The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has requested a national cabinet briefing on the challenges of implementing a national firearms register after last week’s fatal shooting of two Queensland police officers and a neighbour in Wieambilla.
The Queensland and New South Wales premiers this week backed a renewed push by the Queensland Police Union to implement a national gun register, first recommended in the wake of the Hoddle and Queen street massacres 35 years ago.
Similar recommendations were made after the 1996 Port Arthur shootings and Lindt cafe siege in 2014 but the reform has been undermined by inconsistent and often incomplete or inaccurate data held by states and territories.
Albanese on Tuesday said national cabinet would next year discuss reforming how information on gun ownership is collected and collated across state and territory borders.
“I am certainly up for dialogue with the states and territories about how there can be better national consistency and national information that can serve the interests of police going about their duty,” he said.
Albanese’s comments come ahead of a memorial service for constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold, on Wednesday, after the pair was ambushed and shot at a remote Queensland property last week.
Four officers attended the property, about 300km west of Brisbane, to search for missing NSW school principal, Nathaniel Train.
They were ambushed by Train, his brother Gareth and Gareth’s wife, Stacey. Neighbour Alan Dare, 58, was also shot dead by the armed offenders.
It is understood Nathaniel Train had a gun licence in NSW but it is not known if police on the ground were aware of that when they approached the property.
The Australian Firearms Information Network, run by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, would allow police officers and law enforcement agencies to check if someone holds an interstate firearms licence. The benefits have so far proved elusive, however.
Queensland’s premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, vowed to raise the reform at national cabinet, and received in-principle support from her NSW counterpart, Dominic Perrottet.
On Monday, the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said he would lobby for the changes if recommended to do so by police in his state.
Victoria’s Police Association secretary, Wayne Gatt, said any changes that provided officers in different states with more information to support operations could “only be viewed as a positive.”
A spokesperson for Victoria police said it backed a discussion on “how we can effectively tackle serious and organised firearm-related criminality”.
The Australian Federal Police Association – which has called for the national firearms database since 2019 – said the policy required leadership from the commonwealth and funding for its implementation and ongoing running costs.
“It will take people putting egos to one side and to come up with one system to decide what is the best system to use in Australia and then everyone adopting it,” the association’s president, Alex Caruana, said
Dr Samara McPhedran, an honorary associate professor at the University of Queensland, said the issue lay with data sharing rather than laws, which she said had been repeatedly reformed and were largely consistent.
“The gap here in information is whether all states are currently providing information to that national system and what the data sharing protocols are,” she said.
Rick Sarre, a retired criminologist pointed to laws covering defamation, de facto relationships, corporations and insurance as examples of reform where the commonwealth did not have the power to force a national system but achieved Australia-wide consistency due to “the virtue of political will.”
