Who will appear today?
There are just two witnesses scheduled to appear at the royal commission today. They are NSW Police Deputy Commissioner Investigations and Counter-Terrorism David Hudson, and Assistant Commissioner Police Prosecutions and Licensing Enforcement Command Kirsty Heyward.
Public hearing concludes
The public segment of the hearing wrapped up, with further information and evidence to be provided in closed court, not accessible to the public or the media.
That concludes the second public hearing block of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.
Thanks for following along.
Minister insists Operation Shelter never ceased, officer says it existed in name only
A NSW Police operation set up to combat antisemitism and tackle community unrest after October 7 never ceased, the police minister insists, despite evidence at the royal commission that it didn’t exist at the time of the Bondi terror attack.
Yesterday the royal commission heard evidence from a NSW Police superintendent that she understood Operation Shelter to not exist in December, and therefore could not draw resources from it for the Chanukah By The Sea event.
This masthead reported yesterday the operation had been quietly wound back, without the Jewish community being told.
NSW Police Minister Yasmin Catley faced intense questioning in parliament on Wednesday about who made the decision to wind back the operation and why. She didn’t provide an answer, instead insisting she was advised the operation has never ceased.
Senior NSW Police officer David Hudson told the commission the operation existed “in name only” to capture reports and certain deployments at local levels, but not as a centralised group deployed across Sydney at the time of the attack.
One in six gun clubs not onboarded onto digital system
Just one in six gun clubs have been onboarded onto the NSW Police’s online registry, the commission has heard.
Gun Safe was first introduced in 2019 to streamline and automate tasks involved in gun licensing and create a real-time register of firearms and licences. It requires gun clubs to upload annual reports, which are monitored by police, and allows for the identification of non-compliance by gun club members.
But of the 581 gun clubs in NSW, just 97 have been onboarded onto Gun Safe.
“I’ve been guaranteed three times by the commander of the firearm registry that that will be achieved by the end of the year,” Assistant Commissioner Kirsty Heyward said, adding two temporary positions had been recently created to assist with the onboarding.
Australia is developing a national firearm registry, which may use data from Gun Safe. Some states and territories, however, still do not have a digital registry, the commission heard.
Police not permitted to use Commonwealth intelligence during tribunal hearings on gun licenses
Assistant Commissioner Kirsty Heyward has told the commission that police have sometimes not been permitted to use intelligence about why a gun licence was not granted during reviews of that decision.
Previously, people who were refused a gun permit could seek a review of the decision in the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal. These reviews now take place in-house.
A Commonwealth agency may place a caveat that intelligence used in refusing a gun licence not be used in administrative decisions, meaning it cannot be used during tribunal hearings.
Heyward said in those instances, she would contact someone in the Commonwealth agency to explain the importance of accessing that information.
“There’s been success, and being knocked back as well, so it’s a bit of a mismatch,” she said.
‘Significant risk’: Warnings raised about firearm registry years before attack
Issues within the firearm registry’s intelligence capabilities were raised in the years before the Bondi terror attack, the commission has heard, with dire warnings there was a “significant risk” to public safety.
The firearm registry lacked a senior intelligence analyst for several years. The position was terminated from November 2021 until December 2023. When the position was reintroduced, it remained unfilled until February 2025.
In 2021, a review into the firearms registry found the intelligence analyst role was “underutilised, only reactive, and duplicated the work of the adjudicators”, the commission heard.
The report stated that the lack of an in-house intelligence capability presented a “significant risk to both public safety and the New South Wales police force”, the commission heard.
Concerns were also raised that the firearms registry depended on other commands for intelligence.
‘Clunky’ gun licence administration to be revamped
Assistant Commissioner Kirsty Heyward, who oversees police prosecutions and licensing enforcement, has begun providing evidence on how police gather information on people with gun licences.
Police currently use a “clunky” spreadsheet to see who is allocated matters under the internal intelligence, analytics, and information management software system, she said.
It means that multiple people are involved in assessing a single application for a gun licence, Heyward said, and they may have to go to different agencies to access information lodged at different times.
This presented a risk of a “slip or miss of information” between assessments of different adjudicators, the commission heard.
Police will begin trialling a “cradle to grave” case management system for people with licences to create a “total ownership” of decision making, she said.
Operation Shelter ‘reinvigorated’ following terror attack
Hudson had been questioned about Operation Shelter following yesterday’s evidence that it had been dismantled in the lead-up to the Bondi attack.
Operation Shelter was established to protect Sydney’s Jewish community following the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.
It was reduced after police discovered a number of attacks on Jewish buildings had been “orchestrated by a limited number of people upon direction of others,” Hudson said, and following arrests, the “highly brazen attacks disappeared”.
Operation Shelter was then decentralised and absorbed by the Central Metropolitan Region for protests and proactive tasking.
New armed police command may be two years away
A new Armed Response Command launched in response to the terror attack may not be fully realised until 2028, the commission has heard.
The new command will have access to weapons such as long arms while on patrol. It will create an additional 250 positions, including 210 armed frontline officers and 40 others in the command structure and intelligence.
“Obviously, on the 14th of December, our police officers were placed at significant risk being in a gunfight armed with nine millimetre locks against long arms,” Hudson told the commission.
“It is expected that the new armed response command team will be in a position to respond differently or more rapidly than the current capability, for example, the riot squad or the [tactical operations unit],” he said.
However, the new command is between 18 months and two years away as officers undergo training and police recruit graduates to backfill positions.
‘Not forthcoming’: Hudson highlights roadblocks in intelligence sharing across agencies
Continuing his evidence, Hudson said Commonwealth and state law enforcement, security, and intelligence agencies each had “different interpretations” on how information is shared between agencies.
NSW Police had a “very open” interpretation of the Protective Security Policy Framework, which governs what information can be shared, but said other agencies weren’t as transparent.
“If there is risk or threat, we will share information with other agencies, but other agencies can, on occasions, not be so forthcoming, and that has created a difficulty in dealing with other agencies in terms of the relationship with information sharing,” he said.
“Getting information to the areas where it needs to be, in my opinion, should be the priority to be appropriately addressed, rather than relying upon the [framework], and as a justification for not sharing information.”
‘Problematic’: Police had ‘reservations’ about bolstering Jewish security groups
Deputy Commissioner David Hudson told the commission he believed giving the Community Security Group, which provides security services to the Jewish community, additional powers or privileges would be “problematic”.
In his statement, read to the commission, Hudson said CSG does not and should not supplant or displace the role of the police in protecting all members of the community, and police would have “considerable reservations” about granting additional law enforcement powers or privileges to CSG.
“Isolating a particular group for additional powers within our community is problematic. It creates a disconnect between groups. It can cause friction between groups if one particular element of society is afforded privileges that others aren’t,” Hudson said.
In the days after the Bondi massacre, Premier Chris Minns floated giving CSG greater ability to carry weapons. That position appears to have been walked back.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
