29/04/2026
UPDATE - Fi****ms Challenge - What Next?
Thank you to everyone for your patience. These things take time, but I believe I have a clear pathway and idea for demonstrating that the current amendments are inadequate to achieving accessible justice for fi****ms owners, if the right case presents itself.
At this stage, the more viable pathway does not appear to be a direct constitutional challenge to the legislation itself.
That is an important distinction.
Courts do not rewrite legislation because affected persons consider the law unfair, impractical, or undesirable. Parliament enacts legislation. The Court’s role is to determine whether legislation is constitutionally valid and whether decisions made under that legislation are legally valid.
That means a direct challenge to the provisions themselves is likely to face significant difficulty.
The better legal focus is on the practical operation of the current legislative regime.
As you are aware, prior to 24 December 2025, affected licence holders could seek review in NCAT. That process involved merits review, meaning NCAT could consider the evidence and determine whether the decision was correct and preferable.
The amended regime is different. Many affected licence holders may now be limited to:
Internal review by NSW Police; and
Judicial review in the Supreme Court of NSW.
Judicial review is not the same as merits review. The Supreme Court generally does not stand in the shoes of the original decision-maker and simply decides whether it would have reached a different conclusion. Its role is usually to identify legal error.
That may include issues such as:
- Procedural unfairness;
- Failure to consider relevant evidence;
- Failure to address a substantial argument;
- Reliance on speculation rather than probative material;
- Inadequate and inconclusory reasons;
- Inflexible application of policy;
- Misconstruction of the Fi****ms Act;
- Failure to form the required statutory opinion;
- Perverse legal findings.
These principles are reflected in well-established administrative law authorities, including Kirk v Industrial Court of NSW, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship v Li, Plaintiff M1/2021 v Minister for Home Affairs, Bruce v Cole, and Re Refugee Review Tribunal; Ex parte Aala.
The concern is that this new pathway does not, in my view, provide an effective, practical, merit-based remedy for many law-abiding fi****ms owners. We need to show this reasoning in an evidence-based way.
A person may have a strong factual case. They may have a long history of safe firearm ownership, no criminal history, no violence, no drug or alcohol concerns, a genuine need for fi****ms, strong character evidence, and clear evidence of compliance. But if the only external pathway is judicial review, the issue becomes much narrower: was there legal error?
That is a very different question from whether the decision was fair, balanced, proportionate, or correct on the merits.
For that reason, the strategic focus is likely to be on identifying the right test case.
The strongest test case is likely to involve a licence holder who is clearly law-abiding, responsible, and low-risk, with facts Aot complicated by serious adverse conduct.
Ideally, such a case would involve:
- A long-standing fi****ms licence holder;
- A history of safe and responsible firearm ownership;
- No relevant criminal, violence, domestic violence, drug, alcohol, or adverse mental health risk issues;
- A genuine practical need for fi****ms, such as primary production, pest control, occupational use, animal welfare, or serious sporting use;
- An isolated, technical, minor, or remediated compliance issue rather than serious misconduct;
- Strong evidence of good character, fitness, genuine reason, safe storage, and low risk; and
- An internal review decision that appears to have failed to properly engage with the evidence or gives reasons that are formulaic, disproportionate, or unsupported by the material.
A case of that kind may best demonstrate the practical difficulty created by removing independent merits review.
It may show that internal review is not an adequate substitute for external merits review, particularly where the affected person does not simply need a legal technicality identified, but needs the evidence reconsidered in a meaningful and independent way.
The object is not to publicly reveal the litigation strategy. Nor is it to suggest that every adverse decision will be capable of challenge.
The object is to ensure that any challenge is carefully selected, properly prepared, evidence-based, and directed to the legal issues most likely to produce a useful and principled outcome.
In practical terms, that means preparing for future matters needs to be more disciplined than ever.
Submissions to the Registry should be comprehensive. Evidence should be provided early. Medical reports, safe storage evidence, genuine reason material, employment or primary production evidence, club records, character references, and compliance history may all be important, depending on the case.
The internal review decision and statement of reasons will be critical. Those reasons may provide the foundation for any Supreme Court challenge.
The focus moving forward is therefore clear:
- Identify the right case;
- Prepare the evidence properly from the beginning;
- Preserve the legal arguments;
- Scrutinise the reasons;
and pursue the pathway most likely to demonstrate, in a principled way, the limitations of the current review regime.
