Your Federal Member's Community Update

The state and federal gun buyback for NSW is an absolute insult to every law-abiding gun-owner and firearm business across the state.

What a farce!

Forcing around 50,000 law-abiding citizens to hand over hundreds of thousands of guns - but only paying cents on the dollar, is a disgrace.

The amounts on offer are well below market value.

Penalising honest Australians who obey the law and they are rightly outraged.

And look at what they're doing to our firearm businesses.

Pathetic, inadequate grants of up to $25,000 are not going to stop our gun shops and firearm businesses from going broke to the cost of our regional communities.

It's just not good enough!

Taxpayers are going to be slugged up to a billion dollars, all because the state and federal governments wanted to make a knee-jerk political point following the horrific Bondi terrorist attack

What we need to be doing is going after the illegal firearms that our streets are awash with.

The crooks aren't going to be handing their guns in under this buyback.

When police do lock up crims for illegal guns, the sentences are so weak they're back on the street all too quickly.

Let's get to the bottom of the real issues behind the attack, including security and intelligence fails, and go after the real criminals.

Bin this junk policy and leave honest, peace-loving Australians alone.

Stop making them the scapegoats for government failures!

The sound of silence continues on the Great Western Highway. We see billions and billions of state and federal funding being showered on projects on the other side of the sandstone curtain, yet, when we need them most, all we get from government are empty words and small change.

It's been weeks since the state government announced its fix for this closed nationally significant road corridor, yet, since then, it's been the sound of silence—no word on how much this fix will cost, no word on whether we're going to get more than one lane of traffic each way and no word of any federal contribution for anything.

It's not just government silence. We've now got the sound of silence from shuttered and closed businesses that have gone broke because of government negligence. The Triple 8 Cafe? Gone. RNA Chainsaw Mower Supplies? Gone. ICF Haulage? Gone. Lithgow Bike Stop is being smashed, and I was recently at the Donnybrook Hotel where business is down by 60 per cent.

These inadequate one-off business support grants from the NSW government simply aren't cutting it. It's just a tokenistic political gesture. We need federal and state funding for the roadworks and an ongoing business support package, like we had with JobKeeper during COVID, before more businesses are lost. This government neglect is disgraceful, and it has to end now.