Australia to Implement National Gun Register

Picture of guns on display at the Shot Fair Brasil, an arms exhibition held at the Expoville Conventions and Exhibitions Centre in Joinville, Santa Catarina State, Brazil, on August 5, 2022. (Photo by Albari ROSA / AFP) Photo by ALBARI ROSA/AFP via Getty Images

Australia will create a national firearms register, linking information about firearm ownership from every state in the country to a central hub.

The news follows a meeting of the National Cabinet between Australian state and territory leaders with the prime minister on Dec. 6.

The National Cabinet will work together to make the firearms register fully operational within four years.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese claimed the reform will keep Australia’s first responders and community “safer,” hailing it as the “most significant improvement in Australia’s firearms management systems” in almost 30 years.

“While Australia has some of the strongest firearms laws in the world, the register will address significant gaps and inconsistencies with the way firearms are managed across all jurisdictions,” Mr. Albanese said in a statement.

“The register will be a federated model—state data connects with a central hub data allowing near real-time information sharing across the country.”

Mr. Albanese linked the announcement to the anniversary of the police shooting in Wieambilla in regional Queensland on Dec. 12, 2022. The incident prompted calls for more coordination between gun licensing systems in multiple states.

“Ahead of the anniversary of the police shooting in Wieambilla, National Cabinet agreed to implement a National Firearms Register—delivering on an outstanding reform from the Port Arthur massacre response in 1996,” he said.

The federal government will assist the states to fund the reforms, aimed at providing “enduring benefits for decades to come.”

In a release last week, Shooters Union Australia President Graham Park raised concerns about the cost of a national register and said, “Australia has a politics problem, not a gun problem.”

“Realistically, a separate federal register is going to cost a lot of money, which is going to cost a lot of money which is badly needed elsewhere, while not actually making Australians any safer,” he said.

“The various state vehicle licensing/registration systems manage to communicate seamlessly with each other, and have been able to for decades; we think it’s reasonable the firearms registries be able to do that too.”

Mr. Park said there are about a million licensed gun owners in Australia from all walks of life—from “farmers and tradies to doctors, lawyers and even journalists.”

About “99.9 percent of them are law-abiding people who are, I promise, just as horrified by criminals murdering people as you are,” Mr. Park said.

In 2022, Mr. Albanese flagged the concept of a national firearms register following the Wieambilla ambush that claimed the lives of two young police officers and a neighbour.

In June 2023, the prime minister again raised the possible reform to correspond with the release of letters written by a man who lost his family in Australia’s Port Arthur Massacre, Walter Mikac.

The attorney general and police ministers agreed to present options for a new national firearms register to be considered by the National Cabinet, Mr. Albanese explained in June.

“What happened to Walter Mikac should never happen again. That’s why we’re working on a new national firearms register,” Mr. Albanese said on X.

Attorney General Mark Dreyfus welcomed the decision of the National Cabinet to establish the register, describing it as a “landmark reform” and a “great step forward,” in a post to X on Dec. 6.