Western Australia’s $35m online Firearms Portal was temporarily taken offline last week following a data breach which reportedly meant individuals with expired club authorisations were able to access data, including the storage locations of firearms registered to a specific shooting club’s licence.
Nationals WA leader Shane Love called for a full investigation into the breach and off-lining of the portal website, and demanded Police Minister Reece Whitby immediately halt implementation of the Firearms Act.
Mr Love described the breach as “yet another alarming chapter in the long-running saga of the State Government’s botched rollout of the Firearms Act 2024 and its associated digital platform”.
“This portal has already been exposed as a delayed, over-budget, dysfunctional mess — and now we find out it poses a real risk to the safety and personal information of thousands of Western Australians,” he said.
“Users are being required to interact with a platform that is incomplete, unreliable and now jeopardising the security of their personal information.”
Shadow Police Minister Adam Yort also called for a full investigation into the breach, saying his office had also received numerous complaints about the portal generally.
“We’ve consistently heard concerns about system reliability, from crashes to delays in processing,” he said.
“Public confidence in the portal was already limited, and this breach has only added to those concerns.”
Police Commissioner Col Blanch was quoted in The West Australian as saying there was no evidence other individual or corporate licenses had been exposed, and he believed the fix for the issue would be implemented shortly, pending final testing — hence the decision to take the portal offline in the interim.
“No data of individuals was accessed. These are the club’s guns and where the club’s guns are sourced,” he said.
Shooters Union WA State Advocated Steve Harrison strongly condemned the situation and called for accountability from the State Government.
“The firearms portal is connected to a tender that was sent out to market a year or so ago. Surrounded in secrecy, only respondents that signed a non-disclosure had access to it,” he said.
“The tender has not been made public so logically then, the features of the software are not known. In that respect, no one knows what it is supposed to do, how it does it or if it does it.
“Clearly, oversight of the build is less than satisfactory, and subsequently, the portal is a dismal failure.”
Mr Harrison questioned why an incomplete solution had been activated, and why shooters were being forced to use something that was clearly not fit for purpose.
“The difficulties related to registering into the portal, the leaking of sensitive information and god knows what else that has happened and has been hidden is beyond belief,” he said.
“Money well spent? I think not.”
He also dismissed placating noises from the State Government over the incident as “pure gaslighting”.
“Tens of thousands of WA community members are calling out this whole firearm reform legislation and associated process,” he said.
“Politicians are calling it out and overall, we could do better with the money that is being squandered on a project that is the solution to a fabricated problem.
Curiously, SSAA WA seemed to be downplaying the incident, with president Paul Fitzgerald quoted in a Farm Weekly story saying the issue had been blown out of proportion and appearing to accuse politicians of “crying wolf” over the issue and complicating things for his organisation.
“We would much prefer it if politicians were given more information and were a bit more sensible about releasing that information before they cause a roaring bushfire in the firearm community, who are already stressed,” the story quoted him as saying.
He did acknowledge that the portal clearly had issues and hadn’t been properly tested, however, saying there was no denying it wasn’t ready.
“The Police Minister is going to have to do something about it because all we’ve heard in the lead up is threatening the WA firearm community that if you don’t become compliant in 90 days, we’re going to take your guns off you,” he was quoted as saying.
Calls for the Firearms Act implementation to be halted are not being made in isolation, either.
Mr Love and Legalise Cannabis MP Dr Brian Walker have already moved Disallowance Motions in the both Houses on the issue, and there is a currently an e-petition with more than 17,000 signatures calling for the suspension of the implementation and enforcement of the Act until the parliamentary review into it is complete.
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