Australia’s decision to largely disarm, made under the leadership of John Howard during the 1996 gun buyback, distinguished us ideologically from the United States.

Since then, conservatives have found themselves trapped in circular arguments about the right to bear arms.

Politicians who tried to reopen the conversation about gun laws were hounded to the point of hysteria by the click-bait press, brandishing their Port Arthur archives.

The illusion of a gun-free country (and that’s all it is) became safe moral ground.

The truth is, while there are many people in Australia who require firearms (largely farmers), and others would feel more secure with them in their homes (probably those living in Melbourne), guns are not woven into the fabric of our freedom and democracy.

Americans fought a civil war. Australians did not.

Despite the persistent fabrications of history revisionists, we have never fought any kind of war internally (except against the emus).

We don’t cherish guns because our government hasn’t tried to kill us.

This attitude toward guns is conditional on the government protecting citizens. Rising violence, criminality, and terror has caused a significant murmuring about Castle Law and the right to obtain weapons for defence.

Governments have been freaking out about this for a while, as we saw with the uproar in Victorian State Parliament. Truly unhinged speeches were given by the Greens and Labor in response to the Libertarian push to give people the legal security to beat the crap out of home invaders.

The result was predictable.

Australians were told to accept their fate as defenceless. Further, they should feel sorry for criminals who are treated as the real victims.

Just as we reached the point where it seemed we might have a national discussion about self-defence, the Bondi terror attack happened.

Labor jumped on the chance to further disarm the population, this time with the addition of shutting up politically sensitive criticism of delicate voting blocs.

Within a few days, innocent Australian beachgoers were no longer the victims of alleged Islamic terror. They had been turned into the perpetrators through cries of Islamophobia, cultural insensitivity, and hate speech. This is called victim blaming.

With one of the alleged terrorists in possession of six legal firearms, gun laws are back in the conversation.

To be clear, Australians have not asked to disarm innocent people. They want to know why non-citizens and those adjacent to an ASIO watchlist were allowed to purchase firearms. How many more people with Islamist views own guns? What is their total arsenal? Have any of them been overseas to training camps, or returned from war zones?

Rushed gun laws are a way of never answering those questions.

Unfortunately, the entire conversation is remarkably complex for Australians. Think about the split of the population today compared to when John Howard was in power.

There are almost no surviving world war veterans. Most Australians do not expect to ever defend their life or property with deadly force. Farming communities are rapidly shrinking, diminishing the strongest voices for safe gun ownership. At the same time, Gen Z and Zoomers have been raised on increasingly realistic violent games coupled with a saturation of rap culture which has fuelled youth gang behaviour, particularly in Victoria and Queensland. This has been stirred up by the rapid importation of refugees from active warzones who are used to weapons being used for violence rather than farming and recreational hunting. And then there are all the clueless luvvies padding out the centre along with Blue Ribbon conservatives who have never had a need for guns and believe John Howard’s actions to be an untouchable righteous moment in our history.

This obscures the conversation we need to have now about who has weapons, why, and what to do about it.

As a society, we want to be laid back, safe, and innocent.

And we were.

Until politicians decided to change the cultural makeup of Australia in a few short decades. Prime Ministers of both colours chose to import opposing sides of religious and ethnic wars, including offering safe harbour to untold thousands who wish death on the West. The hatreds we see today on our streets are shocking because they are foreign.

And no, you cannot gaslight us into believing this is just about Palestine (even though that is not a valid excuse to disrupt Australian life). There is still footage online from the ISIS supporters who stormed down Pitt Street over ten years ago carrying terrorist flags and holding signs that read, Behead the Infidels!

I know because I was there. As a young woman, I came face to face with their raw hatred.

Nothing was done then, even though some of those men went off to fight for the Islamic State. They were allowed to roam the streets of Sydney after threatening murder. The rise of so-called Islamophobia remains a total mystery to authorities. It couldn’t possibly be because peaceful citizens are sick of being threatened and murdered in their own cities.

There has been considerably more attention paid to radical Islam since it has been directed at the Jewish community under the pro-Palestine banner, but Australians have been facing this threat for many decades with nothing but silence and disinterest from the government.

I will never forget, a few years before the Pitt Street march, attending an atheist convention in Melbourne where a small group of men clad in white robes held similarly threatening signs. They heckled us outside the convention and openly threatened to kill us because of our lack of faith. Police were standing around the scene watching. In some cases, laughing. It was a joke. The threats of violence. Even some of the people I was there with didn’t take the situation seriously because there were only a small number of protesters. I wonder how safe they feel now that tens of thousands can be mustered in the name of Hamas or ISIS.

The dilution of Australia’s Western culture is an unforgivable policy error, sustained by politicians who sought the approval of the United Nations over the consent of Australians.

The safety of Australia was sold out to soothe the egos of fleeting personalities, most of whom live in bubbles of wealth and privilege that forever protect them from the consequences of their actions.

They shrug at multiculturalism from their mansions while ordinary people feel like strangers in their hometowns, pushed and shoved on public transport in a world where manners have deteriorated along with our cultural soul. Where are the Australians? ask the tourists. Drowned out. Diluted. Dying out.

We have endured a solid ten years of growing censorship, in print and online, frantically employed to conceal the unravelling of our state-enforced multicultural society.

Valid fears have been slandered as phobia. Complaints have resulted in accusations of racism. Legislation has been passed, criminalising stern critiques of what many perceive to be an existential threat to the Australia we once knew.

Censorship is not designed to keep the peace between citizens. Its purpose is to protect politicians from scrutiny.

While you are hunted for mean tweets online, politicians who dismantled the narrative of Australia live comfortably on a state pension, and probably a private sector job, for the rest of their days.

To say the Australian people are angry is to woefully misunderstand the simmering rage which has been held down by politically correct speech codes and the weariness of trying to stay afloat in a diminishing economy.

Terror attacks such as the Bondi tragedy are the first breakers approaching the shore, rolling in front of a storm-torn sea. While ever there remain communities in our midst that wish us harm, there will be more, and they will multiply. They cannot be dismantled by hushing the tide.

Our eSafety Commissioner is fond of using the beach to justify escalating digital censorship. Instead of teaching children to read the rips and watch for sharks, they chose to hold our children hostage on the sand and feed them propaganda about the danger of the global conversation.

Now, it is the whole of Australia being herded out of the water and told to be afraid of our beaches, Christmas markets, and public transport. Loudspeakers tell us to watch for suspicious activity instead of playing Christmas carols. Abandoned bags are not lost property, they are potential bombs. Australians have been taught to view the world as a poisoned garden which we survive instead of enjoy.

The onus is on us to maintain constant vigilance. We are the ones who must silence our speech to avoid provoking religious individuals who turn murderous. And instead of disbanding terror groups, closing problematic mosques, and deporting every single person with an affiliation toward Islamic extremism, we are the ones being disarmed.

ISIS enthusiasts will be the last people to lose their guns, if at all. Of that, we can be sure. The review will probably begin with farmers, who could not be further from the problem of city-based Islamic radicalism. Next will be the recreational hunters and collectors who have never amassed so much as a speeding ticket.

To disarm the Islamic radicals would require the government to stir the activist hornet’s nest.

That is how much control we have lost of our own safety.

There is a reason the government and media have shamefully tried to talk about ‘the right’ in the aftermath of Islamic terror. It is a political deflection.

Australians can come to only one revelation: politicians caused this. Labor and the Coalition have to wear that blame and withdraw the damaging policies that brought a religious war into a Christian country.

These are the same people who focused their stories on the hero who tackled one of the shooters. Allow me to be clear, we wouldn’t need heroes if we had a proper immigration and assimilation policy.

Blaming speech and guns is easy, but even John Howard was quick to discredit the idea that Port Arthur and Bondi Beach were comparable situations.

‘We’ve now been treated to the big attempt at a diversion, changes to gun laws.’

There were three million guns in Australia before Port Arthur. There are over four million today.

All we want to know is how many are in the hands of those suspected of radical Islam?

So far, the government doesn’t have an estimate, let alone an answer.

Something tells me they’re too cowardly to ask the question.