On a summer evening in December 2022, two young constables – Matthew Arnold and Rachel McCrow – drove into the rural Queensland town of Wieambilla to follow up on a routine missing person inquiry.
Within minutes, they and a neighbour, Alan Dare, were shot dead by extremists who had lain in wait.
The killings sent shockwaves through the nation. They also revived a decades-old question: why, nearly 30 years after Port Arthur, does Australia still lack a national firearms register?
A register never realised
Port Arthur was meant to settle the issue. The 1996 massacre, in which 35 people were killed, triggered one of the most sweeping firearms reforms in the world. Then–prime minister John Howard’s National Firearms Agreement (NFA) banned automatic and semi-automatic weapons, introduced strict licensing and storage rules, and led to the buyback of more than 650,000 guns.
Tucked into the fine print of the NFA was another goal: a National Firearms Register (NFR), linking every state and territory’s database into a unified system. That part never happened.
While bans, licensing rules and buybacks came swiftly, the register fell by the wayside. States and territories kept their own systems, and police lost the ability to know, in real time, who owned what.
One nation, eight registries
Australia now has over four million registered firearms, owned by almost one million licence holders. Distribution varies. Tasmania and the Northern Territory have one gun for every four residents, while New South Wales alone accounts for more than 1.1 million firearms.
But the registries remain fragmented. Police in the ACT cannot instantly verify a firearm status in NSW without manual workarounds. As former Queensland Police Union president Ian Leavers put it: “What I believe we need is a nationalised system which would record you being a licence holder, any weapons that you acquire, dispose of, have in your possession or that have been reported stolen [and] any offences which have been committed that relate to firearms.”
An attempt at national coordination already exists – the Australian Firearms Information Network (AFIN), run by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission – but it has been described by officers as “chunky and cumbersome”.
Where the cracks show
The risks are not theoretical. Between 1994 and 2000, more than 25,000 firearms were reported stolen in Australia – over 4,000 a year. Between 2020 and 2024, another 9,000 disappeared, mostly from residential homes, with Queensland accounting for a third.
Registered guns continue to feature in violent crime. Between 2011 and 2016, the Australian Institute of Criminology found that in homicide cases where licensing status could be determined, one in four involved a registered firearm.
Wieambilla, Porepunkah, and political will
Every mass shooting brings fresh urgency. Port Arthur sparked the NFA. Wieambilla brought the register back to the fore.
Then, in August 2025, two Victoria Police officers were killed in Porepunkah by an extremist aligned with the “sovereign citizen” movement. The reaction was swift. Within 24 hours, Labor MP Dan Repacholi and Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie – rarely aligned on firearms – issued a joint call to accelerate the NFR.
“There is something particularly sombre about such a terrible event being the catalyst for such significant change.”
-Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus KC
“There is something particularly sombre about such a terrible event being the catalyst for such significant change,” wrote Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus KC. “A National Firearms Register will ensure police across all Australian jurisdictions have timely and accurate information to assess any firearms risk posed.”
The national plan
After years of inertia, momentum turned into commitment. In December 2023, National Cabinet agreed to establish the NFR, aiming for full operational capacity by mid-2028.
The federal government committed $161 million – later increased to over $230 million – to fund system upgrades and data remediation. The implementation program officially began in July 2024.
Dreyfus called it “the most substantial advancement in Australia’s gun safety regime since 1996”.
The promise is real-time situational awareness for frontline police. “The National Firearms Database will be a central hub of data, allowing real-time information sharing across the country,” said Alex Caruana, president of the Australian Federal Police Association, in a media release. “It means that a police officer stationed in Broome, Western Australia, can retrieve almost immediate data relating to firearms registered in Tasmania.”
State-level snags
But commitment on paper is easier than delivery in practice. Queensland has yet to start registry digitisation. South Australia’s registry faces months-long permit backlogs. The Northern Territory still requires five photographs per firearm.
Cleaning up legacy data is another hurdle. An industry assessment released under FOI found that close to 80 per cent of costs will go to upgrading jurisdictional systems and cleaning records, raising concerns that the 2028 deadline could slip.
And, naturally, privacy remains a sticking point. In 2022, Western Australia’s police minister accidentally published location data that could be reverse-engineered to identify firearm owners’ addresses. For critics, it raised uncomfortable questions about centralisation and data security.
Industry unease, political consensus
Despite technical and political challenges, momentum now appears irreversible. The project has bipartisan backing and strong support from police associations.
Industry groups remain less enthusiastic.
As James Walsh, CEO of the Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia (SIFA), argues: “There is little to no evidence that the NFR enhances public safety over existing state and territory registries and the Australian Firearms Information Network. Any firearm registry, national or otherwise, only tracks the movements of legal firearms, it does not provide any intelligence on illegal and unregistered firearms, which are responsible for the majority of criminal misuse.”
Still, SIFA has adopted a pragmatic stance, signalling cooperation to avoid excessive disruption to licensed businesses.
Western Australia’s own course
Not all reform flows through Canberra. Western Australia has undertaken its own overhaul. The state’s Firearms Act had not been comprehensively rewritten in half a century. Police Minister Paul Papalia has suggested the existing law failed to place public safety at the centre – a failing the new law seeks to correct.
WA’s reforms include a $64.3 million buyback program and have been promoted as the “toughest firearms laws” in the country.
Walter Mikac AM, who lost his family at Port Arthur and founded the Alannah & Madeline Foundation, endorsed the changes: “These new laws will significantly reduce the number of firearms in the community, and I expect most Australians agree that is a good thing.”
Unfinished business
Nearly 30 years on from Port Arthur, the NFR remains the unfinished business of Australian gun reform. The promise is straightforward: a single source of truth on who owns what, available instantly to any officer in the field.
The execution is anything but.
Delivery will hinge not only on political will but on the slow, technical grind of aligning eight different registries, cleaning decades of inconsistent records, and securing public confidence in a centralised system.
Risks are abundant and obvious: delays, data breaches, or uneven implementation across states. Yet the momentum this time feels harder to reverse.
With bipartisan support, significant federal funding, and the weight of recent tragedies, the register has become less a matter of if than when.
What has changed is clarity of purpose. As Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus put it, “when police have to walk up a driveway, or knock on a door, they know what weapons may be held by those waiting inside”.
