The Bondi Royal Commission needs to stop wasting time and find out how and why Australia’ intelligence networks failed to prevent terrorist acquiring firearms and killing 15 people, according to Australia’s peak firearms industry group.
The Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia (SIFA) says that while the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion this week has been delving into the influences of the media and social media, it is getting further and further from the elephant in the room: why were authorities not alerted to the alleged terrorists who carried out the Bondi Beach attack?
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of law-abiding firearms users are caught in a bureaucratic limbo and facing the compulsory acquisition of their guns, the industry is being crippled by delays brought about by new laws, and it is becoming more and more clear that governments and their agencies are scapegoating shooters.
NSW MP Roy Butler used parliamentary question time to confirm that the NSW Firearms Registry had been providing daily updates for at least five years to the Australian Firearms Information Network (AFIN) about the details of the state’s gun owners.
Parallel to that, as SIFA CEO James Walsh pointed out this week, the Royal Commission noted that the National Criminal Intelligence System (NCIS) identifies “around 2 billion relationships” including those “between known family members and other associates, who otherwise appear in the system as separate entities”.
The Akrams not only appear to have been living at the same address prior to the Bondi attack, but the younger one had known terrorist links and the older one had a firearms licence which had, for no reason that’s been made public, been held up for years before being issued.
“Were these intelligence systems simply not used correctly or did they fail?” Mr Walsh asked.
“This is the elephant in the room in the Royal Commission and it needs to be addressed or we’re just wasting time.
“If this data is linked, and if the NCIS is designed to identify relationships between family members and associates, did the system identify the relationship between Sajid Akram, the licensed firearms holder, and Naveed Akram, the son previously examined by ASIO?
“The system should have lit up when these relationships were compared.
“Was the issue that ASIO, NSW Police, the AFP, ACIC, Home Affairs and the NSW Firearms Registry were each holding part of the picture, but no agency joined it together?
“That’s what we need to know, and it’s something we and others will be looking at in the coming weeks.”
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