Angela Brazier, the new CEO of the Firearms Safety Authority, has a background in Human Resources. Quite how she managed to rise to the top of a Firearms Authority is beyond my or indeed anyone else’s comprehension. Perhaps she was just a diversity hire.
At the new gun registry launched on the weekend she was quoted as saying the gun register has cost $9 million:
Imogen Wells: How much is all of this costing?
Angela Brazier: The registry is costing circa $9 million.
Stuff
The dolts employed by Stuff failed to note that just four days earlier she was claiming the costs was nearly $10 million:
Angela Brazier of The Firearms Safety Authority – Te Tari Pureke said the nearly $10 million online portal contained similar security measures as online banking, insurance sites and government departments.
NZ Herald
Or checked to see what the announcement said the cost was, which was stated as $13 million over a year ago:
An Australian software company has won a $13 million, five-year contract to establish the police firearms register.
Stuff
It certainly doesn’t fill this gun owner with any confidence when the Chief Executive can’t even get the costs of the software straight.
Nevermind too that is just the software and installation cost, not the real costs of building Mike McIlraith’s empire that is likely to blow through the $208 million as allocated in the budget.
As part of the package, $208 million will go for a new firearms unit within police, which Williams said was a follow-through to the ban on semi-automatic weapons and tightening of gun registration laws.
“The unit will have oversight of implementing the significant and ongoing Arms Act legislative changes which overseas examples tell us are central to reducing gun crime over time,” Williams said.
NZ Herald
When the Chief Executive starts her PR spiel with a lie, it doesn’t really augur well for the project as a whole.
The bizarre thing is that Police seriously think they are going to perform a modern day miracle and produce a system that is not only fit for purpose, but, in a world first, actually works as intended.
To cap it all off they appear to be claiming another world first: a government department delivering a software package for $4 million under the actual software cost!
The truly sad thing about all this is that Police are spending $208 million in a bid to catch maybe 10 people in the country who they believe, with no evidence, are diverting arms to criminals.
I would have thought that $208 million would have been better spent on say… oh I don’t know… putting around 1800 new cops on the beat. That’d surely have more of an impact than some dodgy software.
I suppose when confronted with reality it’s a case of picking a number, any number, maybe the most prominent number available… like my five Martini-Henry rifles that are all going to have 1887 for the serial number because that is the most prominent number on the receiver, as stipulated in person by Mike McIlraith.
Discuss it on The BFD.
