Australia Announces Gun Buyback Scheme in Response to Sydney Beach Attack

Australia’s prime minister has said that New South Wales will begin a gun buyback scheme in November as part of a nationwide response to last year’s deadly Sydney beach attack. The gun buyback scheme will be accompanied by tighter checks for gun licences and a crackdown on hate, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Sunday.

The measures targeting firearm ownership are a reaction to the December 14, 2025, gun attack at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, New South Wales, that killed 15 people. The alleged gunmen used powerful firearms that were legally obtained. Australians owned a record 4.1 million firearms last year, the government has said, with more than 1.1 million of those in New South Wales, the country’s most populous state.

New South Wales’ gun buyback scheme is scheduled to start on November 2, and will see the state offer owners up to 1,000 Australian dollars ($700) per handgun or rifle handed in. “Australians are quite rightly proud of our gun laws, but the fact is there are more guns in Australia today than there were at the time of dealing with the Port Arthur gun buyback,” Albanese said in televised remarks. In the 1996 Port Arthur attack, a lone gunman killed 35 people and led to sweeping restrictions on ownership of automatic and semi-automatic firearms in Australia. Since the Bondi Beach attack, New South Wales state has introduced its own laws limiting gun ownership to four guns per person.