A firearms manufacturer hoping to represent One Nation in New South Wales wants to repeal gun laws introduced following the Bondi beach massacre, after arguing “every single one” of the rifles he produces was banned in the state. Earlier this month, One Nation’s NSW leader, Mike Newman, and the federal MP Barnaby Joyce revealed Jeff Bacon would be second on the party’s upper house ticket in the March state election. Bacon is the managing director of Oceania Precision, a weapons manufacturer based in Tamworth.
The announcement of his candidacy was made in Tamworth before Bacon hosted a One Nation forum on firearms legislation attended by gun lobby groups and local gun clubs, as well as Newman and Joyce. Newman said Bacon was “not only a firearms owner, but he is also a manufacturer and also he is an innovator” with “patents across the world”. He said Bacon would be “my go-to man on the firearms industry”.
Bacon ran as the lower house candidate for Tamworth with the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party in 2019. He joined the Nationals in 2023 before defecting to One Nation. On 3 October this year, he said in Tamworth that running for parliament again “wasn’t a hard decision”.
NSW is the only state to sign on to the federal scheme so far. It is due to begin on 2 November. The NSW parliament also voted to recategorise weapons including straight-pull and lever-release rifles meaning recreational hunters will no longer be able to own them.
One of the alleged Bondi shooters, Indian national Sajid Akram, owned six weapons on a recreational hunting licence, including straight-pull rifles allegedly used during the antisemitic attack on 14 December that killed 15 people during Hanukah celebrations. Oceania Precision’s website describes its rifles as “built specifically for law enforcement”. It currently advertises one model: a select-fire tactical rifle which it describes as “restricted” for law enforcement.
As recently as June, it described itself as a manufacturer for the “Australian domestic and professional market”, according to website snapshots from the Internet Archive. At that time, it advertised two models for the commercial market, the straight-pull SP25-TAC and the lever-release Renegade, although archived webpages suggest both have been described as “not available in NSW” since last year, before the firearms changes enacted after the Bondi shootings. In January, Bacon told the Northern Daily Leader that the government’s firearms reforms had seen “every single one” of his rifles banned in NSW, the paper reported.
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