Albanese: Canberra to join Australia’s gun buy-back programme after Bondi attack

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced on Saturday that Australia's capital, Canberra, will participate in a gun buy-back program as a response to the shooting spree that killed 15 people at a Jewish festival in Sydney. The centre-left government enacted laws in January for the gun buy-back, stricter gun licence checks, and a crackdown on hate speech following the December 14 attack at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration.

The state of New South Wales, Australia's most populous, became the first to commit to the plan, which will commence on November 2. The Australian Capital Territory, home to the national capital Canberra, has agreed to a similar scheme in an effort to ensure that "an antisemitic terrorist attack like we saw at Bondi can’t happen again," Albanese stated in a statement.

Albanese expressed gratitude to the ACT Government for their collaboration as they work to remove guns from the streets to better protect Australians. The ACT has 23,000 guns and over 7,000 firearms licence holders, but the timeline for the ACT buy-back was not specified in the statement. The sources of the firearms used in the Bondi Beach attack, which were allegedly carried out by a father and son inspired by Islamic State, were powerful weapons legally obtained. The surviving suspect has yet to enter pleas to charges including 15 counts of murder.

Australia possesses a record 4.1 million firearms as of last year, according to the government. The gun buy-back will be the largest in Australia since a similar campaign following a 1996 rampage in Tasmania's Port Arthur, where a gunman killed 35 people.