At the Table with the Chief Minister.

At the Chief Minister’s invitation, SSAA ACT President Shane Stroud and SSAA Chief Executive Officer Tom Kenyon met with ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr on Tuesday 21 July 2026. Also present was Mr Bren Burkevics, Director of Environment, Heritage and Parks. Scheduled for 30 minutes, the meeting ran to almost 50 — a good sign in itself.

The purpose of the meeting came as a welcome surprise: the Chief Minister wanted to discuss opportunities to open up public land for managed hunting in the ACT — how it might be managed, and what it could look like.

The driver is clear. Feral animal numbers in the Territory were described as “out of control”, with pig and — increasingly — deer populations the primary concern. Control currently relies mainly on contracted shooters conducting limited culls by land and air, and those measures are struggling to keep pace.

We discussed how reputable, appropriately trained hunters — walking into isolated country and packing out game — could be an effective complement to those programs, at little or no cost to the Territory.

We talked through models used elsewhere — seasonal closures of defined areas, and the zoning and booking of specific areas for qualified and authorised hunters, broadly along the lines of the New South Wales Restricted (R) Licence system. The discussion also touched on the regulation of suppressors. SSAA ACT is well placed to help: we can offer trained, experienced hunters who belong to a self-regulating body with real checks and balances, and we offered to work with the Government on fit-for-purpose governance arrangements.

We were also clear about the limits of our offer. Sensitive matters — the management of brumbies, and the kangaroo cull — appropriately remain with professional shooters. It is worth remembering, too, that many of those professional shooters are themselves SSAA members: the ACT’s existing programs already draw on the skills and safety culture of our community.

With the meeting running well, we took the opportunity to restate our concerns about the proposed numerical firearms caps, and made our key arguments plainly. Caps risk perverse and unintended outcomes. Chief among them, they are likely to increase — not reduce — both the number of licensed owners and the raw number of firearms in the ACT, as the spike in acquisitions already being made in anticipation of caps shows.

We said so candidly: even though such a spike would grow our own membership and revenue, it would not serve our members, and it would not deliver the public safety the Government is seeking. We reminded the meeting that the existing framework already does this work — every owner must establish a Genuine Reason to hold a licence and demonstrate Genuine Need for each firearm they possess — and that without caps there is no need for the now-discredited buyback, freeing those funds for better resourcing of the ACT Firearms Registry’s compliance, enforcement and suitability-assessment functions.

The Chief Minister raised a genuine concern: the private storage of firearms, and the theft of firearms from properties for criminal use. We share it — the safety of the public is our paramount consideration.

We undertook to provide the Chief Minister with a graduated security protocol developed by SSAA and already in use in South Australia, under which the level of security required rises with the risk: the more firearms stored, the higher the standard of secure storage. That principle already applies here — what would make the real difference is giving the Firearms Registry the capacity to inspect and enforce those standards. Better compliance capability, intelligence-led targeting and system upgrades would do far more to prevent firearms theft than an arbitrary cap.

We also made a point that many members will feel keenly. When a firearm is stolen from a licensed owner — often despite fully compliant storage — that owner is themselves the victim of a crime. Too often, lawful shooters are blamed as the source of the problem when, in truth, they are among its victims. We put it to the Chief Minister plainly: the right response is to pursue those who steal and criminally misuse firearms, and to support owners to store securely — not to punish the law-abiding with arbitrary caps.

After nearly 50 minutes, the Chief Minister said he appreciated the information we had provided and that it had given him much to think about. He was clear that the final decisions will be made through the parliamentary process — subject to appropriate debate and amendment — and that even he could not say what the ultimate outcome would be.

We won’t verbal anyone. What we can say is that the meeting was positive and productive, and that the tone throughout was mutually respectful and cordial.