Australian governments are continuing to pursue the implementation of the expensive, resource-sapping and ultimately pointless National Firearms Register (NFR) despite the shooting community repeatedly pointing out its failings.
The Shooting Industry Foundation of Australia (SIFA) has acknowledged the creation of the NFR is inevitable but has raised a number of serious concerns that governments appear to be ignoring as the 2028 deadline for the NFR’s implementation approaches.
“Federal Funding Agreements require jurisdictions to meet certain milestones to unlock millions in federal NFR funding,” SIFA CEO James Walsh said.
“As a result, staff are being reassigned from their usual roles, disrupting day-to-day operations of state and territory registries.
“In some cases, the additional workload is causing significant delays in processing permits and licence renewals, which is severely impacting firearm owners and businesses.
He said Queensland has not yet begun the tender process for digitising its registry, and pointed to the significant delays in SA police paperwork that have been putting firearms businesses at risk of going broke.
Another huge concern is the security of any data held in the NFR, particularly as the Australian government is the second-largest source of data breaches in the country after health service providers.
The most recent figures show more hacks of government data than ever before, according to the Australian Information Commissioner, which reported that 69% of those hacks were perpetrated by malicious and criminal operators.
But as SIFA points out, some data breaches have come from supposedly trusted sources.
“In 2022, in Western Australia, then Police Minister, Paul Papalia released firearm data to the media that could be reverse-engineered to reveal owners’ addresses,” he said.
“This serious breach highlights the dangers of centralising sensitive information.
“The NFR could expose law abiding firearm owners and the general public to safety and privacy risks.”
Not only did the NFR present the real risk of threatening public safety as a result, the NFR likely has no public-safety benefit.
“There is little to no evidence that the NFR enhances public safety over existing state and territory registries and the Australian Firearms Information Network,” Mr Walsh said.
“Any firearm registry, national or otherwise, only tracks the movements of legal firearms, it does not provide any intelligence on illegal and unregistered firearms, which are responsible for the majority of criminal misuse.”
He said SIFA would rather have seen the existing Australian Firearms Information Network (AFIN) “properly resourced and updated” instead of the NFR being created instead.
The AFIN is effectively an existing version of what the NFR is intended to be, and its improvement would probably have cost a fraction of the $230 million earmarked for the NFR.
However, the NFR will go ahead, he said, and SIFA would take a “pragmatic and proactive approach” to it.
“We are working across all jurisdictions to make sure the NFR is fit for purpose, does not suffer from scope creep, and that the concerns of the shooting industry are heard clearly.
“Our goal is to ensure the NFR does not unfairly impact firearms businesses or end users.”
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