Kellie Sloane as NSW Opposition Leader has called the gun buyback "absolute bulls**t," arguing it will not prevent another Bondi-style attack, that it targets law-abiding farmers and sporting shooters rather than terrorists or organised criminals, and that it functions as a political smokescreen for failures on security and social cohesion. She has emphasised that the real enemy is violent Islamist extremist terrorism and hate, not licensed owners, and has noted that criminals and would-be terrorists are not going to walk into a police station and surrender weapons. She has also spoken strongly about the antisemitic character of the Bondi attack and the need to confront rising antisemitism.
The Bondi attack of 14 December 2025 was an Islamist terrorist attack (Islamic State-inspired) deliberately targeting a Jewish Hanukkah celebration. Official accounts, charges, and early statements recognised the ideology, the antisemitic motive, the IS flags, and the IEDs. Critics of the subsequent firearms measures, including Sloane, argue that the policy response has disproportionately emphasised numerical limits and a buyback of licensed firearms while the deeper problems: radicalisation, the ideology that drove the attack, and any security or licensing failures that allowed a licensed owner to acquire the weapons used, receive less sustained focus.
The cars-and-trucks analogy is a standard and coherent counter-argument in these debates. Vehicle-ramming attacks have been used repeatedly in Europe and elsewhere (Nice 2016, Berlin Christmas market 2016, and others). No serious jurisdiction responded by banning or heavily restricting private ownership of cars and trucks, because those vehicles have overwhelming legitimate uses and the problem is the intent and radicalisation of the attacker, not the existence of the tool. The same logic is applied by critics to firearms: licensed ownership for farming, pest control, sport, and hunting is widespread and lawful in Australia; restricting the number a compliant licensee may hold does not address a determined terrorist or criminal who is already prepared to break the law. Firearms are already far more tightly regulated than vehicles for historical and practical reasons, but the analogy still highlights the difference between regulating a means and confronting the motive and the people who choose violence.
In short, Sloane is making a means-versus-motive argument that many opponents of the current scheme share: the attack was driven by Islamist extremism and antisemitism; reducing the legal holdings of law-abiding owners is not a reliable or proportionate response to that specific threat; and treating it primarily as a "gun numbers" problem risks missing the harder work on ideology, radicalisation, and targeted security. That critique has more political space now than the equivalent arguments did in the immediate aftermath of Port Arthur in 1996, partly because of the longer timeline and the fact that only NSW has so far fully committed to the hardest measures. So, more time to fight it, by the legal measures outlined at the blog today. Fortunately, the culture of 1996 that allowed Howard to do the damage he did no longer exists.