I’d love to be wrong and for Aussies to enjoy loads of freedom! You may well have superior knowledge on this, but quick net searches tell about 0.5 to 1 M gun buy backs or confiscations in Australia starting in the late 90s, that all guns are required to be registered, all gun owners are required to be licensed and to have an approved excuse to have a license—which doesn’t include self defense. Gun owners must be members of an approved gun club (at least that should reduce accidents from stupidity and lack of proper training) and may only transport their guns to and from home, gun club or gunsmith. Don’t think 2nd enthusiasts would be enthusiastic about any of that coming here. I presume internet searches on ‘Aussie gun controls’ are going to produces links mixed with all the same biases and searches for ‘US gun controls,’ so what I read deserves to be taken with lots of salt. And I don’t claim to possess enough personal expertise to sort the truth from the lies. But what I’ve heard coming from Down Under over the past couple decades regarding its domestic politics, on multiple policy subjects, doesn’t fit with what I’d heard about the country, and liked, the prior couple decades.
OK, this is where things get a little complicated.
About 620,000 firearms were handed in during a gun buyback in the late 1990s, and more have been since in smaller buybacks - it wouldn't surprise me at all if the total number had reached one million.
But what is not often understood, is most of those firearms were still completely legal. There were a small number of firearms that became more restricted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and an even smaller number that could be reasonably said to have been banned and had to be handed in, but the vast majority of guns handed in were still fully legal. Part of the intent of the buyback was to get unused firearms out of the community as these were the ones most likely to get stolen and wind up in the hands of criminals. Because of the nature of the buyback ('no questions asked') we don't know the precise breakdown of weapons people could have kept and which they couldn't reasonably do so. But the majority were still legal. And quite a few people used the money they got from the buyback to buy newer guns - it was in a lifetime opportunity to get a fair cash price for old guns without having to navigate some fairly complex bureaucracy in some places.
Yes, all gun owners must be licenced - but that wasn't anything new and is often presented as it was. Most guns had also been required to be registered before that, but there were a small number for which that changed. Basically, in the great majority of cases for the great majority of gun owners and the great majority of guns, nothing changed - and it's often falsely presented as if it was a massive change.
The self-defence issue is complicated. You can use a firearm in self-defence if you need to, that's a matter of common law going back centuries. But it is true that if write "self defence" on the form when you ask for a gun licence, or a permit to acquire, they will reject. So you'd have to be an idiot to write that down. Most people aren't idiots. You write down "hunting" or "target shooting" or similar.
Gun owners must be members of an approved gun club (at least that should reduce accidents from stupidity and lack of proper training) and may only transport their guns to and from home, gun club or gunsmith.
Gun owners generally don't need to be members of an approved gun club, but that does make it easier to fill some of the forms and get approval quickly - it's one of the easiest processes so a lot of people do it. The transport rules do exist but... let's just say that commonsense is applied. I don't want to go into too many details about that, but if you check my post history, you'll find a post from earlier today where I talk about commonsense and my interactions with my 'local firearms officer' and you can probably read between the lines.
But what I’ve heard coming from Down Under over the past couple decades regarding its domestic politics, on multiple policy subjects, doesn’t fit with what I’d heard about the country, and liked, the prior couple decades.
Quite honestly, a lot of misinformation has been spread about Australia in the US in recent years. Some of which I believe is deliberate propaganda from a certain highly populated Asian nation, that wants to split Australia and the United States relations - it's not all untrue, but it's often very misleading (things that happen in particular parts of Australia being presented as typical of the whole country, for example... how would you feel if we judged all of America based on what goes on in Los Angeles?)