Australia’s parliament voted for sweeping gun law reforms and a crackdown on hate speech, a month after two gunmen shot 15 people dead at a Jewish festival on Bondi Beach.
Both bills were passed by the House of Representatives and Senate in a special session on Tuesday. The gun reform measures include a national gun procurement process and new checks on gun license applications.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the gunmen in Bondi would not have legally had access to firearms if such a law had been in place before the attack, the country’s worst mass shooting in decades.
The governing Labor senators were supported on the anti-hate bill by Liberal lawmakers, whose coalition partners abstained.
After last month’s mass shooting, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came under great pressure for not doing 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 law. Introducing the reforms, Burke said that individuals with “hate in their hearts and guns in their hands” carried out the 14 December attack.
The father of the father-son duo allegedly behind the attack legally owns six firearms, while his son is on the radar of intelligence agencies.
The gun reform bill, which cleared the House of Representatives by 96 votes to 45, includes stricter importation and firearms importation provisions to improve the sharing of information between intelligence agencies on people trying to get a gun license.
The buyback scheme will target “excess and newly restricted firearms”, Burke said, reducing the country’s four million registered guns.
Burke added that it “surprised most Australians” to learn that the country there were several weapons produced before the 1996 Port Arthur attackwhere a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania.
That attack, the nation’s worst mass shooting, prompting the then government to introduce some of the strictest gun control in the world. The new law will bring some of the most significant changes to Australia’s gun laws since then.
Hate speech reforms were originally included in an omnibus bill with gun reforms but the government split the legislation last week after the Liberal-National opposition coalition and the Greens said they would vote.
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 freedom of speech and said the legislation was not clearly defined, among other things, while the Greens said they would not support it unless changes were made to protect all minorities and legitimate protest.
But on Tuesday, Liberal 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 were “stepping forward to fix legislation” that the government had “failed to manage”, he said in a statement, adding that the bill was “tightened, strengthened and rightly focused on keeping Australians safe”.
The bill includes provisions that ban groups deemed to be spreading hatred and introduce harsher penalties for preachers who promote violence. It is subject to review every two years by the parliamentary joint committee. The opposition will also be consulted on the listing and delisting of extremist organizations.
The bill was passed by the lower house and in the evening it cleared the Senate – by 38 votes to 22 – after the National Party abstained while their Liberal coalition partners voted in favor. The Greens voted against, saying it would have a “chilling effect” on political debate and protest.