Are NSW Urban Gun Owners Getting Thrown Under the Bus?
The short version:
- NSW's new gun laws cap city licence holders at four firearms while farmers keep ten, and the Liberals waved it through after calling it "rushed".
- The same urban shooters being squeezed are the ones driving west every weekend to knock down feral pigs, foxes and deer on farms that can't cope alone, pumping over $1.4 billion a year of hunting expenditure into country towns.
- Sydney's licence holders aren't the problem. They're the free pest control and the regional economy's quiet cash injection, and they just got traded away for political convenience.
If you hold a licence and your address has a postcode starting with 2, somewhere between Bondi and Blacktown, you might have noticed a pattern in the way politicians talk about you lately. Farmers need firearms. Professional shooters need firearms. You, apparently, are a problem to be managed.
The politics of the four-gun cap
When the Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Bill was rammed through NSW Parliament in the days before Christmas 2025, the structure of the law told you everything about who the political class thinks is a legitimate firearm owner and who isn't.
Primary producers and registered sports shooters: up to 10 firearms. Everyone else, meaning the recreational hunter who happens to live in Penrith, Wollongong or the Hills District: capped at four. Two-year licences instead of five. Mandatory club membership. The NCAT appeal pathway gone entirely.
The Liberals' position was telling. Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane called the bill "rushed", then waved it through with bipartisan support anyway. It was left to the Nationals, the Shooters and the Libertarians to actually oppose it. Not one Coalition amendment succeeded. The message from the Liberal side of politics, whose heartland seats are exactly where most urban licence holders live, was clear enough: when the pressure came on, urban shooters were the constituency they were most comfortable trading away.
The unspoken assumption running through the whole debate was that a firearm in a suburban gun safe has no purpose. That the bloke in Baulkham Hills with a Cat A/B licence and three rifles is some kind of anomaly the system tolerates rather than a participant in something legitimate. You'll hear versions of this sentiment everywhere: city people don't "need" guns, that's what the country is for.
Here's what that assumption gets wrong.
Where do you think the hunters come from?
The majority of NSW's licensed recreational hunters don't live on the land they hunt. They live in Sydney, Newcastle and the Gold Coast overflow, and they drive. Every weekend of the year, utes and dual cabs head west over the mountains and north up the New England Highway, loaded with rifles, ammunition, swags and eskies, headed for properties whose owners are begging for help.
That help is not charity theatre. Feral pigs, foxes, goats, rabbits and exploding deer numbers cost NSW agriculture serious money every year, and after the drought and fire years pushed pest populations onto farmland, landholders have leaned on recreational shooters harder than ever. The NSW Department of Primary Industries itself recognises recreational hunting as a legitimate tool in the management of game and feral animals that damage agricultural production. Licensed hunters remove tens of thousands of reported pest animals from public land alone each year, and the private-property numbers, done quietly on handshake arrangements between farmers and trusted city shooters, dwarf that.
The farmer gets pest control he doesn't have time to do himself and can't afford to pay a professional contractor for. The urban shooter gets his genuine reason, his recreation and a freezer full of game meat. That relationship has worked for generations. It is exactly the relationship the new laws strain, because the city half of the partnership is the half being squeezed.
Follow the money into the bush
Then there's the economics, which nobody in Macquarie Street seemed interested in discussing during a two-day emergency sitting.
DPI's own research puts recreational hunting's contribution to NSW at over $500 million in gross state product and more than 4,000 full-time equivalent jobs, with total hunter expenditure estimated north of $1.4 billion a year. There were roughly 25,800 licensed recreational hunters in 2023-24, up nearly 40 per cent in seven years, booking over 63,000 public land hunts annually.
Now ask where that money lands. It doesn't stay in the suburbs. It gets spent in Dubbo, Coonabarabran, Tumut, Glen Innes and a hundred smaller towns: fuel at the servo, two nights at the pub or the motel, breakfast at the bakery, supplies at the rural store, and yes, ammunition, optics and gear at regional gun shops. DPI noted explicitly that hunter expenditure helped regional businesses recover from fires, floods and COVID lockdowns. Every one of those dollars starts its journey in an urban shooter's pay packet.
Cap that shooter's firearms, shorten his licence, pile on compliance friction and remove his right of appeal, and some percentage of those trips simply stop happening. The farmer loses the pest control. The country town loses the spend. The city loses nothing visible, which is precisely why it's politically cheap to do.
The double standard
Nobody disputes that Bondi demanded a response, and nobody in the licensed shooting community defends the men who carried out that atrocity. But the law that emerged draws a line that has nothing to do with risk and everything to do with geography and political convenience. A rifle is not more dangerous because its owner's safe is bolted to a slab in Parramatta rather than a shed in Parkes. The vetting is the same. The storage requirements are the same. The licence conditions are the same.
What's different is that the farmer has the Nationals fighting for him, and the urban licence holder discovered in December that the party he votes for considers him expendable.
Urban shooters are not a fringe. They are the hunters keeping pest numbers down on properties their owners can't cover, the competitors filling club ranges every weekend, and a river of spending flowing from the cities into struggling country economies. They deserve representation that recognises that, not a shrug and a bipartisan rubber stamp.
If you're an urban licence holder and you're unhappy about where this is heading, the review and regulation-drafting process is still live. Write to your local member, especially if they sit on the Liberal benches. Make sure they understand exactly who they threw under the bus, and that you'll remember it in March 2027.
Sources: NSW DPI Economic Contribution of Recreational Hunting in NSW reports (2017, 2023); NSW DPI Performance Data and Insights (hunting), 2019 to 2024; ABC News and SBS News coverage of the Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2025, December 2025.