Australia’s parliament has voted in favour of tighter gun control and hate speech reform a month after the Bondi Beach massacre sent shockwaves through the country.
Bills relating to sweeping gun law reforms and a crackdown on hate speech passed the House of Representatives and Senate at a special sitting late on Tuesday.
The gun reform measures include a national gun buyback scheme and new checks on firearm licence applications.
Tony Burke, Home Affairs Minister, explained that the gunmen would not have had legal access to firearms if such legislation had existed before the attack.
Burke told parliament that the assailants, who killed 15 people on December 14, had "hate in their hearts and guns in their hands."
The father, who was allegedly involved in the attack, legally owned six firearms. His son was known to Australian intelligence agencies.
The gun control bill includes stricter firearm import controls and measures to improve information sharing between intelligence agencies on people attempting to obtain gun licences.
Burke said that the buyback scheme would reduce the four million "surplus and newly restricted firearms" registered in the country.
The minister also pointed out that the country now has more firearms than it did before the 1996 Port Arthur attack, in which a gunman killed 35 people in Tasmania, a fact which “comes as a shock to most Australians".
The Tasmania attack marked the country’s worst such mass shooting, and resulted in the former government introducing some of the strictest gun controls in the world.
The gun control laws passed with the support of the Greens party despite opposition from the opposition conservative Liberal-National coalition. The anti-hate laws passed with support from the Liberal party.
Liberals leader Sussan Ley, who previously claimed that the bill was "unsalvageable", on Tuesday announced that agreement had been reached between her party and the government on a diluted version.
In a statement, she claimed that the Liberals had "stepped up to fix legislation" that had been "mishandled" by the government, and that the amended bill had been "narrowed, strengthened and properly focused on keeping Australians safe".
This new bill includes measures to ban groups that spread hate, subject to a review every two years by a joint parliamentary committee.
She added that the government will liaise with the opposition on the listing and delisting of extremist organisations.
