Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not often have the opportunity to follow my colleague from La Trobe. I would normally have some difficulty with his political views but, when it comes to the issue of law enforcement, whilst we may have some differences about the application of federal laws and some elements of constitutionality, I have to say that the member for La Trobe has been very consistent in his fight to ensure that the police officers and other enforcement agencies who represent us are front and centre in the minds of government when it is considering resources. I congratulate the member on his comments.

I would like to continue the remarks I made when this report was introduced in the House. It is a significant report about something that does go unnoticed. It seems to me that great attention has been given, and rightly so, to counterterrorism since 2001. I will come back to this point a little later. We have seen a considerable diversion of law enforcement resources into counterterrorism, not only across Australian law enforcement jurisdictions but across the globe and, in my opinion and certainly in the opinion of others—and I am sure the member for La Trobe shares this view—it has created an opportunity for organised crime and for criminal enterprises to put down their roots in various areas of our society. We need to be conscious and always vigilant of that and we need to ensure that those people who are sworn to protect us have the appropriate tools and resources with which to do their job.

The Prime Minister, in his national security statement to the parliament on 4 December last year, said:

Organised crime more broadly is a growing concern for Australia, one the Government is determined to combat. The Australian Crime Commission has estimated that organised crime costs Australia over $10 billion every year.

The Government will develop two initiatives in the related areas of border management and serious and organised crime …

Second, we will clearly define the role of the Commonwealth in combating serious and organised crime and enhance coordination among Commonwealth agencies.

He went on to say:

We have highly capable police services which respond to a spectrum of challenges from threats to public safety to terrorism; and emergency response organisations that protect the community in our most vulnerable times.

At any time, this country faces a threat from a range of different sources; our respective institutions of state, our people, our economy and even our technologies are placed at risk. In the past, people may have had the view that, if there is a criminal enterprise and there is certain money to be made from it, a criminal will likely be involved. That is true, but the underpinning thing in all this is that there is a monetary value to crime.

One of the less contemporary approaches to modern policing is to evaluate our police services simply on their arrest rates. That is after a crime is committed; and, after every crime is committed, there is a victim of that crime. If I were to follow the theories of defence lawyers, the appropriate application of criminal law is to wait until the crime is committed, prosecute that crime and, should the case be made, record a conviction. But the whole problem with that notion is that there has to be a victim of crime in the first place; the crime must take place. One of the things that we have been agitating for regarding the committee overseeing the Australian Crime Commission is to look at those underpinning models of criminal enterprise itself. Criminals operating out there operate businesses. I will not say that there is no difference between them and any other businessperson out there—they are certainly nefarious and they are there to pursue an illegal enterprise—but they have a for-profit motive in mind; they are there simply to get a return on their capital and they will operate in the areas of least resistance possible. Areas which are overburdened with regulation, where courts are hamstrung in terms of prosecution or where police are perhaps less resourced are all areas of opportunity for criminal enterprise. This is something that the Australian Crime Commission committee has been trying to get out there for some time—that this is not just going through a statistical exercise and working out how many people have been convicted for crimes that have been reported. We are more concerned, on behalf of the community, about how much crime we can prevent, how much criminal enterprise we can disrupt and, by doing that, and by looking at strategies that underpin that, we think we are in a better position to protect the community in the future.

Mr Deputy Speaker, as you are well aware, the committee members had the opportunity to look at some international jurisdictions and contemporary law enforcement, particularly the regulations and laws that underpin their fight against criminal activity, particularly with regard to organised crime. Together with the member for La Trobe and other members of the delegation, I had the opportunity to visit North America, Europe and the UK. From that journey we found five consistent things. We have summarised them this way: the importance of following the money trail, which I will come back to; the need for greater information sharing amongst law enforcement and other agencies within the government and between governments; the benefit of developing measures to prevent organised crime rather than simply reacting to it; the critical role that political will plays in combating serious and organised crime, and I will come back to that as well; and the need for governments to take a holistic approach in tackling organised crime through a whole package of legislative and administrative measures.

When we travelled overseas we found a range of things. The contemporary method of overseas law enforcement agencies is no longer to simply react to crime, because they know they are on a hiding to nowhere, quite frankly. As soon as you put one enterprise down, another is going to spring up in its place. And more often than not the principals behind these various enterprises are in common. Raffaele Grassi, of the Italian national police, put it best when he said criminal members:

… are prepared to spend time in prison, but to take their assets is to really harm these individuals.

As the member for La Trobe will recall, while we were in Italy we were told that there were many members of the mafia who are quite happy to parade around in a T-shirt and not draw attention to themselves by wearing flashy things, gold charms and that sort of stuff. But to pin them down, their assets are not necessarily in Italy; their assets are all around the world.

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