Today I rise to introduce the Constitution Amendment (Right to Possess and Carry Firearms) Bill 2025.

This bill seeks to enshrine in the Constitution of New South Wales the fundamental right to possess and carry firearms.

This bill protects this right much in the same way this Parliament did in 2024 when it passed an amendment to the New South Wales State Constitution to prohibit the sale of public water utilities to private operators.

If this Constitutional Amendment passes, further efforts to infringe on the rights to possess and carry firearms can only be by an Act of Parliament, meaning that future regulations set by the Minister or Police would be unable to curtail the rights of citizens and residents to possess and carry firearms.

Of course, when the Libertarian Party forms government we will enact a proper Constitution that can only be altered by a vote of the citizens of this state and … that Constitution would truly enshrine the right to own a firearm. This bill is the start of a long but important journey.

There is a diversity of opinion on many subjects in the world of libertarian philosophy. One area that unites us is our belief that individuals have a natural right to own a firearm. It is a deeply held principle. I hope to one day be re-elected to this place Mr President, but if I am not and if I had never made the case I make today, I would have considered my time here wasted.

The question of gun ownership in Australia has been a taboo – but in the post-Covid era and with escalating street crime I believe there is rising interest in the question of whether the state should restrict firearm ownership and enjoy a monopoly on firearms itself.

There have been diligent efforts in this NSW State Parliament and the Federal Parliament by others who are doing a sound job in resisting what seems like a slow but steady slide towards an entirely disarmed population.

Mr President, I intend to use this moment to make a full-throated defence of the constitutional right to own a firearm. Few Australians have heard the philosophical case. When I first came across these arguments two decades ago I changed my opinion. My hope is this is at least the beginning of more well-informed debate.

For too long the mention of guns has created an emotional knee-jerk reaction that spooks politicians and leads to poor policy. The mindless appeal to emotion needs to be replaced by an appeal to facts and logic.

What little debate there is around firearms in Australia often revolves around what are the reasonable needs of farmers, sportsmen, and hunters. These shooters are right to point out that they provide important services, have an excellent safety record, practice discipline and self-control, and suffer under needlessly burdensome regulations.

These are all good arguments, but they are only the beginning. The four principles I want to unpacked relate to:

An armed population is counterweight against tyranny
An armed population is a bulwark against an invasion
Firearms enhance personal safety
Fostering a sense of self-reliance spurs a broader culture of ingenuity and creativity.

The original case for the right to own a firearm is that government power is inherently expansionist and if unchecked will, over time, morph into a tyranny. The best way to permanently limit government power is for the citizens to have a counterweight to resist tyranny.

This argument can seem strange at first to people who have become comfortable in our peaceful and stable democracy.

Australia is not about to descend into a repressive regime any time soon, but that is not a reason for complacency. If we wait to resist until we have reached the precipice of tyranny then it be too late and without guns we’d be powerless.

The right to bear arms has deep roots, stretching back to the constitutional upheavals in Britain in the 17th Century. In 1689, the English Bill of Rights was enacted in response to the oppressive rule of James II, who had sought to increase his power by disarming his subjects. The English Bill of Rights explicitly granted Protestants the right to bear arms for their defence – that sectarian wording today grates but it is worth noting that 90 per cent plus of England at the time was Protestant so it was a near universal right..

The UK Bill of Rights was a clear acknowledgement that an armed populace serves as a safeguard against tyranny. If the citizens do have the ability to overthrow a state that grows too big and bossy then that will prevent the state from getting too big and bossy in the first place.

This English principle crossed the Atlantic, influencing the American colonies culminating in the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, upon which this proposed Constitutional Amendment unashamedly drew inspiration.

Neither the English Bill of Rights nor the American Second Amendment exists to ensure people can shoot pests, deer, or clay pigeons. The American Founding Fathers understood the right to bear arms was not merely about personal protection but about ensuring the people could resist state overreach.

When the Americans drafted their Bill of Rights at the top of the list was freedom of speech and freedom of religion etc … but the second on that list, the right to bear arms, is what underpins the first.

In 1787 future American president Thomas Jefferson said, ‘What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?’

History demonstrates repeatedly that governments when unchecked will overtime tend towards tyranny. The atrocities of the past all had a common culprit. Left-wingers point to the atrocities of right-wing dictatorships. Right-wingers point to the atrocities of left-wing dictatorships.

Libertarians more correctly, blame the state for the atrocities. Look up any of the vile dictatorships of the 20th Century – an immediate high priority was to disarm the population. Of course, they always claimed it was about public safety etc by those dictators knew that their power was locked in once they had a monopoly on firearms.

Even if the people were willingly disarmed by well-meaning leaders (like Australia a generation ago) it still leaves the public equally vulnerable to any future totalitarian shift. It should always be paramount to ensure the broader population can never be held captive by an all-powerful state.

The debate is not really ‘for or against’ guns – not even the most ardent anti-gun advocate is attempting to get rid of guns– the debate is about who should have the guns?

One option is that we concentrate all the weapons in the hands of the centralised state, give them an unchecked monopoly on power and then hope that we can trust them now and forever.

The other option is to allow power in the form of firearms to be more evenly distributed to avoid the excessive concentration of power in the hands of a few.

Even if you are confident that the next 10 governments will be wholesome, wise, and benevolent … eventually things will change. No civilisation, nation, or system of government lasts forever, and when things start to get off track, you will not be able to politely ask the future fascist-communist leaders to please give us back our guns so that we can resist.

Thanks to the English Bill of Rights, the English-speaking world has enjoyed three centuries of unmatched liberty. That has lulled us into thinking that a future tyranny while theoretically possible is in reality impossible. But that reasoning fails to see that tyrannical government is that standard operating procedure for most governments across history.

Which brings us to Covid. In the United States, where the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected, there was a lower uptake of warp-speed vaccines compared to other developed nations. By mid-2022, only 75 per cent of Americans aged 12 and over had received their second dose, compared to 95 per cent in Australia. Why the difference?

Australia and America had similar political leadership bullying us into taking warp-speed vaccines. We had similar corporate media propaganda, similar social media shadowing banning, similar bureaucracy, similar courts, and similar bimbo celebrities pushing the warp-speed vaccines … but there was significantly less uptake in America. Why?

Because the American government knows it cannot treat the American people like farm animals. In disarmed Australia, we were not so lucky – we were treated like farm animals. Because of Parliaments like this Australia’s reputation has been tarnished internationally because of our world’s worst, most draconian response to Covid.

Mr President, I put it to the House that there is a direct causal link between an unarmed population and our state-sponsored Covid overreach.

When citizens have the means to resist, they are less easily coerced. There was no need for an armed revolution in the United States to temper the enforcement of invasive vaccine mandates, the mere potential of resistance was sufficient for the US government to be restrained.

What prevents the state evolving into a tyranny is for those who run the state to know that state power is limited – not by words, or laws or conventions – but by real power: firearms.

If overnight God gave every household in Cuba, Iran, and North Korea one firearm each then those tyrannies would be overthrown by morning tea tomorrow. As it is, the long-suffering people of those nations have had to endure poverty and control for decades and can do very little about it. The people may hate the 5 per cent of gangsters who run those state … but those gangsters have the guns and so have the power to remain on top.

There is a direct correlation between those who clamour for an ever-larger state and those who want to monopolise gun ownership with the state. Many are well-meaning but their ignorance is dangerous.

There is another reason why a constitutional right to owning a firearm is critical to the long-term success of Australia. Libertarians do not believe in meddling in foreign squabbles. We seek to be the Switzerland of the South Pacific – neutral in world conflicts but active in world commerce.

That radical foreign policy approach would not be possible without an armed populace. An invader may be able to defeat our defence forces but the invader will still be reluctant to try and occupy a nation where there is high firearm ownership. Switzerland has not been invaded for 500 years and the Swiss enjoy one of the world’s highest firearm ownership rates and one of the world’s lowest homicide rates.

In an increasingly multi-polar world, Australia cannot forever rely on living under the American security umbrella. We have a high-quality military, but they are relatively small. A well-armed population is both a crucial addition to our defence capabilities but also a strong disincentive against invasion … as foreign invaders will be reluctant to try and occupy a heavily armed nation.

If the United States were to suffer a 50-year Great Depression and China or Russia had an economy that dwarfed the US, then even under those conditions, no nation would consider invading the United States because most homes have a resistance tool – a firearm. Good policy is good policy for the centuries to come and not for the election to come.

The case for a right to owner firearms extends beyond resisting tyranny and invasion. It is also about empowering individuals to take responsibility for their own safety and security, a principle deeply rooted in both historical precedent and contemporary realities.

The right to self-defence should not be something approved or declined by a remote parliament – it is a natural, God-given right.

Sadly given the constitutional limitations we face in NSW this amendment, if approved, will not guarantee a right to self-defence. I hope to return to that debate later this year when I introduce a Castle Law bill which explicitly will guarantee a right to self-defence but even so widespread firearm ownership will deter criminal behaviour. Criminals will think twice about invading a home or car if they know the property owner may have a firearm.

It is time Australia had a serious conversation about self-reliance when it comes to personal safety.

The right to life, liberty, and property is fundamentally connected to the right to meaningfully defend your own life, liberty and property – and that requires access to the tools necessary to effectively defend yourself.

A contrary line of argument claims that we no longer need to defend ourselves, and can instead outsource that role to the police. Mr President, this is dangerously naïve. The police cannot be everywhere, and in most times of immediate danger when seconds count, the police will still be minutes away. The consequence is more one-sided confrontations with a built-in bias towards criminals, who don’t obey weapons laws anyway, and people who are physically stronger.

Since criminals and the physically strong can now be assured that there are more defenceless victims, this situation actually encourages more criminality and violence. It should be no surprise to discover that armed societies tend to be polite societies, and that there is a direct inverse correlation between gun ownership and nearly all types of physical violence, including assault and rape.

This issue of self-defence is becoming increasingly relevant across Australia, with a worrying trend-line in violent crime – including car jackings, home invasions, and most recently the rampage of a machete-wielding gang in Melbourne. Nobody should be required to tolerate these situations, and we should not have an official policy of learned helplessness and passive victimhood.

Critics will claim that more guns can lead to more gun crime. There is some truth to this claim, but it is both meaningless and deceptive. Assault, rape, murder, or any other violent crime are not made inherently ‘better’ just because they are done with a different weapon … so the focus on the weapon is misleading and intellectually dishonest. The relevant criteria should simply be the rates of violent crime.

There is vanishingly little evidence that guns cause violent crime. The one data point that forms the beginning, middle, and end of nearly all anti-gun rants is that America has higher violent crime than Europe and Australia. That is true, but again it is meaningless and deceptive. No honest seeker of truth does a single-variable analysis with only one observation … that isn’t evidence, it’s just an anecdote. We do have evidence, and it doesn’t show what the anti-gun people think that it shows.

If you are one of those people who genuinely wants to protect innocent people but are sceptical of my claims, then I urge you to study the evidence so that you can prove me wrong. You will be surprised. Exploring the evidence on guns and crime leaves people with a stark choice of either adjusting their views on guns, or admitting they have an ulterior motive, or obfuscating in the hope that nobody else notices the data.

Though if hard data is not sufficient to sway public opinion, perhaps we can counter the cliché anecdote about the US with another anecdote about one particular part of the US. The state of New Hampshire has some of the most relaxed gun laws in the world. If gun ownership really did lead to more violent crime, then it should be a Mad-Max hellscape … so let’s check the statistics.

In 2024 New South Wales recorded 36 homicides per million people. In contrast, New Hampshire recorded only 11 homicides per million people – less than a third the NSW level. It is not just New Hampshire, there are around a dozen US states with a lower homicide rate than New South Wales and a dozen more that are very nearly identical. The American statistics are thrown out by gangs in the big inner cities where crime is high. Those states typically have the strictest gun control laws but criminal gangs laugh at those laws.

In jurisdictions where firearms are legally carried, such as in many American states, studies often show that law-abiding citizens act as a deterrent to crime, not a contributor to it. For instance, a 2017 study by John Lott found that states with permissive concealed carry laws saw reductions in violent crime rates, suggesting that an armed populace can enhance, rather than undermine, public safety.

When the state claims the sole authority to wield force, it risks creating an imbalance where citizens are dependent on the government for their safety and many other more prosaic things. This dependency can erode personal responsibility and foster a culture of passivity.

By contrast, recognising the right to bear arms empowers individuals to take an active role in their own defence, reinforcing the idea that liberty is not granted by the state but inherent to the individual.

Firearms, in this context, are not just tools … but symbols of self-reliance and autonomy. America’s Second Amendment and America ingenuity are not unrelated.

The world has thrived off American inventiveness – aeroplanes, radios, mass-produced cars, and household products, TVs, the computer, the internet, space travel, and AI. Americans are simply more creative because their mindset is one of enhanced self-reliance. So thank you America and thank you to the wise American Founding Fathers who locked in the right to own a firearm.

Moreover, the right to bear arms supports a culture of mutual respect and voluntary cooperation. Responsible gun ownership requires discipline, training, and adherence to ethical standards … qualities that strengthen communities.

This Constitutional Amendment is the strongest tool we have available at this point to stop the erosion and secure these rights for future generations.

In closing, by recognising a right to own firearms, this bill does not claim to create a new right. Libertarians do not believe the government can create rights … they can simply recognise rights that already exist and commit themselves to respecting those rights. We believe citizens already have self-ownership, which logically gives you the right to free speech, association, trade, contract, and the right to own a firearm. Our task now is to convince the government to respect that pre-existing right.

This bill is not just for existing farmers, sporting shooters, and hunters, but also for people who believe in individual liberty, people who believe in self-defence, and people who believe in protecting against the threat of tyranny.

If we fall short with this bill we will not be perturbed – we know significant change often requires persistence and the Libertarian Party will be persistent.

I urge my colleagues to support the Constitution Amendment (Right to Possess and Carry Firearms) Bill 2025.