Category: Analysis

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Federal, state and territory governments have agreed to the biggest overhaul of Australia’s gun laws since the Howard government’s post-Port Arthur reforms, in a response to the Bondi massacre that has claimed the lives of 15 victims so far and one of the perpetrators.

After a late Monday afternoon meeting of national cabinet, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the leaders had commissioned police ministers and attorneys-general to develop options for extensive changes. These include:

• accelerating work on standing up the National Firearms Register

• allowing for additional use of criminal intelligence to underpin firearms
  licensing that can be used in administrative licensing regimes

• limiting the number of firearms to be held by any one individual

• limiting open-ended firearms licensing and the types of guns that are legal,
  including modifications and,

• a condition of a firearm license is holding Australian citizenship.

Albanese said, in a statement after national cabinet, leaders had agreed “that strong, decisive and focused action was needed on gun law reform as an immediate action”.

This included “renegotiating the National Firearms Agreement, first established after the 1996 Port Arthur tragedy, to ensure it remains as robust as possible in today’s changing security environment”.

As an immediate priority, the federal government will prepare further customs restrictions for the import of firearms and other weapons. This will include 3D printing, novel technology and firearms equipment that can hold large amounts of ammunition.

Before the national cabinet meeting Albanese said, “People’s circumstances change, people can be radicalised over a period of time. Licences should not be in perpetuity.”

New South Wales Premier Chris Minns earlier flagged that NSW was looking to make changes to its gun laws.

“We need to make sure the firearms legislation in New South Wales is fit for purpose. That does mean restricting firearms for the general public, for the people of New South Wales,” Minns said.

The shootings were carried out by a father and son. The father, Sajid Akram, 50, was killed, while his son, Naveed Akram, 24, is in hospital. The father, who came to Australia in 1998 on a student visa, had a gun licence and six weapons.

Names and details of victims emerged during the day. They included a 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, Alexander Kleytman, and a 10-year-old girl, Matilda. Other victims were Rabbi Eli Schlanger, 41, local Jewish volunteer Marika Pogany, 82, and former NSW police officer Peter Meagher, 78. French National Dan Elkayam and one Israeli national were also killed.

Late Monday NSW Health confirmed 27 patients were receiving care in Sydney hospitals.

In a day of crisis talks, federal cabinet also met, as well as its national security committee.

Albanese declared, “We will do whatever is necessary to stamp out antisemitism”.

But pressed on the recommendations of the government’s envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal, who reported some months ago, Albanese did not commit to implementing her more radical proposals

Segal on Monday reiterated antisemitism needed to be attacked “through education, through very clear guardrails in relation to what’s acceptable in terms of our laws, through carrying through with prosecutions and penalties, through what’s happening on social media and through community speaking out.

“It means bringing that definition of antisemitism alive through the public sector. It means making sure our immigration settings are appropriate at a state level. I think we obviously need to review gun licenses.”

The Bondi attack attracted attention around the world.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly attacked Albanese.

“Your government did nothing to stop the spread of antisemitism in Australia.

“You did nothing to curb the cancer cells that were growing inside your country. You took no action. You let the disease spread and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today.”

Netanyahu made special reference to Ahmed Al Ahmed who disarmed one of the gunmen: “a brave man, turns out a Muslim […] and I salute him”.

Local Jewish leaders condemned what they regard as inadequate past action against antisemitism and called for renewed efforts to combat it.

Josh Frydenberg, former Liberal treasurer in the Morrison government and a leader in the Jewish community said: “our governments, federal and state, our leadership in our civil institutions have not done enough.

“And the questions must be asked, why didn’t they act? Why didn’t they listen to the warnings, including from those who were heading up our intelligence and security agencies like ASIO, who said the rising antisemitism was their number one concern?” Frydenberg said.

The opposition was highly critical of the Albanese government.

Opposition leader Sussan Ley said, “We’ve seen a clear failure to keep Jewish Australians safe. We’ve seen a clear lack of leadership in keeping Jewish Australians safe. We have a government that sees antisemitism as a problem to be managed, not evil that needs to be eradicated.”

Former shadow home affairs spokesman Andrew Hastie claimed the government’s attention on gun reform was “a massive deflection” by the prime minister.

Hastie said the question was why when ASIO had identified Naveed Akram in 2019, his father been allowed to keep six guns.

“Let’s be clear here, it looks like radical militant Islam, who used guns to cut down people, innocent people, during a very significant religious festival, Hanukkah.” Hastie said.

He also stressed the need for screening people’s values as well as their views in relation to antisemitism.

“I want to see people coming to this country who speak English, who support Australian values of faith, reason, inquiry and debate […] we are a Judeo-Christian country, in the sense that that’s the basis on which our democracy works,” he told Sky.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. National cabinet agrees to sweeping overhaul of Australia’s gun laws in response to Bondi massacre – https://theconversation.com/national-cabinet-agrees-to-sweeping-overhaul-of-australias-gun-laws-in-response-to-bondi-massacre-271949

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Adam Daniel, Associate Lecturer in Communication, Western Sydney University

Rob Reiner, the celebrated Hollywood director whose diverse filmography was loved by a broad array of audiences, was found dead on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 78.

Authorities have described the deaths of Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, as suspected homicide. Their son, Nick, has been arrested in relation to their death.

Despite this tragic and shocking news, the many tributes to Reiner that have emerged overnight have celebrated the evident warmth, intelligence and humour of the man and his work.

From my perspective, Reiner’s career stands as one of the clearest demonstrations of a director moving fluidly across genres while maintaining a consistent worldview.

Whether they were romantic comedies (When Harry Met Sally…, The American President, The Sure Thing), thrillers (Misery), courtroom dramas (A Few Good Men) or coming-of-age fables (Stand By Me), Reiner’s films return again and again to deeply humanist beliefs: that people, however flawed, are capable of growth and connection; that care and empathy for each other is vital; and that cinematic stories can help us recognise this in one another.

Taking comedy seriously

First entering the cultural imagination as Meathead on TV’s All in the Family (1971–79), Reiner’s performances as an actor often concealed his sharp political intelligence beneath blunt humour.

This tension between surface comedy and underlying seriousness would also become a defining feature of his work as a director.

From the outset of his directing career with This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Reiner used comedy as a way of revealing character, contradiction and vulnerability.

This Is Spinal Tap became one of the most influential comedies ever made and my personal favourite comedy of all time.

Often celebrated for its improvisational brilliance and satirical sharpness, I think the film is equally remarkable for its affection towards its characters. It treats the titular band’s absurdity as inseparable from their sincerity.

In doing so, Reiner also helped define a new comedic grammar in the mockumentary format that was incredibly influential for future generations of comedy filmmakers.

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Read more:
Why This Is Spinal Tap remains the funniest rock satire ever made

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A huge emotional range

Across the late 1980s and early 1990s, Reiner’s extraordinary run of films demonstrated not only technical versatility but an emotional range that was rare among his peers.

The Princess Bride (1987) fused fairy-tale romance, adventure and meta-humour. When Harry Met Sally… (1989) remains one of the great comedic explorations of love, intimacy and relationships in American cinema.

Perhaps most striking was Reiner’s comfort with tonal complexity.

Stand by Me (1986), adapted from a Stephen King novella, looks back on childhood with both nostalgic memory and an acknowledgement of the darkness underneath suburban adolescence. Misery (1990), another King adaptation, examines toxic fandom and obsession in a taut and compelling thriller with splashes of dark humour.

A Few Good Men (1992) brings courtroom theatrics into conversation with questions of authority and ethical responsibility in the military, and gave us two iconic performances from Hollywood superstars Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson.

What unites these films is not a particular style or subject matter, but perspective.

Reiner’s direction often privileged performance and emotion. Even when working within genre frameworks, he never accepted genre as a cage. Instead, he understood the pleasures of genre and how to utilise their tropes to explore broader questions of humanity.

Sincerity as a strength

Politically outspoken and unapologetically engaged, Reiner also never separated civic responsibility from artistic practice.

However, his films resisted dogma. In an industry that often privileges cynicism or ironic distance, Reiner’s work insisted on sincerity as a strength.

If there was a through-line to Rob Reiner’s legacy, I would argue it is a desire for audiences to feel deeply without embarrassment. His films demonstrated that laughter could be one of the most humane forces storytelling has to offer.

As an adolescent cinephile raised in the 1980s and 1990s, Reiner’s work opened my eyes to how important emotional connection was in the pact between audience and film.

His ability to work effectively across genres was due to the masterful and sincere way he made us care for his characters, be they buffoonish rock stars, princes and princesses, military lawyers and generals, or teenage boys facing their first exposure to mortality.

Adam Daniel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. In a cynical industry, Rob Reiner’s films taught us the power of sincerity – https://theconversation.com/in-a-cynical-industry-rob-reiners-films-taught-us-the-power-of-sincerity-272164

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Suzanna Fay, Associate Professor in Criminology, The University of Queensland

Australians have watched on in horror as more details have come to light about the shooters in the Bondi terror attacks.

As people grapple with the tragedy, many wonder how such a thing could have happened in a country that has long prided itself on its tough gun laws.

The 50-year-old father, Sajid Akram, and 24-year-old son, Naveed Akram, had six guns. Police confirmed all of them were registered firearms. The father, who was fatally shot by police, had a recreational hunting licence and was a member of a gun club.

National Cabinet has since committed to a raft of new gun laws, including renegotiating the National Firearms Agreement, caps on the amount of firearms any one person can own and limiting open-ended licensing.

So how easy is it to get a gun in Australia currently, and how might the reforms work?

The laws of gun ownership

Gun control laws vary slightly in each state and territory, but are broadly similar. We’ll look here at the laws in New South Wales.

The first step is to apply for a firearms licence. As part of this, authorities will conduct a background check to ensure there’s no criminal history, including mental health orders or domestic violence charges.

The applicant must also pass the “fit and proper person” test. NSW Police says this test checks someone is “of good character, law abiding, honest, and shows good judgement”.

If these standards are met, a firearms licence is granted.

But in order to actually buy a firearm, people must apply for a “permit to acquire”. This is linked to the specific firearm they’d like to purchase.

If it’s their first gun, there’s a 28 day waiting period before they can have it in their possession. Subsequent guns do not need a waiting period as long as it’s in the same category they already have approval to own.

They must also pass a safety course, with both practical and theoretical components, including a written test.

Firearms, once acquired, must be stored in a specific way. Guns cannot be stored while loaded, for instance, and ammunition must be kept in a separate safe.

Finally, someone must have a “genuine reason” to buy a firearm. These include working as a primary producer, or participating in recreational hunting, among others. They need to prove a genuine reason for each and every firearm purchase. Personal protection is not a a genuine reason.

Applicants need to prove their reason is truthful. This may be proof of membership to a gun club, or a letter with express permission from the landowner on whose property they intend to hunt.

Importantly, if someone holds a firearm licence for recreational purposes, they must compete in a certain amount of competitions each year. In NSW, it’s two to four.

What works well?

Many parts of Australian gun control laws work well.

The genuine reason provisions are particularly useful. By requiring people to engage with the firearm-owning community, it stops so called “lone-wolves” from buying a gun just to have.

My research with gun clubs has also shown members can be a crucial grassroots safety check. They typically look out for each other and check in if there’s a concerning shift in someone’s attitudes or beliefs.

If things seem particularly dangerous, many report fellow members to the police so they can investigate further. The gun owning community also want our communities to be safe.

It raises the question of how engaged the shooter in this case was with his local gun community.

What could change?

While the exact circumstances for these two shooters are still emerging, we know one of the men was known to ASIO (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation). The guns were registered to the father.

National Cabinet has agreed to a list of measures, including speeding up work on a national firearms register and limiting gun licences to Australian citizens.

They will also move to cap the number of guns a person can own. Western Australia did this earlier this year. Recreational shooters in WA can have up to five firearms, while primary producers and competition shooters can have up to ten.

It’s not uncommon for people to have more than one firearm. Licensed firearm owners in NSW have an average of about four, according to a 2025 report.

While it’s reasonable to examine the working of our current gun control measures, it’s unclear how effective such a measure would be. In the case of the Bondi attack, we need more information about the sorts of guns that were used and how many were used.

Plus, under the current laws across the country, people can’t buy more guns just because they feel like it. They have to prove a genuine reason to own another one.

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Read more:
Bondi Beach shooting: how it happened

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What about reviewing licences?

National Cabinet also decided to limit open-ended firearm licensing.

As it stands, licences are usually not granted for life. Renewal periods differ depending on the jurisdiction, but in NSW most licences are issued for somewhere between two and five years. We don’t yet know if any changes would make these renewal periods more frequent.

But licensing mechanisms, like recent concerns over working with children checks in the childcare sector, only capture what we know has happened. Unless people have already fallen foul of the law, authorities won’t necessarily find any concerning behaviour.

Indeed, authorities have said the Bondi shooter who owned these firearms had “no incidents” with his licence. Renewing it more regularly may have unearthed something important, or it may not have. We don’t know enough about this incident yet to say if such a law change would have been useful here.

If reviews were made much more frequent, that would require a large-scale increase in police resources.

One change that might help would be to actively involve firearms dealers in these legal changes. They have the most contact with those purchasing guns and may have valuable intelligence about how their customers are behaving and thinking.

So while changes in the letter of the law may or may not help monitor firearms owners, we have to ensure it’s implemented effectively too. This means resourcing authorities properly, working closely with communities and making sure legal changes would actually tell us what we need to know to prevent deadly gun violence.

Suzanna Fay has received funding from the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia for a research project in 2018 and the University of Queensland.

– ref. Why can someone in suburban Sydney own 6 guns legally? New laws might change that – https://theconversation.com/why-can-someone-in-suburban-sydney-own-6-guns-legally-new-laws-might-change-that-272067

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Andra B. Chastain, Associate Professor of History, Washington State University

Chileans have elected the most right-wing presidential candidate since the end of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship over three and a half decades ago.

In a runoff held on Dec. 14, 2025, José Antonio Kast, a Republican Party ex-congressman and two-time former presidential candidate, won just over 58% of the vote, while his opponent, Jeannette Jara, the left-wing labor minister of current President Gabriel Boric, won nearly 42%.

Approximately 15.6 million Chileans were eligible to vote in the first presidential election to take place with mandatory voting and automatic voter registration.

As a result of those new election rules, which went into place in 2022, an estimated 5 million to 6 million new voters went to the polls. These voters – found to be largely younger, male and lower-middle class – are seen as lacking a strong ideological identity and rejecting politics altogether.

The verdict delivered by Chile’s voters puts it in line with a broader right-wing regional shift – most recently in Bolivia – that has reversed the “pink tide” of left-leaning governments in the past two decades. But as a historian of modern Latin America and Chile, I believe Chile’s election also reflects the important local context of years of increasing disenchantment with the political system.

Amid Chile’s expanded electorate, the primary issues of voter concern during this campaign were crime and immigration. An October 2025 poll specifically found delinquency to be the top issue, with immigration, unemployment and health care also marking high.

Though Chile has one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America, high-profile cases of organized crime have shaken the nation in recent years. Homicides increased between 2018 and 2022 and have decreased slightly since then. Immigration has also risen significantly, with a large number of immigrants coming to Chile having fled economic and political crises in Venezuela, as well as in Peru, Haiti, Colombia and Bolivia. The foreign-born population in Chile rose from 4.4% in 2017 to 8.8% in 2024.

The key constitutional context

Many commentators have highlighted the stark polarization of this election, with a Communist Party labor minister campaigning against the arch-conservative Kast, who has lauded the Pinochet dictatorship under which his deceased older brother once served. But there is more to the story.

Some observers have drawn comparisons between Kast and other far-right Latin American leaders like Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Javier Milei in Argentina and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. But Chile is not merely following the same far-right playbook of its neighbors.

In the weeks leading up to the runoff in Chile, both candidates moved toward the center. Jara vowed to expand the prison system to combat rising crime, while Kast – who had previously threatened expulsion of undocumented migrants – softened his tone to say they would be “invited” to leave.

Moreover, Kast learned from his previous failed attempts at the presidency by speaking less about his controversial or more socially conservative positions. For example, he played down opposition to abortion under any circumstances. Chilean voters, in contrast, overwhelmingly approve of the limited abortion rights that were passed by Congress in 2017.

Yet beyond the campaign trail messaging, the results also reflect a structural fact of Chilean politics that mirror political realities of other parts of Latin America, and even globally. In every presidential election since 2006, Chileans have voted out the incumbency to swing to the opposing side of the political spectrum. With candidates barred from consecutive presidential terms, the pendulum has swung back and forth since the alternating presidencies of socialist Michelle Bachelet – 2006-2010 and 2014-2018 — and conservative Sebastián Piñera – 2010-2014 and 2018-2022.

Boric, a former left-wing student leader, took office in 2022 following a wave of upheaval and popular protests over inequality in 2019-2020. In what was a historic moment, the country voted to begin a process of rewriting its Pinochet-era constitution, which entrenched neoliberal economic policies and limited the government’s capacity to confront inequality. The constitutional convention was made up of directly elected citizens, many of them from grassroots movements.

Yet in a stunning reversal, the progressive constitution – which would have protected rights to nature, Indigenous rights and social rights – was roundly defeated in a plebiscite in 2022. Just over a year later, voters similarly rejected a second attempt to rewrite the constitution, albeit under a process that conservative parties helped shape.

Boric’s approval ratings, already low, suffered from this failed constitutional process. More than the right-wing elections elsewhere in the region, this national context helps to explain Chile’s own conservative turn.

The ever-present discontent of voters

Even as the pendulum has swung back and forth in recent Chilean presidential elections, there are deeper continuities across the different Chilean governments in the 21st century. Important among them is generalized voter discontent with the political system.

This has traditionally been expressed in popular protests, such as the student movements of 2006 and 2011 and the Estallido Social – or Social Uprising – of 2019-2020 that were the largest protests since the return to democracy in 1990 and helped propel Boric to power. Public discontent was also expressed in the overwhelming vote to rewrite the constitution, which passed with 78% of the vote in 2020.

Even though the constitutional process was ultimately rejected by voters, this underlying discontent has not gone away.

One of the recent signs of discontent with the political choices on offer was in the first round of voting on Nov. 16: The third-place candidate was not one of the veteran politicians on the right, but Franco Parisi, a populist economist who has not set foot in Chile in years and who called on his supporters to intentionally vote null – or “spoil” their votes. Discontent has taken many forms – outrage about inequality and neoliberalism in 2019-2020, or unease about economic precarity and crime in the current election. But it has persisted, even as Chile’s political system remains stable.

Some observers have pointed out that, unlike in many places around the world, Chile’s democratic norms are holding strong. The fact that power continues to pass peacefully despite major ideological differences is significant, particularly in light of the long struggle for democracy during the Pinochet regime. Kast’s style, for what it’s worth, is not as bombastic as that of U.S. President Donald Trump or Argentina’s Milei.

Still, his apparent politeness belies what many fear is a coming erosion of rights: the rights of women to bodily autonomy; the rights of individuals] to due process; the rights of workers to dignified conditions. These may well be up for negotiation under the new administration.

Kast, a staunch Catholic and father of nine, is opposed to abortion under any circumstances and has even attempted to ban the morning-after pill. He was a supporter of Pinochet up until the regime’s end, campaigning for the “yes” vote in 1988 that would have seen eight more years for the authoritarian leader after 15 years already in power. Kast has likewise vowed to slash public spending and deregulate the economy, a clear echo of the Pinochet years.

Despite the momentous shift heralded by Kast’s election, though, it is unlikely to change one of the principal challenges of Chile’s democracy in the 21st century: voter discontent and disenchantment. There has been a consistent trend for the government in power to lose popular support and face strong headwinds in Congress from the opposition. For all the celebration happening right now for Kast and his supporters, it is hard to see that changing once the new government takes office in March 2026.

Andra B. Chastain receives funding in 2025-26 from a Fulbright-García Robles research grant in Mexico. She has previously received funding for research in Chile from the Social Science Research Council and the PEO Foundation.

– ref. Chile elects most right-wing leader since Pinochet – in line with regional drift, domestic tendency to punish incumbents – https://theconversation.com/chile-elects-most-right-wing-leader-since-pinochet-in-line-with-regional-drift-domestic-tendency-to-punish-incumbents-272042