Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

) ( ): I rise in support of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2019. Money laundering is a serious business in Australia. It's an illegal business. Some people talk about it being a victimless crime, but, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Where money laundering is committed, taxes aren't paid on that money, and, more often than not, the concept of money laundering arises because, as the name suggests, they are trying to clean ill-gotten gains. The ill-gotten gains are derived from criminal offences, often from organised crime, which, as I'll talk about shortly, could be anything from illegal gambling to paedophilia and child molestation groups and the evil that they peddle on the internet.

Money laundering is a very, very significant problem worldwide. The United Nations estimates that the amount of money that is laundered around the world is somewhere between two and five per cent of the world's GDP—that is, somewhere between US$800 billion and US$2 trillion a year. One of our pre-eminent regulators in this space is AUSTRAC. It's AUSTRAC's responsibility to identify criminals involved in money laundering, involved in offences such as tax fraud, drug trafficking, tobacco smuggling, people smuggling and scams such as the now infamous Nigerian loan scams. Money laundering comes under many different guises. Money laundering is achieved certainly not just in Australia but around the world. It's often achieved through casinos, through pubs and clubs, and through banks. We know that, as a result of the banking royal commission, Justice Kenneth Hayne made 76 recommendations to clean up the banking, superannuation and financial industries. We know that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia was fined $700 million for 53,700 breaches of anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism finance laws. Not to be outdone, Westpac was recently fined for 23 million breaches of the anti-money-laundering and counterterrorism finance laws involving $11 billion in transactions. These included transactions linked to child exploitation and resulted in a $1.3 billion fine. Tabcorp, at a much smaller end of the spectrum, was recently fined $45 million—it's not exactly a small fine, but it's not $1.3 billion—for failing to report suspicious behaviour to regulators over more than five years.

Around 2017, in my electorate on the Sunshine Coast, the Sunshine Coast Council made a public announcement that they were considering building a casino on the Sunshine Coast. That was not going to happen on my watch, and I vociferously fought against it, as did many people on the Sunshine Coast. The Sunshine Coast is a family friendly environment. It's where many people in this place and, in fact, from all over Australia go to holiday because of its family friendly environment. When we let you back in—and when we let those Victorians back in—why would we, as a community, give up our biggest natural advantage, that differentiates ourselves from places like Brisbane and the Gold Coast?

But council was hell-bent on building a casino, and I and a number of community leaders fought against it during that time. I'm very proud to say that that is now dead—d-e-a-d—as a dodo. And I will hold Premier Palaszczuk to her commitment to me that she will never allow a licence for a casino on the Sunshine Coast, to her credit. On a number of occasions during that public campaign, I was asked, 'What's wrong with a casino?' People would say, 'A casino would be great for the Sunshine Coast.' Well, apart from hollowing out the local economy, my biggest concern was the attraction it would have to organised crime and money laundering on the Sunshine Coast, something that is not what you would call prevalent on the Sunshine Coast today.

In relation to anybody needing any further evidence as to why we should never have a casino on the Sunshine Coast, I want to speak about the inquiry currently going on in New South Wales in relation to Crown casino. I want to preface this by saying that the inquiry is ongoing. There have been no final determinations, although the counsel assisting has certainly made recommendations. The counsel assisting has certainly recommended that Crown casino is not a fit and proper person to hold a licence for the Barangaroo casino in Sydney. Why is that relevant? Well, the counsel assisting, Adam Bell, told the inquiry that Crown was not suitable to hold a licence. He said that, ultimately, it was harmful to the public interest for Crown to do so. He said:

In summary, we submit that the evidence presented to this inquiry demonstrates that the licensee is not a suitable person to continue to give effect to the licence and that Crown Resorts is not a suitable person to be a close associate of the licensee.

In the course of the hearings, the inquiry heard allegations Crown encouraged staff to continue to work in China, despite warnings from Beijing that it was cracking down on foreign casino agents. We've seen stories on 60 Minutes and in the newspapers—these are allegations—about wholesale money laundering being undertaken in their casinos. In Melbourne, people have been turning up to casinos with large duffel bags of cash. They have been walking in, getting chips, having a bet and then cashing those chips back in and walking out. The money is cleaned and goes back out. It's legitimised. And that money is often the result of ill-gotten gains. We have to do better. We have to do more. Think about the evils that are being perpetrated by these organised crime gangs on our children, on our communities. That's why I am so very pleased to see this bill come before the House.

This problem is not just confined to casinos. One former Clubs New South Wales anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-finance compliance auditor claims that between $65 billion and $75 billion is laundered through clubs and pubs just in New South Wales each year. These are legitimate clubs—RSLs, sports clubs and bowls clubs—but the crime gangs are using legitimate clubs and pubs to wash this money. We need to do more than we have been doing in the past, and that is why this bill today is so very important.

This bill contains a range of measures to strengthen Australia's capability to address money-laundering and terrorism-financing risks and generate regulatory efficiencies, including amendments to expand the circumstances in which reporting entities may rely on customer identification and verification procedures undertaken by a third party; to explicitly prohibit reporting entities from providing a designated service if customer identification procedures cannot be performed; to strengthen protections on correspondent banking by prohibiting financial institutions from entering into a correspondent banking relationship with another financial institution that permits its accounts to be used by a shell bank and by requiring banks to conduct due diligence before entering, and during, all correspondent banking relationships; and to expand exceptions to the prohibition on tipping off, to permit reporting entities to share suspicious matter reports and related information with external auditors and foreign members of corporate and designated business groups. It will also provide a simplified and flexible framework for the use and disclosure of financial intelligence to better support combating money laundering, terrorism financing and other serious crimes. It'll create a single reporting requirement for the cross-border movement of monetary instruments, and it will also address barriers to the successful prosecution of money-laundering offences by clarifying that the existence of one Commonwealth constitutional connector is sufficient to establish an instrument of crime offence, and by deeming money or property provided by undercover law enforcement as part of a controlled operation to be the proceeds of crime for the purposes of prosecution.

The Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act requires reporting entities to identify and verify their customers through customer due diligence procedures, which represents a major component of the compliance costs. The bill will provide reporting entities with further options to rely on customer due diligence procedures undertaken by a third party. These options could reduce the time involved in identifying each customer by 66 per cent and the costs of verifying each customer by 80 per cent. This reform alone is expected to deliver significantly reduced compliance costs and an estimated regulatory saving of $3.1 billion over 10 years. So this is good news. Aside from reducing the risks of the evils that come from it, it's going to reduce compliance costs, and I commend the bill to the House.

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