Canberra is set to join Australia’s sweeping new gun buyback, a move Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says is aimed at preventing a repeat of the Sydney shooting spree that left 15 people dead at a Jewish festival.
Albanese said his centre-left government moved quickly after the 14 December gun attack at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration in New South Wales’ capital, introducing laws in January to underpin a buyback, tighten checks for firearms licences and intensify efforts to crack down on hate.
New South Wales, the nation’s most populous state, was the first to sign on to the plan, which is scheduled to begin on 2 November.
The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) — which includes the national capital, Canberra — has now agreed to run a comparable scheme, Albanese said, as part of an effort to ensure “an antisemitic terrorist attack like we saw at Bondi can’t happen again”.
Anthony Albanese enacted laws for a gun buyback following the Bondi Beach attack last December
“I thank the ACT Government for their collaboration as we work to take guns off our streets in order to better protect Australians,” he said in a statement.
According to that statement, the ACT has 23,000 guns and more than 7,000 firearms licence holders. It did not specify when the ACT buyback would start, and Albanese’s office did not immediately respond to a request for details.
Police allege the Bondi Beach attack was carried out by a father and son inspired by Islamic State. Authorities have said they used high-powered firearms that were legally obtained. The surviving suspect has yet to enter pleas to multiple charges, including 15 counts of murder.
The federal government has said Australia recorded 4.1m firearms last year.
The coming buyback is expected to be the country’s largest since the campaign launched after the 1996 Port Arthur rampage in Tasmania, when a gunman killed 35 people.
