Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

By leave—I also rise to commend this report to the House today, along with the Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Law Enforcement, as the deputy chair of that committee. The committee canvassed a range of issues about how COVID-19 has impacted law enforcement and criminal activity. We heard from a number of witnesses who all attested to the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic had impacted on crime, particularly organised and transnational crime and online criminal activity.

The report makes eight recommendations across a breadth of issues. Recommendation 8 in particular addresses the increase in family and domestic violence during COVID-19. There are also recommendations around the security and safety of the vaccine rollout and recommendations around the exploitation of the food industry, particularly the food delivery industry, by organised criminal groups as well as other recommendations which the chair just spoke about.

The inquiry has had a particular outcome of leading to another inquiry that the law enforcement committee is currently undertaking into the security of vaccines, and by 'security' we're talking here about the physical security of vaccines and the integrity of the vaccine rollout. I must stress that it is not sufficient to only talk about the safety of vaccines without also talking about the security of the vaccine rollout, so this inquiry, which is currently being conducted, will look into issues of potential scams around vaccines, potential availability of fake vaccine certifications on the dark web as well as the physical security of vaccines both in Australia and in the Pacific region. Criminals will always look for points of weakness that they can exploit in any kind of chain. It would be naive to think that in a pandemic situation they will not also look at points of weakness that they can exploit to further their illegal activities.

I would like to take this opportunity to commend and thank all the members of the committee, including the chair. I'd also like to thank the previous chair, the member for Hughes, who was in the position of chair when we started this particular inquiry. I'd like to thank him for allowing me to call this inquiry and for the bipartisan way in which he conducted the committee—as does the current chair. I'd also like to thank the secretariat for their hard work on this report; the witnesses and the law enforcement agencies who came to give evidence. I commend this report and its recommendations to the House. I look forward to seeing some of these recommendations implemented by the government.

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