by Jim O’Toole, Townsville Bureau

A DEEPLY flawed and mishandled audit of the Queensland Police Service Weapons Licensing Branch is the direct cause of this week’s data breach, according to the state’s leading pro-shooting organisation.

More than 1000 gun owners accidentally had their e-mail addresses shared visibly when a police officer sending a mass e-mail to shooters in the Moreton police district forgot to put the details in the “BCC” field.

Katters Australian Party leader Robbie Katter supports the Shooters Union pictured with SU President Graham Park during the 2020 election campaign

The incident made national headlines amidst concerns the security of thousands of firearms had been compromised by the error.

Shooters Union Australia President Graham Park said the incident was a direct result of a recent audit of the Weapons Licensing branch by the Queensland Audit Office, which was regarded as deeply flawed by the shooting community.

“This audit report, and in particular its recommendations, totally ignored the real issues facing the state’s Weapons Licensing Branch and firearms regulation framework, ignored the input of shooting organisations and firearms dealers, and instead blamed licensed, law-abiding shooters for police internal issues,” he said.

“It’s clear that in the wake of the audit, front-line and operational police are taking heat from management and political sources and being pushed to appear as if they are coming down on gun owners.

“That’s created a situation where, among other things, police feel compelled to e-mail more than a thousand licensed gun owners to remind them of firearm security matters, as part of an effort to appear proactive and ‘doing something’ about managing firearms in the state.

“As we’ve seen, it only took an unintentional and easily made, but potentially devastating, error to compromise the data and security of a thousand gun owners – all in the name of politically motivated busywork.”

Mr Park said Shooters Union had conducted its own investigation and the information available clearly showed the mishandled audit had sparked this incident.

“There is no doubt in our minds this data breach is directly related to the Audit,” he said.

“Everything we know about how the Weapons Licensing software works indicates it was only a matter of time before an event like this happened, and this flawed Audit has been the primer that’s set it off.”

Cairns News has a few basic policies and one is for all firearms to be dropped from the register. The register has proven to be highly inaccurate and is of no use in fighting crime because 99 per cent of licensed gun owners do not commit crimes. Katters Australian Party too has a similar sensible policy. Remove the registration of firearms and 300 police officers could actually do some policing in the Far North starting at Townsville where runaway crime has ruined many lives. 

The Labor Party has no answers and for Labor candidates north of Rockhampton to be re-elected suggests to us Dominion and China indeed had a hand in the Queensland election result.

After all the Labor Party sent the Queensland Electoral roll to China three months before the election.

What for?