Letter on the NSW Police Service’s registration efficiency
13 November 1997
Australian Shooters' Journal
PO Box 2066
Kent Town SA 5071
Dear Sir,
I thought I'd share my experience of trying to get a Minor's Permit for my son.
About late July I got an application for my new shooters licence and decided to apply for my son's minor's permit at the same time. I went to the police station but was told the minor's application forms hadn't been printed and they had to ring Firearms Registry to find out what to do. He told us my twelve year old son had to write a letter requesting a permit, enclose a copy of his Safety Awareness Cetificate and Birth Certificate and I had to write a letter giving him permission to apply. This was posted about 30/07/97. From then to early October, when I received mine, I rang them about every fortnight.
About a week after my licence arrived I rang again and was told my son's would be issued within two weeks. It didn't arrive. I rang again on 28/10/97 and was told they couldn't find the application, the same appliciation they'd been processing for 3 months. I was told to re-send everything which I did on 31/10/97 and addressed it to the person I had been speaking to.
I rang again 05/11/97 and was informed by this person that the application had been received in the mail room but he hadn't received it.
I rang again 10/11/97 and after being transfered around ended up with a different person to the person I had previously spoken to. She informed me she had notes on her computer that they were trying to ring us on an old number that we had changed almost twelve months earlier. She told me to ring back and she'd look into it. I rang back later that day and was informed the paperwork had been done and the permit should be issued withing two weeks. The saga continues. At the time of writing this, the permit still had not arrived.
My son is very disillusioned by this. He has been shooting since he was five years old and was just getting into clay target shooting when this all started. It's very hard to keep his spirits up because he is convinced he'll have to start from scratch with his clay shooting because he hasn't been able to shoot for almost 4 months.
To top it all off I received another notice to attend the RTA to get a new photo licence because the other one was incorrect. Apparently I received one of the first batches of licences and due to a computer error there was one word missing so it has to be replaced. The RTA advised me, at the time, that about 70,000 of these licences had been issued and cost $4.00 to print each. Who pays for this?
Yours,
(signed)
Copy held SSAA National
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