Police need to be removed from the bureaucratic side of firearms licensing, and South Australia’s dire backlog of PTAs and licence applications highlights some good reasons for it.
There’s also a strong case to be made for removing the regulatory burden from police, too, because this is more an administrative task than an enforcement one, and it’s not one that police have been doing very well.
Police exist primarily to enforce the law but they are forced into an administrative role, with all of its associated burdens, by the structure of guns laws as they exist throughout Australia.
This means that instead of officers being actively engaged in law enforcement — solving crimes, arresting villains, cracking gun-smuggling rings etc — they’re plugging away behind desks to rubber-stamp simple PTAs, licence renewals and licence applications for law-abiding people, small businesses and community clubs.
Police forces have limited resources that should not be wasted on bureaucratic drudgery, and those in charge do not allocate many of those precious resources to firearms registries, which is exactly why South Australia is in the situation it faces now, with outrageously long delays in processing that are causing massive problems for shooters and the firearms industry.
NZ is removing this responsibility from its police force. Queensland police have said they want to shed the role and SAPOL’s response to the criticism they’ve copped in the past few days hints at similar sentiments.
A media release yesterday said: “SAPOL has experienced a 55% increase in PTAs since 2019; taking into account the legislative requirements, processing times are currently at 29 days above the minimum timeframes. The Firearms Branch team continue to work hard to accommodate the increase and process all applications as quickly as possible.”
You don’t have to read much between the lines to get the message behind that statement: SAPOL’s workload in this area has skyrocketed but its resources haven’t, and no matter how hard the existing team works they won’t keep up.
This is ultimately a problem for government to solve, and the best way to do that is to relieve the police of the burden.
But the current SA government doesn’t seem interested, evidenced by the fact that the former police minister simply stopped responding to the Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia, which has been working hard to find a resolution for most of this year. The last time they heard from the police minister was back in August.
NSW has made small steps in the right direction by moving some of the administrative functions to Service NSW, the single government body that looks after a huge range of state government functions, but the actual processing of the licences and PTAs still happens under police auspices.
Much of the NSW Firearms Registry is staffed by civilians rather than sworn police officers but it is still resourced and commanded by police.
Allowing the government’s administrative bureaucracy to look after the rubber-stamping side of firearms licensing and permits will not present any danger to the public if there are simple ‘red flag’ provisions that trigger police intervention when required. This is what NZ is doing.
The change must happen. It will free up police resources for their primary role; it should maintain certainty for firearms businesses that already must struggle under severe regulatory restrictions; and it will ensure shooters can get on with things without ridiculous delays or subjective reinterpretation of processes.
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