Alpers, Philip and Zareh Ghazarian. 2019 ‘Australia's 'Perfect Storm' of Gun Control: From Policy Inertia to World Leader.’ Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand. J. Luetjens, M. Mintrom and P. 't Hart, Eds (Chapter 9), pp. 225-226. Canberra: ANU Press. 1 January

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From 50,000 members in 1996, the 400 SSAA shooting clubs now approach a combined national membership of 200,000 gun owners, many of whom are compelled by law to pay an annual fee and then shoot with politically committed enthusiasts several times each year. As the SSAA remains overtly determined to wind back the NFA—and, in concert with the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, has already succeeded to some degree in every state and territory (see Alpers and Rossetti 2018)—gun clubs can still be effective agents for political mobilisation.

Today, just seven top SSAA branches declare income of $20 million and net assets of $34 million, while the national branch alone collects $10 million in annual fees. This is more than double the assets of Swimming Australia and nine-tenths the income of Athletics Australia. In its most recent publicly available financial return, SSAA National in Adelaide reported accumulated capital of $6 million in cash.

The largest SSAA state branches have done even better. In 2015, SSAA Queensland collected income of $5 million and held assets of $15.7 million, of which $8.3 million was in cash. Adjusted for inflation, Queensland branch assets have increased by 2,675 per cent since compulsory gun club membership was written into legislation. As the law sets no limit on shooting club fees, the SSAA can levy this government-mandated tax on shooters in any amount it chooses. The net result is a multimillion-dollar war chest, ready to be used to lobby for the dismantling of gun laws agreed two decades ago by all major parties (see O'Malley and Nicholls 2017).

In recent years, however, Australian shooters' groups have been regularly discouraged from spending accumulated capital on large-scale attempts to roll back the country's firearm laws. The 2014 Lindt Café siege in Sydney, followed by high-profile family shootings at Lockhart in New South Wales, Margaret River in Western Australia and the Sydney suburb of Pennant Hills each resulted in renewed public clamour for restrictions on gun ownership. A concerted $500,000 campaign by shooters' groups and arms dealers to swing voters towards minority pro-gun parties in the 2017 Queensland election failed to noticeably influence even the country's most firearm-friendly large state (see McGowan 2018). In Tasmania, a Liberal Party election pledge to the local gun lobby to wind back several conditions of the NFA was abandoned following a public outcry (see Humphries and Dunlevie 2018).

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