Calls to scrap PTAs as data casts doubt on public safety benefits

There are new calls to scrap the requirement to get permits to acquire firearms in Queensland after new data revealed the process is little more than a rubber-stamping exercise with little to no public safety benefit. 

Right to Information data obtained by Shooters Union shows Queensland Police’s Weapons Licensing Group (WLG) is issuing an average of 53,000 permits to acquire (PTA) a year, ranging from 48,645 in 2020 to 55,643 last year.

With PTA rejection rates hovering around 0.5%, Shooters Union is questioning the public safety value of PTAs and is calling for them to be scrapped entirely and replaced with a dealer-based notification system.

As part of its investigations into why PTAs are taking so long (more than 30 days) to be processed in Queensland, Shooters Union lodged a Right to Information application requesting the data on PTAs issued between 1 January 2020 and 8 May 2025 (when the RTI application was lodged).

The data reveals Queensland’s Weapons Licensing Group has issued an average of 53,523 Permits To Acquire annually from 2020 to the end of 2024, and another 17,445 PTAs were issued between 1 January and 8 May this year.

QUEENSLAND PTA DATA

Shooters Union did ask for a breakdown of PTA data by category, but said that information was not provided.

Shooters Union president Graham Park said WLG was collecting more than $2.3m every year in PTA application fees, despite a Question on Notice from Katter’s Australian Party in parliament revealing that it only cost $520,000 per year — including wages and stationery — to process PTAs in Queensland.

“WLG’s own data shows PTAs are almost never refused, and PTAs being refused on safety grounds would also involve that person losing their licence anyway, so there really is no reason for PTAs to exist except as a revenue-raising exercise for the state government,” Mr Park said.

“Shooters are essentially paying millions of dollars every year to facilitate civil servants shuffling paperwork around, and as we’ve seen, the system simply can’t handle that anymore. 

“It shouldn’t take a month for WLG to process PTAs, especially when everyone knows they’re almost certainly going to get issued anyway. They’ve become a time-consuming, inefficient, expensive formality with no community safety benefits whatsoever.”

Mr Park said the solution was simple: Abolish PTAs and replace them with a dealer-based notification system, whereby dealers could sell firearms to any appropriately licensed person (after verifying their licence was valid), and then electronically notify WLG of the details of the sale.

“Everything needed for this is already in place,” he said. “Dealers already provide this information via notices of disposal and Form 10s, so we’d just be cutting out the PTA component, which the data shows is clearly unnecessary and just adds more bureaucracy, red tape and expense.

“We envision there would still be some sort of firearms registration fee involved — we’re not naive enough to think the government won’t want a financial taste from the system — but getting rid of the PTA process would free up potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in resources and personnel for redeployment to front-line policing and social services, where they would make a much greater public safety impact than they could ever hope to achieve under the current system.”