If the Nationals and Liberal parties want a good solid public policy alternative to the reflexive gun and hate speech control strategy of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese they should implement an upgrade of the police and intelligence data systems instead of blowing their budget on buying back guns and focusing on hate speech.
The question is sometimes asked: if Australia has “gun control” how did the Bondi shooters get issued six licensed guns? Because the terror reduction problem was framed as “gun control.” The focus was on controlling objects, not anticipating threats. The thinking was: if you control the guns then you will control the level of terror. In their mental model Y=XB+U, where Y, the level of terror, is determined by controlling various factors. B is the matrix of relevant parameters and U is the error term.
In the Australian model, terror was a function of the number of guns available. But it was the wrong model. The proper variables of interest were hostile persons and networks, B(0) and B(1), and they were not prominent in the variable matrix determining the threat. What Albanese is doing by doubling down on restricting firearm numbers is increasing the coefficient of the weak gun variable while introducing another variable called “hate speech,” which might actually have the effect of suppressing any denunciation of hostile persons and hostile networks as “hateful.” But in what really matters, that of tracking threat persons, the record is less than sterling. The astonishing reality is that Australian agencies have failed to upgrade the data systems necessary to track terrorists and terror networks. Australian IT News writes: “NSW Police kicks off third attempt to replace 30-year-old core platform.” It is trying, for the third time in 30 years, to replace its police software system. To get some sense of how old this system is, 30 years ago Windows 95 was new and Netscape Navigator was the top browser.
NSW Police’s attempts to modernise its ageing core policing system have a history going back over a decade. It first received $44.8 million in the 2013-14 state budget. Following a long-running search for a technology provider to replace COPS, the force initially settled on an Accenture-built solution, dubbed NewCops, which was ultimately discontinued. It then launched a global search for a new vendor in 2018 for what it called an integrated policing operating system (IPOS). By March 2020, NSW Police announced it had awarded a $177.8 million contract to Jeff Bezos-backed public safety software vendor Mark43, alongside Unisys, to build and develop the platform.
The need is to upgrade their data systems, not spend more money on buybacks, hate-speech control, etc. etc. because only the improved monitoring of threat persons and networks can help prevent terror attacks in any meaningful way. It’s not just New South Wales that is using an old system. Other state systems are in a similar state of obsolescence. Victoria Police has no immediate plans to replace its 25-year-old LEAP database but is considering longer-term transitions from legacy systems. Similar modernization efforts have occurred in jurisdictions like Queensland and South Australia. These elderly components feed into the national system, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), which can be no better than its constituent parts. The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) manages several national policing information and intelligence systems, many of which incorporate legacy components despite ongoing modernization efforts. Exact ages vary by system, but available information indicates significant portions are decades old.
However, as of late 2025, legacy elements persist in critical systems to ensure continuity in national law enforcement data sharing. No single “ACIC computer system” exists as a monolithic entity; it’s a suite of interconnected national tools, some with components over 30 years old.
The Bondi Beach shooters, Sajid Akram and his son Naveed Akram, were not connected to ISIS by ACIC data systems prior to the December 14, 2025, attack primarily because the relevant intelligence from a 2019 ASIO investigation into Naveed’s ties to an ISIS-linked cell was closed after he was assessed as posing no ongoing threat, and this historical data was not actively maintained, updated, or cross-referenced in ACIC’s outdated systems for real-time risk assessment. This lack of connection allowed the father to renew his firearms license in 2023 without flags, despite the son’s background, and overlooked potential red flags like their November 2025 travel to the Philippines (a region with active ISIS affiliates) or their recent move closer to the attack site. It’s mostly a failure of data fusion pure and simple.
Everyone knows the famous poem.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost;
for want of a shoe the horse was lost;
and for want of a horse the rider was lost,
being overtaken and slain by the enemy,
all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.
The worst thing you can do in the aftermath of the Bondi massacre is hammer in the wrong nail.
