Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to support the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Unexplained Wealth and Other Measures) Bill 2014, because organised crime casts a vast shadow over our economy and our society. It has proved quite difficult to tackle and stamp out. It is also a very big handbrake on our nation's economic development. Transnational organised crime is big business. In 2009 it was estimated to have generated US$870 billion, an amount equal to 1.5 per cent of global GDP at the time. Unsurprisingly, those who are involved in organised crime—energetically, aggressively and innovatively—compete for their share of illicit markets.

The sad thing about organised crime is that many of the people who are involved in it are quite intelligent, and they employ and undertake very sophisticated operations, basically to make profits. They are profit driven and employ increasingly complex networks and structures and ways of concealing their activities and their identities. Organised crime is now, unfortunately, a part of the lives of Australians in an unprecedented way. Once encounters with organised crime were largely restricted to those who sought out illicit commodities or sought out illegal activities. Today, any Australian can be affected by organised crime. Some of the more obvious examples in our society are Australians being defrauded in investment scams, theft of credit card and bank account data through online attacks or by means of skimming through ATMs and point-of-sale devices; the discovery of dangerous and volatile clandestine laboratories used to produce drugs in suburban areas; and violence between organised crime groups that, increasingly, in many of the big cities in Australia is on the rise.

The Australian Crime Commission conservatively estimates that organised crime costs the Australian economy about $15 billion annually. And with the country's largest airport and second-largest port in my community, it has unfortunately become a target for many organised crime syndicates and operations. Just yesterday the news broke that a 38-year-old maintenance worker based at Sydney airport was arrested and charged with attempting to import 99 kilograms of heroin worth $19 million into Australia.

As shadow parliamentary secretary for immigration, with responsibility for customs, I have often been shocked to hear the details of weapons and the interceptions of the border protection authority in the course of their regular duties. In the four months from February through to May, the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service seized 1,339 firearms, 14,460 non-firearm weapons, which included 7,729 bladed weapons, 2,522 martial arts weapons, 190 antipersonnel chemicals and 149 items of warfare, the Customs definition of which includes grenades, bombs, projectiles and associated parts and accessories. That is just a snapshot of a couple of months of some of evil activities and illicit and illegal weapons that are being brought into Australia. Our authority is doing a marvellous job in detecting and shutting down these operations, and they deserve our support.

Money is one of the main drivers of these criminals, which is why this bill aims to boost the capabilities of authorities so that they are better able to hit the lawbreakers where it hurts them the most. The purpose of this bill is to revise the procedures and requirements for making orders relating to unexplained wealth and to allow information obtained using coercive powers to be shared with state and foreign authorities for the purposes of proceeds of crime investigations and litigation. Hopefully, this will lead to an increase in the number of prosecutions and confiscations of proceeds of crime in Australia, which, unfortunately, has in some respects been low to date.

Unexplained wealth laws are a powerful tool against organised crime. They enable authorities to seize assets that exceed a person's legitimate wealth. This enables the targeting of criminal kingpins who profit from crime without being directly involved in the commission of an offence. The majority of amendments contained in the bill were introduced into the House in 2012 by the former Labor government before that bill lapsed at the end of the 43rd Parliament. This bill is fundamentally the same as the lapsed legislation. It implements Labor's commitments of February 2013 in the previous government's response to the inquiry of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement into commonwealth unexplained wealth legislation and arrangements. The bill implements eight of the 18 recommendations handed down in that inquiry, such as: to include a statement in the objects clause of the law about undermining the profitability of criminal enterprises; ensuring evidence relevant to unexplained wealth proceedings can be seized under a search warrant; streamlining affidavit requirements for preliminary unexplained wealth orders; allowing the time limit for serving notice of applications for certain unexplained wealth orders to be extended by a court in appropriate circumstances; harmonising legal expense and legal aid provisions for unexplained wealth cases to those for other act proceedings, so as to prevent restrained assets being used to meet legal expenses; allowing charges to be created over restrained property, to secure payment of unexplained wealth orders, as can occur with other types of proceeds of crime orders; removing a court's discretion to make unexplained wealth restraining orders, preliminary unexplained wealth orders and unexplained wealth orders, once relevant criteria are satisfied, and requiring the AFP commissioner to provide a report to the parliamentary joint committee annually on unexplained wealth matters and litigation, and to empower the committee to seek further information from federal agencies in relation to such a report.

There are other amendments in the bill, which Labor supports. They include: inserting an additional object of undermining the profitability of criminal enterprises into the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002; removal of the requirement for authorised officers to meet an evidence threshold test for a preliminary unexplained wealth order where the evidence threshold test for a restraining order has already been met; clarifying that a court may make an unexplained wealth order even if the person to whom the order relates failed to appear as required by a preliminary unexplained wealth order; and, allowing information obtained using coercive powers under the act to be shared with state and foreign authorities for the purposes of proceeds of crime investigations and litigation.

Unexplained wealth laws enable a court to issue an order unless the subject of proceedings can establish on the balance of probabilities that his or her wealth was lawfully acquired. An assessment is made of the quantum of unexplained wealth, being the difference between the person's total wealth and that shown to be derived lawfully, and the subject of the order must pay the amount to the relevant jurisdiction.

Labor led the way in implementing unexplained wealth laws. Commonwealth unexplained wealth laws have been in place since 2010. Minister Keenan, in opposition, unfortunately made remarks about Labor not embracing the recommendations of the committee that involved the Australian Crime Commission pursuing unexplained wealth orders. In government, however, Minister Keenan has failed to keep faith with his rhetoric in opposition. Once again, the coalition said one thing in opposition and have done the opposite in government.

Nevertheless this is a reform that I am pleased to support and that Labor supports. Hopefully, we will see an increase in the number of successful prosecutions in this country for unexplained wealth, successful prosecutions of people in Australia who are benefitting from crime.

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