10/12/2025
Whatever you think of former Prime Minister John Howard or the Liberal Party, I will forever be grateful to Australia’s 25th PM for making the deeply unpopular decision to take on the gun lobby in Australia in 1996.
The night after the Port Arthur massacre Howard stepped up. He introduced a government gun buy back scheme which saw the government buy back (and subsequent destruction of) more than 700,000 Australian owned guns. And he essentially forced the states to sign an agreement for nationwide gun law reforms.
“The National Fi****ms Programme Implementation Act 1996, restricts the private ownership of semi-automatic rifles, semi-automatic shotguns and pump-action shotguns as well as introducing uniform fi****ms licensing.”
We are a safer country because of that call. That image is a photo of Howard addressing a PRO-gun rally to explain his decision.
Our children can go to school, students can wander around their university campuses, young people can gather at music festivals, our families can go to church or to the mall or the cinema knowing that the chances an armed assailant is going to turn up is all but impossible.
We have John Howard to thank for that.
I feel the same way today about Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Today the Social Media Age Restriction comes into effect. Children under 16 will no longer be able to open accounts on platforms which have shown not just a blatant disregard for their wellbeing but instead a manipulative and exploitative agenda. Platforms which happily show kids people killing themselves, sexual assaults, p**n, and highly targeted advertising and content designed to prey on young people's vulnerabilities about their appearance.
It won't be perfect. We all know that. But what kind of society are we if we continued to sit back and do nothing while our children pay such an enormous price?
So I'm grateful. And I'm proud of Australia to be the first country to step up and say ENOUGH.
