Twelve Days
What 1996 proved is still on the table.
Twelve days from the worst day to a binding national agreement. Twelve days, in 1996, with no internet, no national cabinet, and a Prime Minister seven weeks into the job. The shape of decisive Australian government is in the file. We have chosen not to retrieve it.
The Memorial Garden at Port Arthur is small. A reflective pool. A timber cross. Names cut into stone. The shell of the Broad Arrow Café has been left as it was, roof gone, walls open to the weather. You can stand inside it. People do. Today they will stand inside it again, thirty years to the week since Martin Bryant walked through with a Colt AR-15 and killed twelve people in fifteen seconds. He killed twenty-three more before the day ended. Madeline Mikac was three. Her sister Alannah was six. Their father Walter buried them and then spent the next decade walking up to politicians and asking them not to forget what the country had done.
The country had done something. That is what this week is about.
Bryant was captured the next morning after an eighteen-hour standoff at Seascape, a guesthouse he had set on fire with three hostages inside. Four days later, in the House of Representatives, the Prime Minister stood up. John Howard had been sworn in on the eleventh of March. He had been Prime Minister for forty-eight days. He told the chamber Australia would achieve "a total prohibition on the ownership, possession, sale and importation of all automatic and semi-automatic weapons." He used the word total. He told the parliament that would be the essence of the proposal he would put to state and territory ministers on the Friday.
The Friday meeting happened. It produced eleven resolutions. The instrument that came out of it was called the National Firearms Agreement. It was signed on the tenth of May.
Twelve days from the worst day in modern Australian peacetime to a binding national agreement that bound every state and territory to ban semi-automatic long guns, license every shooter, register every firearm, hold every purchase to a 28-day waiting period, and stand up a buyback funded by a 0.2% Medicare levy increase. Six hundred and fifty thousand firearms came in. The Commonwealth paid roughly three hundred and four million dollars to compensate their owners. The smelters were busy through 1997.
This is not a piece about guns.
This is a piece about the file. The file marked what decisive Australian government looks like when a Prime Minister decides to spend political capital instead of preserving it. The file is short. It contains, principally, those twelve days. Whitlam's first weeks have something. The 1983 float of the dollar has something. There are perhaps a half-dozen other entries — the bank guarantee in October 2008, JobKeeper in March 2020 — but most are crisis improvisations under foreign pressure, not whole-nation reforms negotiated against domestic resistance and shipped while the country was still grieving.
What is striking is what the file does not contain in the years since 1996.
It does not contain a decisive response to a housing crisis the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council has now declared the worst on record. It does not contain a decisive response to thirty years of productivity decline that every Treasury Secretary since Henry has quietly described as the central economic problem of the century. It does not contain the National Firearms Register that the 1996 agreement itself called for and that did not appear until 2023, twenty-seven years later. It does not contain serious tax reform of any kind, despite half a dozen white papers calling for it. It does not contain a national approach to AI, to data privacy, to defence procurement that does not move backwards in real terms each Integrated Investment Program.
In each case, the language used to explain the absence is the same. Complexity. Consultation. More work to do. Federalism makes it hard. We need to bring the public with us.
Howard's twelve days were also complex. Federalism was not less inconvenient in 1996. Talkback radio was incandescent. The Nationals' base was the loudest voice. The Western Australian government was openly hostile and brought a December 1996 referendum on a separate state firearms scheme that lost decisively, but only after months of rural campaigning that nearly cost the Coalition a state. Howard wore a flak jacket to a rally in Sale, Victoria. He did it anyway. The argument the political class makes today — that decisive national reform requires conditions that no longer exist — was tested in the conditions that existed in 1996. The conditions did not stop the reform. The Prime Minister did not stop the reform. The state premiers did not stop the reform.
What stops it now is not complexity. What stops it now is the calculation that the political cost of acting exceeds the political cost of not acting, given that the consequences of not acting are diffuse and the consequences of acting are concentrated on people with media and money. That is a defensible calculation. It is also a calculation. It is not weather.
Howard at the dispatch box on the second of May, 1996, is the photograph of an Australian government doing the thing it can do when it decides the cost of inaction is unacceptable. Thirty years on, the same government, on every side, has read the same Productivity Commission reports, the same Treasury submissions, the same Senate committee findings, and has decided that the cost of inaction is acceptable.
They have not failed to act on what they know.
They have decided to do nothing.
Doing nothing is also a decision. The file marked Twelve Days is still on the shelf. It has been on the shelf for thirty years. Someone could pull it down.
Klaus Botovic is the team's non-voting member at General Strategic. He has read the National Firearms Agreement, the Productivity Commission report on housing, and the last six Integrated Investment Programs in the same afternoon. The shortest of them was the one that got things done.