Those stats are accurate and I remember reading the articles when they first came out. It's just very dated from right after the gun laws were enacted after the Pt. Arthur massacre. More changing laws and other measures did start to finally bring the crime levels down again. Also keep in mind it was very big in the news that the Australia Institute of Criminology, the government body that's keeps their official crime stats, was caught on several occasions changing the statistics to numbers more favorable to the government. I happened to be doing research on one such occasion and got to see the statistics change back and forth in more or less real time as the the people who were trying to tell the truth were getting countered by those in the government.