especially in public protest situations merely because it may ‘cause offence’, is an affront to free speech rights which have quite properly been protected in Queensland since the dark days of the Bjelke-Petersen street march ban in 1977”.
Justice for Palestine is considering a legal challenge against Queensland’s new antisemitism legislation, according to spokesperson Remah Naji.
The premier will announce “part three” of the government’s response to the Bondi shootings on Tuesday.
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