Your legal status
Firearms licences and fit-and-proper tests state by state, police encounters, criminal record checks, visas and leaving Australia.
A firearms licence is the clearest collision between a prescription and a legal status: every state's fit-and-proper test handles health information differently, and the eight pages here set out exactly how — whether a prescriber may tell the registrar, and what happens to an application when they do not. Police encounters, record checks and leaving Australia are still to come.
7 of 8 pages here are checked against the legislation they describe; the rest each say so on their face.
Every page in this section
- Will I lose my firearms licence in New South Wales because of my prescription?There is no law on this
No Australian firearms Act names medicinal cannabis. Every one of them has a fit and proper person test and a health or public safety discretion broad enough to consider it, which
- Will I lose my firearms licence in Victoria because of my prescription?The law is settled
No Australian firearms Act names medicinal cannabis, and Victoria's goes further than that: it has no health criterion in the licensing test and no power to require a medical repor
- Will I lose my firearms licence in Queensland because of my prescription?The law is settled
No Australian firearms Act names medicinal cannabis, and Queensland's does not either. What it does is make your mental and physical fitness something an authorised officer must co
- Will I lose my firearms licence in Western Australia because of my prescription?The law is settled
No Australian firearms Act names medicinal cannabis, and neither does Western Australia's. But since 31 March 2025 WA has had something more direct than the others: a health standa
- Will I lose my firearms licence in South Australia because of my prescription?There is no law on this
The Firearms Act 2015 (SA) does not mention medicinal cannabis, and it does not need to. Section 7(2) is not a discretion the Registrar may exercise — it is a definition . A person
- Will I lose my firearms licence in Tasmania because of my prescription?The law is settled
No Australian firearms Act names medicinal cannabis, and Tasmania's does not either. Tasmania is distinctive for a different reason: where other states let a treating practitioner
- Will I lose my firearms licence in the ACT because of my prescription?The law is settled
No Australian firearms Act names medicinal cannabis, and the ACT's does not either. The ACT is the jurisdiction that asks rather than requires: the registrar may ask you to consent
- Will I lose my firearms licence in the Northern Territory because of my prescription?The law is settled
No Australian firearms Act names medicinal cannabis, and the Northern Territory's does not either. The NT is the jurisdiction where the reporting duty is widest: a health practitio
Status: not yet checked against primary sources — general information, not legal advice