An investigation published by The Australian (paywalled) today puts into sharp focus just how flawed and illogical the political push for citizenship requirements for firearm licensing really is.
The central question arising from the horrific Bondi terrorist attack should be straightforward – how did Sajid Akram come to be assessed as a fit and proper person to hold a firearm licence and subsequently acquire legal firearms?
Increasingly, it appears that is a question governments and authorities need to answer.
According to The Australian, Akram applied for a NSW firearm licence in June 2020 but was not issued one until July 2023 – a processing time around ten times longer than the average at the time he applied. The newspaper reports that there is evidence suggesting his application may initially have been refused due to security concerns before ultimately being approved.
Akram and his son had already been investigated by ASIO in 2019 over his son’s association with known Islamic State supporters. His son was subsequently subject to what ASIO described as “residual risk processes” as recently as 2022.
Yet Akram was eventually granted a firearm licence and went on to legally purchase six firearms.
Whether the various inquiries now underway ultimately establish precisely what happened, and where responsibility lies, remains to be seen. But emerging evidence raises serious questions about the NSW Police’s administration of the existing licensing and intelligence systems.
It also seriously undermines the political argument that citizenship was somehow the relevant deficiency exposed by Bondi.
Following the attack, the extraordinary three-year processing period was attributed to a major backlog within the NSW Firearms Registry.
The evidence reported today casts considerable doubt on that explanation.
The average processing time for new firearm licence applications in 2020 was reportedly 96 days. For the licence category Akram sought, the average during the second half of that year was just 76 days. Around 90 per cent of applications were still being processed within 120 days the following year.
Minutes obtained by The Australian indicate that by March 2022, the backlog of applications lodged before February 2021, including Akram’s, had been cleared.
Only four internal reviews from that period remained outstanding. Internal review is, among other things, the process available when a firearm licence has been refused. NSW Police has not confirmed whether Akram’s application was one of those four reviews, and it would be wrong to state as fact that it was. But the extraordinary delay plainly warrants explanation.
SSAA NSW Chief Executive Pete Szaak, a former NSW Police chief inspector, told The Australian that the backlog explanation “does not make sense” based on his experience and that a three-year application would be unusual unless it had been subject to internal review or proceedings before NCAT.
These are precisely the questions that should be occupying governments. Instead, politicians have seized on Akram’s immigration status and used it to justify proposals to restrict firearm licences on the basis of citizenship. Concerningly, Victoria has already legislated down this path with bipartisan support.
SSAA Victoria opposed the citizenship requirement in the Victorian Firearms Amendment Bill because citizenship is a poor proxy for what firearm licensing is actually supposed to determine – whether an individual is a suitable person to possess firearms.
If there was information available to police or intelligence agencies that should have prevented Akram from holding a firearm licence, the failure was not that he wasn’t an Australian citizen. The failure was that he was granted a firearm licence despite whatever information was available about him and his circumstances. Conversely, a permanent resident who has lawfully lived in Australia for years or decades, complied with our laws, met the existing fit-and-proper-person requirements, and responsibly held firearms does not suddenly become a public safety risk simply because their passport is from another country. Removing that person’s firearm licence does nothing to correct a system that may have failed to identify or act appropriately upon an actual risk. It simply removes licences from people who have done nothing wrong.
There is an uncomfortable political convenience in citizenship requirements. They are easy to announce. They sound tough. They allow governments to tell a shocked community that something has been done.
But legislation should be judged by whether it addresses the problem that actually occurred, not by whether it provides a politically attractive response to it.
Today’s reporting also identifies broader concerns about the operation of the NSW system. The Royal Commission heard that the Firearms Registry removed its in-house intelligence analyst in November 2021. The position was not filled again until February 2025, following internal concerns about “risks to public safety due to capability gaps”.
The same reporting details another disturbing case in which a firearm licence was issued in 2022 to a person previously charged with terrorism offences, with the Registry apparently failing to recognise his previous identity until alerted by a counter-terrorism officer. The licence was subsequently suspended and revoked.
These are not questions about passports. They are questions about information sharing, intelligence, risk assessment, administrative capability and the application of existing firearm laws. Those questions are harder than imposing a citizenship test. They require governments to examine the performance of their own agencies rather than simply imposing another restriction on licensed firearm owners, and that requires real political courage and leadership.
SSAA Victoria has consistently supported robust background checking of firearm licence applicants (with appropriate safeguards and cost arrangements for shooters). The community is entitled to expect that people who pose a genuine risk are identified and prevented from accessing firearms.
A citizenship requirement risks doing the opposite. It creates the appearance of stronger firearm regulation without necessarily strengthening the part of the system that appears to have failed. Worse, it can affect thousands of existing, law-abiding firearm owners while distracting attention from the far more important question of why a person who ultimately committed an horrific terrorist attack was permitted to acquire firearms legally.
As NSW SFFP MP Mark Banasiak put it in The Australian: “The public has a right to know, especially when the government is changing the gun laws when it looks like it was the application of the laws that failed.” That distinction should be at the centre of the national debate. If our licensing, policing or intelligence systems failed, governments have an obligation to identify those failures and fix them.
Sajid Akram’s immigration status was incidental to whether he presented a risk. His suitability to possess firearms was not. Politicians who confuse the two, risk giving the community false reassurance while leaving the real problem unresolved. That does not improve public safety; it simply avoids asking difficult or uncomfortable questions about why the system failed in the first place.
