Combined Firearms Council of Victoria

In 2015, the CFCV ran a survey of over 800 shooters which revealed how strongly we feel about the the performance of the Licensing and Regulation Division of VicPol.

We knew you’d be pretty unhappy with them – especially with their meddling during the lever-action shotgun fight – but what we didn’t expect was just how deep those feelings run!

Delay

The reason for the delay in releasing this survey had a lot to do with other sensitivities at the time. With a range of other issues concerning the conduct of Victoria Police now coming to the surface, we think now is a good time to release the results.

You will note that we have since had a change in the Minister responsible for the police portfolio, but there’s no reason to suspect that your sentiments towards our regulator has changed over the last couple of years.

Survey questions

The survey asked three questions about the registry and four questions about the performance of the (now previous) Minister.

The first six questions provide an interesting insight into what Victorian shooters are concerned about.

It was the response to the last question which was the most revealing

Here are the results from over 800 shooters who participated in the survey:

Question 1: How would you rate the performance of the Licensing Regulation Division? (Please be fair!)

• 11% of shooters felt the registry was efficient.  A further 74% were either neutral or said it was inefficient.

Question 2: In our recent survey, Victorian shooters said we should scrap our firearms registry. Why?

• 58% said it did nothing to benefit the community. Others said the way it works was inconvenient (i.e. opening from 11-3pm) or that it took too long to respond.

Question 3: If scrapping Victoria’s registry isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, what could we do to improve its performance?

• 41% of shooters said they wanted the government to conduct an efficiency review from outside Victoria Police.
• 53% of shooters disagreed or strongly disagree with keeping the registry in its current form.
• 81% of shooters said they either agreed or strongly agreed with the need to reduce Victoria Police’s influence by changing the way the government engages with the shooting community.

Question 4: Who is Victoria’s Minister for Police – with portfolio responsibility for firearm regulation?

• 52% said they did not know.  46% correctly identified Wade Noonan [NOTE: This survey was conducted before Minister Neville took the portfolio over]– which is a higher level of recognition than we would have expected.

Question 5: How would you rate the performance of the Victorian Minister for Police?

• 65% of shooters disagreed or strongly disagreed that that he is engaging and interested in what shooters do
• 71% of shooters disagreed or strongly disagreed that the Minister understands their needs.

Question 6: Who was the previous Victorian Minister for Police?

• 76% didn’t now.  19% correctly nominated Kim Wells [as it was at the time of the survey] while some thought it was Greg Barber.

Question 7: The role of Victoria Police is to implement the law, not comment on whether it is good or bad.  That’s for the Minister to do.

Shooters were asked to respond to three questions in this part:

• “How concerned are you about the former Acting Chief Commissioner commenting on
  whether the Adler A-110 shotgun should be banned?”;
• “How concerned are you about the Police publicly commenting on any policy matter concerning firearms?”; and
• “How concerned are you about the performance of the Minister when he lets this happen?”

The choices were:

• “It doesn’t worry me”;
• “I don’t have a view on it”;
• “I’m concerned about it”; and
• “This is so bad, the Premier should sort it out”.

On all three questions, more than two thirds of shooters responded with the last choice – that is, the matter was “so bad, the Premier should sort it out”.

Conclusions

There was nothing in the responses which could be seen as a positive for the government.

• There’s no stakeholder buy-in;
• There’s no evidence to support the registry’s worth; and
• There’s a strong community view that this problem needs the Premier’s own personal attention