Katter: Gun buyback targets farmers, not real criminals

Queensland state MP Robbie Katter has taken aim at the federal government's proposed gun buyback scheme, calling it a politically motivated distraction that will do nothing to prevent attacks like the Bondi massacre while imposing a near-billion-dollar cost on taxpayers.

The member for Traeger told 4BC Brisbane that gun policy must be driven by data and evidence rather than emotion, arguing that licensed firearm owners are being scapegoated for violence overwhelmingly linked to illegal weapons.

"Cracking down on licensed firearm owners doesn't help — almost all the activity you see in gun deaths has nothing to do with them," Katter said. "All the activity in this area is from illicit firearms, which exist completely separate to everything you're targeting."

Katter pointed to the United Kingdom's complete handgun ban as a cautionary tale. Within six years of the prohibition, handgun deaths in Britain had doubled — a result he said exposes the flawed logic of blanket restrictions. "You can't say all this stuff works," he said.

He was equally critical of the resource burden the scheme would place on police. Sending compliance letters to farmers and sporting shooters, he argued, pulls uniformed officers away from frontline duties. "They're not on the beat trying to catch kids breaking into your house — they're occupying their time sending me two or three letters making sure I'm compliant."

On the cost side, Katter said the buyback carries a price tag approaching one billion dollars and has already punched a hole in New South Wales's $1.2 billion firearms industry — without delivering any meaningful safety improvement.

Rather than a new national scheme, Katter said investment should go toward fixing Queensland's existing gun registry, which he described as paper-based, inaccurate, and long overdue for digitisation. The firearms industry has flagged modernising the system as a top priority for more than a decade.

"We'd love more transparency," he said. "Make it digital so it's real time and you can see we're already doing the right thing." Instead, he said, governments opted for a second national registry that would layer one unreliable database on top of another.

Katter also took issue with the political environment around firearm ownership, saying licensed gun owners — many of them farmers and regional workers for whom firearms are a practical tool — are routinely dismissed in state and federal parliaments. "You're treated like a pariah in Brisbane or Canberra. You're some hillbilly nitwit that doesn't understand," he said.

The debate has intensified in the wake of the Bondi attack, with the New South Wales government firmly backing the buyback. Queensland, along with several other states and territories, has so far declined to commit.