Setting the Record Straight.
The Point’s latest claim doesn’t stack up.

On 16 September, The Point — an initiative of the Australia Institute — ran an “Explainer” by Alice Grundy on Tasmania’s new firearms Bill, which the Tasmanian lower house passed without a cap on the number of firearms a person may own. The article argues the Tasmanian law “falls well short” of what was agreed at National Cabinet, and rests on a striking claim: that “a higher number of licenced firearms increases the risk of a higher number of firearms entering the black market.” It is worth taking both points head-on, because you will hear them again.

Caps and recategorisation were put on the national table as options at the National Cabinet of December 2025. But when the National Firearms Agreement was actually updated — at National Cabinet on 26 August 2026, its first update in nearly a decade — it adopted neither numerical caps nor any recategorisation. Caps are simply not part of the current national standard. Measuring Tasmania against “the National Cabinet agreement,” without mentioning that the updated Agreement left caps out, is misleading. And the wider picture is the opposite of what the headline implies: caps sit with only a minority of jurisdictions, Victoria, Queensland, the NT and SA have declined them — and Tasmania’s own parliament has just voted one down.

The article lists the ACT among the jurisdictions that have “agreed to firearms caps.” That misrepresents where things actually stand here. The ACT’s caps are proposed, not law — they sit in a Bill still before the Legislative Assembly, and the debate is very much live. Presenting them as settled, alongside states that have legislated, tells Canberrans the argument is over when it is not — and pre-empts a decision that is still ours, and our representatives’, to make.

It matters because the ground has shifted under exactly this debate. With the updated National Firearms Agreement leaving caps out, Victoria, Queensland, the NT and SA declining them, and Tasmania voting one down this week, the ACT is now effectively the last jurisdiction still pursuing caps — not a latecomer to a national consensus, but increasingly on its own. A piece that casts the ACT as simply falling into line misreads the very situation Canberra’s licensed owners are living through. And the theft argument imported from Tasmania — the highest-theft state — does not fit the ACT, which has the lowest firearm-theft rate in the country.

The conclusion does not follow. Whether a firearm is stolen depends on how securely it is stored and whether criminals target it — not on how many others its owner lawfully holds. A cap leaves every remaining firearm exactly as stealable; the same logic would justify confiscating every firearm from every lawful owner. The claim is also single-sourced to the Australia Institute’s own research, against the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s assessment that the illicit market is dominated by the long-standing “grey market” and illegal imports.

Most importantly, it blames the victim. An owner whose securely-stored firearm is stolen is the victim of a crime — not the cause of the black market. The article’s own Tasmanian figures (164 firearms stolen, only one in five recovered) describe a storage-and-recovery failure, for which the proportionate answer is stronger storage and better recovery — the very measure the ACT’s own Standing Committee recommended as the priority. A cap secures nothing.

The piece is labelled a neutral “Explainer,” but the author is the Australia Institute’s Research Manager; the research it cites is the Australia Institute’s; and The Point is the Australia Institute’s own platform. The author has also appeared as a witness before the ACT inquiry advocating these very measures. None of that is disclosed. And the two independent, government-commissioned reviews that examined caps are left out entirely: the Lay Review found “no clear evidence that numerical caps … reduce firearms-related harm,” and the ACT’s Report 9 recorded “significant uncertainty” over how the proposed caps would even work.

We have asked The Point to correct the record on both points above, and — because our earlier requests for correction have gone unanswered — to tell us who is responsible for complaints about its coverage, and whether it answers to the Australian Press Council or any other standards body. We will keep you informed. As always, the full record of our work on the proposed reforms is on our Legislative Action page.