Australia is hardly a welcome haven for gun owners, but some anti-gun activists and politicians are claiming that the "shooters lobby" has quietly taken control of one of the major political parties in the state of Victoria.
According to the activists, the Victoria Labor Party, and in particular the Socialist Left faction within the party, is "threatening delegates, dictating policy and inciting violence," though the anti-gunners are awfully short on specifics.
Instead, a recent piece in The Saturday Paper is full of vague allegations like this:
Before her appearance later this month at Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, where she is applying for intervention orders against a senior Victorian Labor Party figure and a union delegate, Helen Breier explains that she never wanted to go public.
“This is my Labor Party,” she says. “I joined Young Labor in 1975. The Labor Party is my team … but Victoria is in danger.”
Personally, she adds: “I’m scared.”
Obtaining no resolution of her complaints to both the state’s ombudsman and the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC), she says she’s speaking out after exhausting internal efforts to thwart a “dangerous infection” within government.
“The gun lobby’s power over Victorian Labor is out of control,” says Breier, who has a finance career and is an elected member of Labor’s Conservation, Environment and Resources Policy Committee, among other senior party positions.
Breier alleges in her court applications that a senior Victorian Labor figure “used a video from an undisclosed source to threaten, intimidate and silence me” at the behest of hunting proponents. She also alleges an Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union official, “a promoter and supporter of gun interests”, used intimidating methods to block her environment protection motions, and allowed a group of AMWU delegates to “harass and intimidate me”.
Breier and other delegates echo academic researchers who characterise Victoria’s government as having been “captured” by gun proponents who have cultivated influence within unions, secured senior bureaucratic positions and weakened gun-related laws incrementally since 1996, when the Howard government launched its gun buyback and other reforms. Back in 2018, University of Melbourne political researcher George Rennie wrote that gun lobbyists had since sought to “coopt democratic norms to force change, even when it is directly at odds with overwhelming public opinion”.
Among the chief complaints of the anti-gunners is that the Victorian government hasn't banned waterfowl hunting "despite a parliamentary inquiry recommending a ban in 2023." The gun ban crowd is also upset that deer hunting remains legal, and oddly enough, is blaming that fact for the "billions of dollars" in damage that deer are expected to do over the coming decade.
That problem would be even worse were it not for hunters, and it sounds to me like the Victorian government should be encouraging folks to take up hunting. In fact, that's exactly what the state's proposed Outdoor Recreation Victoria agency is hoping to do, alongside other activities like fishing, boating, four-wheel driving and camping.
In a March 17 memo, a Labor delegate warned ministers that “if this hunting lobby hold over the Victorian branch of the party and its factions … were to become public knowledge in the approach to the November 2026 state election, it would not bode well for Labor’s credibility”.
The memo continues: “The extent to which these unions have come under the influence of the gun and hunting lobbies is also not yet widely understood”, as they operate “within Labor factions, particularly the Socialist Left”.
It seems to me that the real complaint is that hunters and gun owners have managed to find a voice within Victoria's political system when anti-gun activists think they should be silenced. I don't know much about Australian politics, but I'm fascinated by the fact that it's the Socialist Left faction within the leftwing Labor party where they've been able to find a home, and honestly, I wish that gun owners in the United States (or even one state within the U.S.) were as successful at generating support for the Second Amendment on the leftward side of the political spectrum.
Anti-gun sentiment still dominates Australian politics, as The Saturday Paper's piece makes clear. There are complaints that Australia has more guns than it did after the countrywide "buyback" of firearms 30 years ago, wailing and gnashing of teeth because Victoria's premier has rejected demands for a cap on gun ownership, and allegations that Victorian Labor has become "the Shooters and Fishers Party."
I can only hope that is the case, and that Australia's gun owners will continue to find their political footing going forward. It's worth noting that Labor currently holds 56 seats in Victoria's 88-seat Legislative Assembly, so the voters in the state apparently don't find the pro-hunting and moderately pro-gun owner positions of Labor leadership to be a negative. That could change in the elections scheduled for late November, but the party that seems to be on the upswing is the conservative One Nation, which is even more supportive of gun owners than Labor. The rise in popularity of One Nation, and the support for gun ownership within Victorian Labor, is a sign that at least some Australians have had enough of the decades of hostility towards gun owners, hunters, and sportsmen. I see that as a positive trend, but I'm not surprised it's causing panic on the anti-gun left.
