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As the NSW government considers backing the Shooters party on a bill that would ease restrictions on weapons, those close to the 1996 massacre warn against any move that could fuel the national surge in gun ownership. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
‘Don’t touch it’: Port Arthur veterans on gun law amendments
If there’s a hell, Peter James says, it would look like the Broad Arrow Cafe on April 28, 1996. It was in there, and the adjoining gift shop, that Martin Bryant, in just a minute and a half, fired almost 30 rounds of his Colt AR-15, killing 20 people and injuring another dozen. The final death toll from that day reached 35.
James was a Tasmanian paramedic, then based in Launceston, three hours’ drive north of Port Arthur, and was called upon that day not to serve as a medic – “there was no one left to save,” he says – but in his role as a critical incident stress debriefer. As the site was so obscene and complex, James was also conscripted to help process it: as well as debriefing officers, he conducted crime scene walk-throughs, arranged roster shifts, and later helped with the carriage of bodies. He would also deliver the news to the adult children of Bryant’s first victims – the owners of the nearby Seascape bed and breakfast – that their parents had been murdered.
As James approached the cafe, there was a police officer on guard at the front, signing in those who entered. He had a warning: “Just know that the man who goes in there will not be the same man who comes out,” he said.
“Never has a truer word been spoken,” James says.
When he stepped inside, everything felt magically still, silent. James couldn’t feel his breath or the turbulence of the ceiling fans that were still spinning. There were forensic officers in there, but he couldn’t hear them speak – or at least, in his traumatically embalmed memory of the scene, there were no voices.
“In there, you couldn’t hear the waves hitting the seawall nearby,” he said. “There was no noise, no noise at all. You didn’t feel hot or cold. And time just stopped.”
He was operating on another plane – some senses were hyper-focused, others numbed – and he remembers that room now as if it were a literal vacuum, sucked of air.
“And don’t worry about asking me about that day,” James says. “As I’ve told my wife many times, you can’t put anything into my head that’s not already there.”
Like many first responders that day, the horror was intensified by an instinctive kinship with the child victims. Alannah, 6, and Madeline, 3, were killed that day with their mother, Nanette. “The girls at Port Arthur were about the same age as my children,” he says. “It personalises it big time. Your brain sort of twists it, and I remember saying later to my wife: ‘How could someone shoot Sam and Oliver?’ ”
Walter Mikac was husband to Nanette, and father to Alannah and Madeline, and he became the grief-scarred face of John Howard’s major gun law reforms, the National Firearms Agreement.
On May 7, 1996, little more than a week after the massacre, Mikac penned a letter to the prime minister. “To Mr. Howard,” it opened, “As the person who lost his wife & 2 beautiful daughters at Port Arthur I am writing to you to give you the strength to ensure no person in Australia ever has to suffer such a loss.”
The two men would speak several times after this, and Mikac would come to think of the legislation as not only historic and necessary but also as a kind of living monument to the dead. But in recent weeks, both men have spoken publicly about their fear that a controversial “right to hunt” bill now being debated in the New South Wales parliament will undermine it. “It would usher in the most regressive firearm legislation we’ve seen in 30 years,” Mikac said last month.
In May, NSW Shooters, Fishers and Farmers MP Robert Borsak introduced a bill to the state’s parliament that would legally enshrine a “right to hunt”. It quickly, and surprisingly for some, found the notional support of Premier Chris Minns.
The Game and Feral Animal Legislation Amendment (Conservation Hunting) Bill seeks to expand the amount of state land currently reserved for hunting, as well as changing the state’s Weapons Prohibition Act to allow for conservation hunting to be considered a “genuine reason” for NSW Police Force to issue a permit for the use of a prohibited weapon – while also allowing for the use of gun “suppressors”, or silencers.
Should the bill become law, it would also replace the Game and Pest Management Advisory Board with a new authority with a radically different composition: one where half of its members would be directly appointed by hunting organisations.
John Howard objects to the whole bill, but that last part is something he particularly opposes. In a written statement to The Saturday Paper, Howard said: “I am totally opposed to any weakening of existing gun laws. I am concerned that the establishment of a separate authority under the NSW Legislation will become the thin end of the wedge, as such bodies often become captive to the views of vested interests. The question needs to be asked – what is the point of this legislation?”
One Labor MP expressed a similar reservation to me about the proposed new authority, as did NSW Greens senator David Shoebridge, who tells The Saturday Paper that it would be a return to something like the old Game Council NSW, a statutory body that dissolved in scandal in 2013 after a report found serial governance failures, conflicts of interest, and that one council member had inhumanely killed a goat.
Robert Borsak has defended the bill by saying it’s absurd that one needs to achieve a social licence for hunting – a pursuit that has existed for millennia. In a media statement this week, Borsak said: “I have the utmost respect for Mr Mikac and the unimaginable loss he suffered at Port Arthur, but he is not an expert in firearms legislation, pest animal management, or conservation hunting … The Conservation Hunting Bill does not alter firearms laws or increase risk to public safety – for 23 years licensed hunting has taken place on over 2 million hectares of NSW State Forests without a single fatality or injury.”
As the bill’s name suggests, Borsak and his supporters have stressed its conservation benefits – enshrining the right to hunt would be an effective measure against the proliferation of vertebrate pests. In its submission to the parliamentary inquiry that was convened to examine the bill, the Invasive Species Council vehemently disagreed. “The ‘Conservation’ Hunting Bill is based on a misleading premise that recreational hunting is effective for controlling invasive vertebrates,” it said.
“If recreational hunting was an effective way of managing invasive vertebrates, the Invasive Species Council would welcome this bill. To understand why we oppose the bill, it is important to understand the differences between recreational hunting and volunteer shooting in coordinated control programs.” The submission defines recreational hunting as “an ad hoc activity focused on the pursuit of ‘game’ animals for reasons such as obtaining meat or trophies, the thrill of the chase, or being outdoors”. Volunteer shooting, by contrast, is “a directed activity to help achieve specified conservation outcomes as part of a coordinated control program”.
The council went further, arguing that hunting groups have in the past undermined conservation by encouraging the overpopulation of invasive species and effectively transforming state reserves into game parks. “Although some hunters are motivated to contribute to invasive animal control, other hunters are primarily interested in expanding and sustaining hunting opportunities and oppose effective control programs,” its submission said. “The Hunting Bill will provide opportunities for the hunting lobby to undermine invasive vertebrate control, particularly on public land.”
For some years now, the NSW Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party has engaged in an informal, qualified alliance of sorts with NSW Labor, even if one Labor MP tells The Saturday Paper their party is exceptionally coy about it. There are two basic and obvious parts to the alliance: electoral and legislative. In seats where One Nation or the Nationals are competitive, Labor has often gifted the Shooters its preferences. In parliament, where Labor doesn’t enjoy a majority in the upper house and the Shooters occupy two seats, the two parties have mutually secured the other’s support for bills. There has been much speculation within parliament that Labor’s support for the hunting bill has been exchanged for the Shooters’ support of its workers compensation bill. “We are close to the Shooters even though it’s generally not obvious, and this is an important quid pro quo,” one Labor MP told The Saturday Paper.
The MP says what really matters here is just how “obnoxious” the hunting bill is beneath this political deal-making. “The offensive part of it is the suggestion that it’s about hunting feral animals and conservation. That’s bullshit. It’s insensible to approach invasive species culls through recreational hunters. It’s much more complex than that. Making it about ‘conservation’ is a way of making it seem legitimate. It’s a blatant political deal. Coalition building.”
On Tuesday this week, Walter Mikac met with the NSW premier. Mikac was joined in the meeting by Stephen Bendle, an adviser to the Alannah & Madeline Foundation, which the two co-founded and named for Mikac’s late daughters. Bendle is also the national convenor of the Australian Gun Safety Alliance. “We were pleased at the hearing we got,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “We understood the premier’s pretty strong position around firearms. We had a long conversation about the issue of feral pest management and how it’s separate from hunting. Because we feel that the bill is entirely focused on hunting – it doesn’t contain any strategy or initiative to improve conservation. Every component is focused on promoting hunting, and the government shouldn’t be outsourcing pest management to weekend shooters. We’ve also had many meetings with the opposition and we’re hopeful that they’ll listen to the overwhelming evidence provided at the inquiry and will reject the bill.”
Bendle added that the Shooters party had “unilaterally” decided to replace the existing advisory body, without having made an argument for why. “It would be controlled by hunting organisations, and if there’s any uncertainty about the government already supporting this and expecting it to happen, well it’s obvious in the budget papers – it’s already been fully funded in the 2025/26 budget.”
Both Bendle and Mikac are alarmed there are now more guns in Australia than there were in 1996, and that Western Australia is the only state to restrict the number of guns a licence holder may own. Despite several years of political discussion following the 2022 shootings on the Train brothers’ property at Wieambilla, Queensland, a national firearm registry has yet to be established and the transparency of gun data varies greatly between jurisdictions.
Meanwhile, Peter James has written to the Tasmanian premier to warn against him ever contemplating something similar to the “right to hunt” bill. “It’s scary to water down any gun laws,” he says. “And I find the conservation arguments a load of crap. Gun reform was for the safety of the greater number, not for the convenience of a few that want to shoot feral pigs or road signs on weekends. My gut feeling is: don’t touch it.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 6, 2025 as "‘Don’t touch it’: Port Arthur veterans on gun law amendments".
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